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Weekend links 646

It’s that lethal book again. A sample of wallpaper impregnated with arsenic, one of many such pages in Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers (1874) by RC Kedzie.

• “I like to spend time in the now because there I can create something new but in the past I cannot.” Damo Suzuki, former vocalist in Can, on creativity and his resilience in the face of long-term illness. Related: a trailer for Energy: A Documentary about Damo Suzuki.

• “I enjoy Carnival of Souls, but it is a dark form of enjoyment, with high stakes, because the enjoyment is predicated on me being able to shake myself free of the film after it is over, and that can be a struggle.” Colin Fleming on fear as entertainment.

• “Some people like fantasy epics or Regency romance or Sudoku or science-fiction world-building or the gentle challenge of cozy mysteries; I like the undead.” Sadie Stein on encounters with ghosts.

• “You’re now standing on the blocks of the Great Pyramid at Giza. For the first time ever you can explore the entire pyramid interior.” The Giza Project.

• “What do we think about when we watch films set in vanished decades that many of us experienced at first hand?” asks Anne Billson.

• At Bandcamp: Touch celebrates forty years of not being a record label.

• “Why scientists are sending radio signals to the Moon and Jupiter.”

• At DJ Food’s: Retinal Circus gig posters 1966–68.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Feneon.

• The Pyramid Spell (1978) by Nik Turner | I Am Damo Suzuki (1985) by The Fall | Carnival Of Souls Goes To Rio (2001) by Pram

Marabout Fantastique book covers

A post for Halloween featuring a selection of covers from the “Fantastique” imprint of Belgian publisher Bibliothèque Marabout. The imprint, which was only labelled “Fantastique” on later editions, was launched around 1969 and ran through the 1970s before petering out in the early 1980s. The uniform cover design—almost always black with titles set in Roberta—is an attraction for paperback collectors even when the titles are very familiar ones, and when the cover art, most of which was the work of Henri Lievens (1920–2000), is sketchy and vague.

Among the Belgian writers rubbing shoulders with their more famous foreign counterparts are Jean Ray, author of the cult novel Malpertuis, playwright Michel de Ghelderode, and Thomas Owen (the pen-name of Gérald Bertot). Not all of the artwork is credited but most of the examples here are the work of the prolific Lievens, an artist whose cobwebbed eccentricities sometimes exceed the bounds of their brief; that flapping creature on the cover of The White People by Arthur Machen has no analogue in any of Machen’s stories. Later covers in the series saw contributions from Jean Alessandrini, with collages that were the subject of an earlier post. Marabout is still publishing today, albeit in a reduced fashion, having relocated to France where the company is now a tiny part of the Hachette empire.

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Weekend links 644

Yoshitoshi’s Ghosts (2004) by Paul Binnie.

• “The later Grand Etteilla series, printed well into the nineteenth century, and the present-day proliferation of Tarot decks, following ephemeral fads and fashions, all trace their origins to this beautiful and beguiling creation from the enigmatic Egyptophile at 48 Rue de L’Oseille.” Kevin Dann on the Livre de Thot Tarot (ca. 1789) by Jean-Baptiste Alliette, better known as “Etteilla”.

• “Death is not a subject he has ever shied away from, in his fiction or conversation. Indeed, he has measured other writers by how seriously they address it.” Richard B. Woodward on his friend, Cormac McCarthy, and McCarthy’s new novels. There’s an exclusive extract from The Passenger here.

• “…addicts, psychopaths, lovelorn outsiders, cult leaders, lesbian and gay icons…you name it, the vampire has become it.” Christopher Frayling on the perennial popularity of the vampire, and a new book collection of vampire film posters.

• Robert Wilson‘s new production of Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry is “a sinister, multilingual pantomime bathed in red light and looped in noise…fittingly violent, absurd, ominous and infantile”.

• “What kind of music goes with a show that originates in deep space?” Aquarium Drunkard on Sonny Sharrock’s final recordings, the soundtrack music for Space Ghost Coast To Coast.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine takes a fresh look at the health of secondhand bookshops in Britain.

• Tokyo nightlife photographed by Hosokawa Ryohei.

