A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Film
In the mail today from Burning Shed, the debut album by Air French Band [sic] in an expanded three-disc set, housed in a card wallet and featuring blu-ray audio and video. On the second CD there’s a live version of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Who knew? etc. The duo’s last album was in July 2014, so it’s anyone’s guess when they might record again, but this will do nicely for now, thanks.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Voyage dans la Lune
Under Water/In Air.
This recently-released video for Under Water/In Air by Starfucker (or STRFKR, as they often have to style themselves) is an animated production by Edward Carvalho-Monaghan, an artist whose visuals may be seen to similar effect in an earlier animation for Starfucker’s Armatron. Carvalho-Monaghan’s artwork has appeared on a number of the group’s record sleeves, including the latest album, Parallel Realms, which combines a Surrealist dose of the visual style that I refer to as the groovy look with the kind of impossible architecture popularised by MC Escher. Armatron, meanwhile, features more architecture in what may be borrowings from Giorgio de Chirico.
Armatron.
I lost interest in music videos years ago, I’d much rather listen to the music than have to experience it as a soundtrack to some director’s attempt to illustrate a song with visual novelty. But animated music videos are easier to take, in part because the pairing of animation with music goes back to the earliest days of the medium. The Starfucker videos have had me wondering how much video or animation might suit the “groovy” definition if you went looking for it. And by this I mean following the limits defined by my earlier post which is predominantly concerned with heavy outlines and flat, bold colours rather than quasi-psychedelic effects. I don’t have the time just now to start searching for other examples but The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine is the Ur-text in this department, and the film’s influence may be found in both Carvalho-Monaghan animations.
Sing, Sang, Sung.
One other music video that does come to mind is for Sing, Sang, Sung by Air, directed by Mrzyk & Moriceau. The colour palette is desaturated but the rest of the graphics are definitely in the groovy zone, with the video as a whole coming across like a Surrealist take on those endlessly scrolling, mutating computer games. When the black ball reaches its destination you’re tempted to watch it all again.
(Under Water/In Air tip via Scotto Moore’s This Newsletter Cannot Save You.)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy look
• Tadanori Yokoo animations
The Vision of Endymion (1902) by Edward John Poynter.
• The Art and History of Lettering Comics by Todd Klein. Eight of the pages in the forthcoming Moon & Serpent book have been lettered by Todd.
• At Igloomag: Chang Terhune looks for music to help you sleep. No mention of an obvious (and superior) candidate, Sleep by Max Richter.
• New music: Ghosted II by Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin; and The Ship by David Shea.
But unlike macroscopic drugs like cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing—the water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string, or pieces of paper that transport the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the “carrier medium,” an object impregnated with drugs, one that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds, and guts of consumers.
When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission. Hence, a meta medium, a liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble gum card, and the communion host. This makes blotter a central if barely recognized artifact of psychedelic print culture, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and subject, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic, and cognitive immediacy.
Erik Davis, in an extract from Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium
• At Wormwoodiana: John Howard on The London Adventure, or, The Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen.
• At Unquiet Things: Hidden Marvels on Your Bookshelf: The Artistic Legacy of Laurence Schwinger.
• “Some intelligent civilizations will be trapped on their worlds”. Evan Gough explains.
• At Vinyl Factory: The Latin-American women of 20th-century electronic music.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Steve Erickson presents A Black Psychedelia Primer Day.
• At Public Domain Review: Animated Putty by Walter R. Booth.
• Vinita Joshi’s favourite music.
• Sleepy Theory (1982) by Weekend | Sleep 3 (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep Games (2012) by Pye Corner Audio
Portrait d’Arthur Rimbaud (1933) by Valentine Hugo.
• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft.
• Retro-Forteana is “Andrew May’s Forteana Blog, focusing on the weirder fringes of history (and other old-fashioned stuff)”.
• Mixes of the week Bill Laswell Mix No. 7: The Return of Celluloid by Voice of Cassandre, and Isolatedmix 126 by Saphileaum.
• At Bajo el Signo de Libra: The second part of a look at photographs by Herbert List of Italians and Italian life.
• New music: Worship: Bernard Herrmann Tribute by The Lord, and Cursory Asperses by Celer.
• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the joy of obscure journals.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Paul Clipson Day.
• At The Mountains Of Madness (1968) by HP Lovecraft | Mountains Of The Moon (2002) by Jah Wobble And Temple Of Sound | Mountains Crave (2012) by Anna von Hausswolff
An Exceptional Occurrence (1950) by Eileen Agar.
• New music: The Endless Echo by Pye Corner Audio, coming soon from Ghost Box. PCA continue to fly the flag for the original Ghost Box mission of bringing various forms of weirdness to electronic music. The new album “draws inspiration from scientific and science-fictional notions about the nature of time and the idea that it may be entirely unreal”. Over at Bandcamp there’s Here by Stefano Guzzetti and Ian Hawgood.
• “Powell and Pressburger emerge from this film, more than ever, as sui generis: inventors of their own kind of film, gentleman amateurs of cinema in some ways…” Peter Bradshaw reviewing Martin Scorsese’s Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger.
• Velocity and Creation, a pair of short films by Vadim Sherbakov made with magnets, glitter and inks. The scores are too bombastic but I like the visuals.
Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for—why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it. What do I mean by increasing life? How can we live more, given that we can’t live longer? Through attention and intensity. Being fully present to the world, and feeling without reservation: the two things that making art requires and that experiencing it involves.
William Deresiewicz on thirteen ways of looking at art
• Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection.
• Mix of the week: Aquarium Drunkard presents Pulp Jazz: Twenty-First Century Groove Music. Great stuff.
• At Public Domain Review: Tales of the Catfish God: Earthquakes in Japanese Woodblock Prints.
• At The Quietus: Jonathan Meades interviews Saint Leonard. And vice versa.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Michelangelo Antonioni Day.
• The Strange World of…Bill Laswell.
• Creation (1971) by Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come | Création Du Monde (1971) by Vangelis | Creation (1977) by Tangerine Dream