{horror} – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 695

The Sleepwalker (1878) by Maximilián Pirner. Via.

• The latest non-fiction book from A Year In The Country is Threshold Tales, “an exploration of the edgelands, borderlands and liminal places in film; of the places whether literal, in the mind, cultural or amongst the paranormal realm where the boundaries between worlds, ways of life, the past and the future become thin and porous.” Featuring some useful viewing tips for the Spook Season, no doubt.

• Spoon & Tamago reports on VHS cafe opening in Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa district. I was happy to see the end of VHS format but I admire the Japanese dedication to redundant technology.

• There are more seasonal viewing (and reading) recommendations at Unquiet Things where Ms. E. has been blogging her way through the month. Begin here.

• At Public Domain Review: Edmund Fry’s Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799).

• See 12 winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Contest.

• Wyrd mail (and further links to other things) for autumn from Wyrd Daze.

• At The Daily Heller: The Art of Invented Scripts, Meaning Optional.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – October 2023 at Ambientblog.

• New music: N/Y by The Haxan Cloak.

• Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge (1972) by Amon Düül II | Sleepwalkers Woman (1983) by Scott Walker | Sleepwalking (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire

Weekend links 694

Reading the Tarot at Southend-on-Sea (c.1968) by Linda Sutton.

• “Starship Africa, released in 1980, was a densely textured audio collage emulating the sensation of intergalactic space travel, though it freaked out some in the scene. According to [Adrian] Sherwood, DJ David Rodigan told him: ‘What do you think you’re doing to reggae music?'” David Katz on the return of Creation Rebel.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Subcontinental Synthesis, a history of India’s first electronic music studio, edited by Emptyset’s Paul Purgas. There’s also a related compilation album, The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969–1972.

• New music: The Lamentations Of Jeremiah by Vince Clarke, and Tidescape by Roger Eno.

But even when it’s a signal, even when it’s a microbe, we’ll likely never know if it’s aliens. Not just because of the vast distances involved or because of the wild possibilities presented by chemistry and biology, but because science seldom works that way. Discoveries almost never arrive as we think they will, as lightning bolt eurekas. They are slow, gradual, communal. Alien life may not be something we ever ‘find’, but instead inch towards, ever closer, like a curve approaching its asymptote. For all our desire to know who’s out there, that may have to be enough.

Jaime Green on the scientific method and the search for extraterrestrial life

• At Public Domain Review: Charles H. Bennett’s Shadows (ca. 1856).

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is JAF Herb.

• Make a Spawn of Cthulhu mask.

• Theon Cross’s favourite music.

• Herb (1980) by Sly And The Revolutionaries With Jah Thomas | Pause In Herbs (1995) by Ken Ishii | Herb Is Burnin’ (2010) by Method Of Defiance

The art of Shin Taga

The World of Edogawa Rampo (1991).

Ushering in the Spook Season with the dark and strange etchings of Japanese artist Shin Taga. Dark, strange, also meticulously detailed and erotic enough for his work to be featured at Shunga Gallery where they draw fitting comparison with the eroto-Surrealism of Hans Bellmer. As is often the case with older Japanese artists—Taga was born in 1946—there doesn’t appear to be a dedicated website or even much information about the creator of these works. There are, however, a number of online galleries with decent reproductions, also catalogues, including one which presents a series of prints based on the stories of Japanese horror writer Edogawa Rampo.

Mask 01.

View with a Face.

Peerless.

Fish No. 19.

Continue reading “The art of Shin Taga”

McCallum reads Lovecraft

Art by Leo and Diane Dillon.

RIP David McCallum, who I prefer to remember for his role as one half of the weirdest-TV-duo-ever, Sapphire and Steel. McCallum was a minor sex symbol in the 1960s, thanks to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a celebrity that led to his conducting a series of instrumental pop albums. I’ve never heard any of these but they have their champions. They were followed in the 1970s by a number of readings for the Caedmon label which included three albums of HP Lovecraft stories. The Dunwich Horror is one I’ve referred to in the past since I used to own a knackered copy. As a reading it’s pretty good, slightly edited but with the novelty of allowing you to hear McCallum recite the famous “As a foulness shall ye know them” passage from the Necronomicon. These commissions no doubt came about simply because McCallum was available but his Lovecraft recordings gain a deeper resonance in the light of his later exploits with Joanna Lumley in the haunted corridors of Time. Some of the malign forces that Sapphire and Steel face aren’t so distant from Lovecraft’s interdimensional “Old Ones”, unfathomable entities seeking ingress to the material universe.

Cover art uncredited.

All of the McCallum Lovecraft albums are now on YouTube so the curious may listen to the recordings without searching for rare (and expensive) vinyl:

• The Rats in the Walls (1973)
• The Dunwich Horror (1976)
• The Haunter of the Dark (1979)

The reading of The Rats in the Walls doesn’t edit Lovecraft’s xenophobia so anyone unwilling to hear a racial epithet used as a name for a pet cat should avoid that particular recording. The first album, which included a sleeve note from August Derleth, is also the only one of the three that was reissued. I wonder whether The Dunwich Horror might have fared better if it didn’t have such appallingly amateurish cover art. A shame the Dillons weren’t able to illustrate that one as well.

Art by Les Katz.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Haunted Corridors: The Temporal Enigmas of Sapphire and Steel

Weekend links 692

Illustration by Alfred Pearse for The Horror of Studley Grange by Clifford Halifax & LT Meade. Via.

• The Haunting at 60: Guy Lodge asks “Is it still one of the scariest films ever made?” I say yes but then it’s always been a favourite. Also, Robert Wise is something of a cult figure in this house, not for his big-budget directing jobs on The Sound of Music and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but for his RKO horror entries (The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher), his film noir (Born To Kill, The Set-Up, Odds Against Tomorrow), and two smaller science-fiction films from different decades, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain. All this and he also edited Citizen Kane.

• “This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.” Jeremy Lybarger reviewing Science Fictions, the retrospective devoted to the art of Remedios Varo.

• New music: Improvisation On Four Sequences by Suzanne Ciani; Incorporeal by Hidden Horse; Atlas by Laurel Halo; Infinito (Version) by Moritz von Oswald.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present…is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Tom McCarthy: JG Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing

• At Public Domain Review: Behold the Nebulous Smear: ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430).

• At Unquiet Things: Shake, Shiver, and Shriek: The Haunted Gothic Nightmares of George Ziel.

• Winners of Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2023.

• The Strange World of…Gavin Bryars

• Watch The Stars (1968) by Pentangle | Stars (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno | Kelly Watch The Stars (1997) by Air