{film} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 816

The Creative Power of the Spirit, No. 31 of A Goodly Company series, 1920–1933 by Ethel le Rossignol.

• “One moment it was a little blip. The next, our friends are dying”: the gay porn soundtrack composers lost to the Aids crisis. More gay porn: Pink Narcissus, James Bidgood’s micro-budget homoerotic fantasy, will receive a UK blu-ray release later this year.

• Old music: Thirst by Clock DVA gets a very welcome reissue later this year, having been unavailable in any form since 1992. I’m not so happy about the changes to Neville Brody’s original cover design but the album itself is a major post-punk statement.

• “Graphic design was thought to be a man’s discipline,” she says. “So I think it was quite a surprise for people to find me there.” A profile of Margaret Calvert, designer of (among other things) Britain’s road signs.

• At Colossal: A major survey in Paris chronicles Leonora Carrington’s esoteric Surrealism.

• At Public Domain Review: Sara Weiss’ Journeys to the Planet Mars (1903).

• At the BFI: The mystery music video for The Beatles’ Penny Lane.

• Winners and entrants for Close-up Photographer of the Year 7.

• “Cats to blame for octopus deity enshrinement delay.”

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

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Jack Arnold’s Day.

• Pink Noir (1996) by David Toop | Pink Dust (2013) by Sqürl | The Pink Room 2 (2024) by Seigen Ono

Zeuhl Ẁortz!

Kobaïa / Müh (1970), a single by Magma.

1: Zeuhl definitions

Zeuhl is an adjective in Kobaïan, the language written by Christian Vander, drummer and founder of the French band Magma.

Pronunciation: zEU(h)l, while the EU are like a French E with a slight U, and the (h) is a semi-silent letter which is an integrated part of the EU, totalling in a “syllable and a half”. (Prog Archives)

Zeuhl (pronounced [zœl]; lit. ’celestial’) is a music genre that is a hybrid of jazz fusion, symphonic rock and neoclassical music, established in 1969 by the French band Magma. The term comes from Kobaïan, the fictional language created by Magma’s Christian Vander and Klaus Blasquiz for Magma, in which Zeuhl Ẁortz means approximately ‘celestial force’.
[…]
Zeuhl is determined by several characteristic elements. Especially important are dominant rhythm fractions, usually in the form of a pumping bass guitar and sometimes sluggish or flexibly playing drum kits. Slow repetitive structures that serve to build a hypnotic atmosphere are just as prominent as solo passages of high technical finesse. Vocals are often widely present and can consist of polyphonic choral movements, such as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, or soloistically performed passages with shrill intonation. Zeuhl bands also often have solo guitarists or pianists that usually have a more than accompanying function, especially to emphasize the repetitive patterns. (Wikipedia)

2: The Birth of the Zeuhl

“1967,” he says. “The year John Coltrane died. It seemed to me that afterwards, it was as though music had to try to start all over again. Someone had to pick up the pieces, go on searching in the way that he had. Nobody could match him, but people could pick up the flame. It was almost impossible for anyone to do anything new after Coltrane, but you had to try, try to find other new directions. So that’s what I tried to do with Magma. I was a bit young at the time, but…”

Christian Vander describing the birth of Magma to Paul Stump, The Wire, July 1995

3: Zeuhl lists

Weidorje (1978) by Weidorje. Cover art by Klaus Blasquiz.

• Shindig! Magazine: Magma in seven records, and Deeper Underground: the best albums by the Magma family by Warren Hatter.

• Prog Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century: My Favourite Zeuhl Albums of All-Time by Drew Fisher.

• Bandcamp: There is No Prog, Only Zeuhl: A Guide to One of Rock’s Most Imaginative Subgenres by Jim Allen.

• Discogs: Zeuhl lists by Neit and ultimathulerecords.

• Prog Archives: Top 100 Zeuhl.