• New music: Approach by Lawrence English.

• The Passenger (1977) by Iggy Pop | The Passenger (1987) by Siouxsie And The Banshees | The Passenger (1997) by Lunachicks

Weekend links 643

Freundschaftsfoto (1964) by Jürgen Wittdorf.

• “It’s truly astonishing how Laswell collided with vastly divergent musicians and genres while somehow still representing complementary musical spheres.” Yes, indeed. Mixes of the week: Bill Laswell Research Institute: Vol I & II, two 90-minute collections at Aquarium Drunkard dedicated to the career of the indefatigable musician/producer/catalyst.

• “These pieces are created using custom developed software and laser specialised machines resulting in highly detailed laser cut works on layered paper with some works comprising over a thousand individual parts.” Works in paper at Studio Ibbini.

• “The visual history of polyhedra is littered with false starts, poignant failures, and allegories unable to convey the weight of their subject matter.” Noam Andrews explores the history of rendering polyhedral objects in art.

• “When it came to homosexuality, the east was as bourgeois as the west.” Homoerotic art from the communist era by Jürgen Wittdorf (1932–2018) receives a reappraisal.

• More MR James: All of James’ ghost stories in a single volume at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts.

• More mixes: A mix for The Wire by NikNak, and XLR8R Podcast 769 by The Sun Ra Arkestra.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tracing the history of railways in Japan through art.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Marie Menken Day.

• Angeline Morrison‘s favourite albums.

• Ghost Train (1961) by Virgil Holmes | Ghost Train (1961) by Electro-Tones | Ghost Train (1962) by The Partners

Abe Gurvin album covers

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968 (1972).

Reading this article last week about Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation I realised I’d never looked up the album’s cover artist, Abe Gurvin (1937–2012); this despite owning two copies of Kaye’s compilation, one of which, an expanded box of four CDs, includes additional Gurvin art (see below). Nuggets was released in 1972 on Elektra, a label for whom Gurvin worked regularly as a designer as well as an artist. The only other cover of his I definitely recall seeing before is for one of Mort Garson’s electronic novelty albums, Cosmic Sounds (credited to The Zodiac), although some of the classical recordings on Elektra’s Nonesuch imprint look vaguely familiar. Nonesuch were using vivid art and graphics on the covers of their classical albums from the mid-60s on, years in advance of rival labels; Gurvin, along with Bob Pepper, Gene Szafran and others, provided the cover paintings. In the 1980s many of these albums turned up cheap in British remainder shops, hence the familiarity, although I can’t say whether it was Gurvin’s art I remember seeing.

Disc art from the four-CD Nuggets box (1998).

The subtitle of the Nuggets album—”Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968″—always promised more than it delivered when only a quarter of the songs could be called psychedelic. Without Gurvin’s artwork providing a contextualising frame it’s hard to imagine the compilation sustaining its reputation as a psych classic, whatever the subtitle might suggest. Gurvin’s florid aesthetics were put to similar use elsewhere, not only on classical recordings. Some of the examples below are a result of attempts by art directors to give artists like Gene Pitney a trendy spin.

Cosmic Sounds (1967) by The Zodiac. “Must be played in the dark” says a note on the back cover.

Nuggets, incidentally, was beneficial in its influence even if its psychedelic quotient is lacking. Without its success there might not have been the 28 psych/garage compilations known as Pebbles, a bootleg series that retrieved from obscurity many minor bands and one-off singles; and without Pebbles we wouldn’t have had further imitations like Boulders (11 discs) and all the many series that followed, including my personal favourite, Rubble, a 20-disc collection of British psychedelic singles.

The Dove Descending: Choral Music (1966) by The Canby Singers.

Haydn: Symphony No. 21 In A Major / Symphony No. 48 In C Major (“Maria Theresia”) / Symphony No. 82 In C Major (“L’Ours”); Chamber Orchestra Of The Saar, Karl Ristenpart / Gürzenich Symphony Orchestra Of Cologne, Günter Wand (1966).

Sweet, Sweet Lovin’ (1968) by The Platters.

Gurvin’s contribution to this one is the hand-drawn title design.

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