4: Live Zeuhl

A poster by Jofre Conjota for a concert in Chile demonstrating that Zeuhl can exist without electricity.

• Magma, Hippodrome du Pantin, Paris, 1977 (46 mins; a French TV film that captures one of the 70s lineups in peak form. Includes an almost complete performance of Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh.)

• Weidorje, French TV, 1979 (11 mins; Magma offshoot Weidorje were only active for a couple of years, this may be their only TV appearance.)

• Magma, Théâtre Bobino, Paris, 1981 (A complete concert—1 hr 53 mins—from the group’s weird-funk period: Christian Vander leaves his drumkit to sing and rant at the audience, everyone is dressed in spacey glitter outfits, and some of the songs from the Merci album can’t be classed as Zeuhl at all. The musicians are all first rate, however.)

• Magma play Köhntarkösz, 2005 (A fantastic 32-minute performance in a very cramped venue.)

• Collectif PTÄH interprète Magma (12 mins; a Magma covers band playing in a village square.)

5: Cinematic Zeuhl

• Tristan et Iseult (1972): a French feature film with a score by Christian Vander and three members of Magma. The soundtrack album was later incorporated into the Magma official discography as Ẁurdah Ïtah.

• Moi y’en a vouloir des sous (1973): a French satire in which Magma make a brief appearance as a way-out rock group.

6: Lovecraftian Zeuhl

Les Morts Vont Vite (1986) by Shub Niggurath. Cover art: La Ballade de Lénore (1839) by Horace Vernet.

• Liriïk Necronomicus Kanht (1978) by Magma.

• Dagon (1980) by Eskaton.

• La musique d’Erich Zann (1981) by Univers Zero (a Belgian group, originally named Necronomicon, which included former members of an earlier group named Arkham).

• Yog-Sothoth (1986) by Shub Niggurath.

7: Comic Zeuhl

Magma’s Christian Vander and Klaus Blasquiz in a three-page comic strip from Pop & Rock & Colégram (1978), a collection of satirical music-themed pieces by Jean Solé, Alain Dister & Marcel Gotlib.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dune: some French connections
• HR Giger album covers

Weekend links 815

A photograph by FR Yerbury of St George’s-in-the-East, London. From Nicholas Hawksmoor (1924) by HS Goodhart-Rendel.

• “Sixty years later, the Spectacle saturates us in ways the Situationists never imagined. Online platforms structure our personal relationships; algorithms nudge us toward the platform owners’ preferred choices. ‘Intelligence’ is embedded into everything from our phones to our kitchen appliances. But back in the Sixties, the Situationists saw the physical environment of the city as an expression of the mass society created by consumerism and governed by the Spectacle, and they felt power closing in around them: ‘All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops—the geometry.'” Hari Kunzru takes a psychogeographical dérive through the streets of London, encompassing the Hawksmoor churches, Iain Sinclair’s own peregrinations, Alan Moore’s Sinclair-influenced script for From Hell, Arthur Machen and more. (No mention of Alan’s ongoing Long London series, however, the first book of which is a deep dive into Machen territory.) Kunzru could be accused of being 30 years too late with his piece but for younger readers and many Americans these paths are worth retracing.

• Enemies from Venus!: “The only surviving fragment of a Dutch science fiction series for children from the mid-sixties (that never was).” CGI animation by Ernst-Jan van Melle in the style of black-and-white puppet shows like Fireball XL5, Space Patrol, etc.

• “If this is a horror story, it’s a horror story about being desperate for love, and about the vulnerability, loneliness, and difficulty in understanding other people that might drive this state.” Olivia Laing on Jonathan Glazer’s second feature film, Birth.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great British heist films.

• At The Daily Heller: Posting Posters about Fellini.

• RIP Sly Dunbar; James Sallis; Catherine O’Hara.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Peter Whitehead’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Toumani Diabaté.

• New music: Errata by WF 98.

• Birth (1971) by Keith Jarrett | Birth (1995) by Howie B | Birth (2013) by Roly Porter

Beautiful and macabre: two books from Century Guild

Arriving in the mail last week, a pair of beautifully-produced volumes which Thomas Negovan very generously sent to me. Negovan’s Century Guild publishes the kind of art I’ve been writing about here for the past twenty years: Symbolist painting, Art Nouveau graphics, Decadent illustration and more. There’s some intersection between the publisher’s backlist and earlier titles from Dover Publications, but where Dover have mostly concentrated on mass-produced paperbacks Century Guild deploy the full range of finishings available to a publisher of high-quality art books: foil embossing, faux leather finishes, spot-varnished boards, edges sprayed in metallic ink, and ribbon place-markers. Beautiful Macabre is Negovan’s own selection of rare poster art from 1868 to 1981, rare enough for most of the material to be new to me: theatre posters, Expressionist film posters, exhibition posters, etc, with an emphasis on Decadence through the ages. This is another of those books that show how the morbid preoccupations of the 1890s became codified in the 20th century into generic horror.

Cover design by Jack Hargreaves.

The Anton Seder book is a more singular study, reprinting the intricate plates from Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst (The Animal in Decorative Art) and Moderne Malereien, a collection of Seder’s interior designs in the Art Nouveau style. Seder’s book of animal designs has its own Dover reprint (which may explain how Murray Tinkelman was able to incorporate some of the creatures into his Lovecraftian cover art) but the Century Guild collection includes much more than this, with biographical notes, and pages that place Seder’s books in the context of previous guides and templates for use by artists and craftspeople. This type of book was a common thing around 1900 (Alphonse Mucha produced three of them), while similar examples abound in previous centuries. The fragmentation of art and craft in the 20th century, and the turn against exuberant decoration, put an end to a form whose spirit survives today in reprints such as this. And it happens to have arrived at a time when its contents will be very useful reference for my current commission. Thanks, Thomas!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine
• Moderne Malereien, 1903
• Das Thier in der Decorativen Kunst

Weekend links 814

Kull of Atlantis—The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune by Ned Dameron for Kull (1985) by Robert E. Howard. Via.

• Jeremy Allen reviews the latest reissue of The New Worlds Fair by Michael Moorcock and The Deep Fix, describing the album as “a fascinating and quixotic document from the time it was made, deserving to be taken seriously in its own right”.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction, a small collection of early stories by Clark Ashton Smith.

• New music: Geometry of Murder: Extra Capsular Extraction Inversions by Earth x Black Noi$e; Live At Nonseq by WNDFRM.

The book is not just loaded with words or tongues. Its also loaded with genres, or more accurately, different modes of literature. And one of the modes I particularly enjoyed this time around is, appropriately, the Weird. In ways long noted on forlorn and unspeakable subreddits, there is a decidedly Lovecraftian dimension to Melville’s Whale, which the Master of Providence did read and enjoy months before writing his game-changing “Call of Cthulhu.” We begin the novel with a sick soul, who may or may not be named after an Old Testament outcast, wandering through a macabre and fetid New England whale-town, following grim portents that lead him on towards a cursed ship doomed to confront a monster who sleeps or at least feeds, and presumably dreams, at the bottom of the sea. And that’s just the first couple of chapters.

Erik Davis on the pleasures of re-reading Moby-Dick, in a piece which makes me want to read the novel again

• At the BFI: Phil Hoad on David Lynch’s efforts to keep making films in an industry resistant to his kind of art.

• Exploration Log 12: Adam Rowe on the best retro science fiction art collections.

• At Public Domain Review: The Nine Birds of Jacques de Fornazeris (1594).

• Winners and finalists for the 2025 Ocean Art Contest.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Hilary Woods.

• The Whale (1977) by Electric Light Orchestra | Don’t Kill The Whale (1978) by Yes | School For Whales (1980) by Marc Barreca