{electronica} – Page 156

Weekend links 64

The Sixteenth of September (1956) by René Magritte.

To Magritte admirers, The Sixteenth of September is a deceptively realistic work painted in 1956, one of a series in which the artist plays tricks with light and time of day. It shows a crescent moon impossibly shining through the dark mass of a tree, against a dawn sky.

To [Marc] Bolan fans, the painting has an entirely different significance: 16 September 1977 was the date the singer was returning home in the small hours from a night out, in a Mini driven by his girlfriend Gloria Jones. […] Fans say the tree in the painting closely resembles the sycamore the car crashed into, and the moon was at the same phase on 16 September 1977. (more)

• New Yorkers finally got a successful vote for gay marriage making New York state the sixth and largest in the US giving full marriage rights to its gay citizens. One of America’s conservative journals, National Review, made the striking point that forty years ago New York was in the vanguard of gay liberation while Spain under Franco was a dictatorship with no gay rights at all. No one then would have bet on Spain beating New York to gay marriage rights as it did in 2005. Allow me to note that we still only have civil unions here in the UK.

• Related: Queer Beacon: LGBT spaces in New York City by Kian Goh, and at Scientific American: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, with a Key to Many Complicating Factors by Jeremy Yoder.

• A pair of intrepid photographers breach the midnight security at St Paul’s Cathedral to bring back photos of the building rooftop. Related (and looking like a good location for a British equivalent of Stalker), photos of the disused Thorpe Marsh Power Station, Yorkshire.

• Mixtape of the month: the ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror collection by Portishead, a great blend of rock, rap and electronic odds-and-ends. Also a dash of Alan Moore & Stephen O’Malley.

• Eddie Campbell is blogging again. Welcome back to the madhouse, Eddie. His smart and witty daughter, Hayley Campbell, continues to file regular bulletins from her London bunker.

• Your Tumblrs this week: Fuck Yeah Ken Russell and Fuck Yeah Powell & Pressburger.

• Robot Flâneur: Exploring Google Street View.

• Paris Visages by Marco Gervasio.

• “Push the button, Max!”

• Written On The Forehead (2011) by PJ Harvey.

Weekend links 62

A plate from Tales of the Amur by Dmitry Nagishkin, a 1975 edition illustrated by Gennady Pavlishin.

• The week in Surrealism: Opera of the surreal gives Dalí an encore: Yo, Dalí, a previously unperformed work by Xavier Benguerel, receives its premier in Madrid. Meanwhile Tate Liverpool’s summer exhibition, René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, is profiled here. “René Magritte has inspired more book covers than any other visual artist,” says James Hall.

If Rimbaud anticipated the Surrealists by decades, Ashbery is said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yet though nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines.

Lydia Davis on Rimbaud’s Wise Music.

• Umberto Eco’s glimpse into the art of the novel | Return to Wonderland: an essay on Lewis Carroll’s world by Alberto Manguel | Heavy sentences by Joseph Epstein: On How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish.

And then there’s the mystery of what happened to him for those four months in London when we have no trace of him. Rimbaud mentions Scarborough in “Promontory” and talks about “Hotels, the circular façades of the Royal and the Grand in Scarborough or Brooklyn.” Since there’s that missing period in England, people say he must have gone to Scarborough, and have even checked hotel registers for that period, but as far as I know nobody has ever found anything. Someone even checked railway and train schedules in order to pin him to this real place. I seem to remember a French writer admitting that Rimbaud was never in Brooklyn, but kind of wishfully thinking that he might have been. Which is very funny. “Rimbaud in Brooklyn”: there’s a project for someone.

A Refutation of Common Sense, John Ashberry on translating Rimbaud.

• Robert Jeffrey posts a video of his nine-year-old self giving Madge a run for her money in 1991. As Boy Culture puts it: “Anyone who feebly clings to the belief that gay can be prayed away should take a look at this and give up already…” Amen.

• The mathematics of Yog-Sothoth: Richard Elwes on Exotic spheres, or why 4-dimensional space is a crazy place.

• For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry by Christopher Smart (1722–1771).

• Lesbian pulp fiction, 1935–1978 and Faber 20th century classics.

• As The Crow Flies, a new album from The Advisory Circle.

• New World Transparent Specimens by Iori Tomita.

• 79 versions of Gershon Kingley’s Popcorn.

• Minor Man (1981) by The League of Gentlemen.

Everything old is new again

Thomas Negovan.

Music journalist Simon Reynolds has been garnering attention over the past couple of weeks with his new book Retromania, an exploration of the thriving revivals and resurrections in the musical world and an examination of what this may mean for the future. There’s an astute discussion along these lines between Reynolds and Colin McKean over at The Quietus (and it is a discussion for once, rather than the more usual Q&A). The debate is a pertinent one but seems a little insular in its focus on music alone, and pop music in particular. Other creative disciplines have been dealing with questions of influence and originality for some time, they only seem pressing concerns in the musical world because so much music from all nations and eras is now available, and pop as a form is still relatively young.

In addition to the rear-view mirror approach to musical creation, there’s another side to retromania in the present fascination with antique musical instruments and recording equipment. The Cramps once declared that they preferred valve amplifiers because valves “turned the music to fire”; amps containing silicon chips, on the other hand, deadened the music by routing it through pieces of stone. There’s a lot of this attitude around at the moment (organic analogue versus inorganic digital), not least the persistent fetish for analogue synthesizers which dates back as far as 1995 and the Node project. That said, you’ll have to work hard to find anyone pursuing a retro aesthetic with greater determination than Thomas Negovan, a Chicago musician intent on releasing a 4-track EP which has been recorded directly onto wax cylinder using an 1894 Edison recording machine. Negovan and co. plan to release the recording on vinyl (with no digital technology used in the transfer), and also release a single on wax cylinder, a medium which they say hasn’t been used in this way since 1924. They still need some funding so there’s a Kickstarter page for the project here, and more details about Mr Negovan’s music over at his MySpace page.

Lastly, and quite by coincidence, The Wire‘s website has been running Antique Phonograph Portal links this week, including mention of a wax cylinder preservation project at the University of Santa Barbara. Go here, here and here for further details.

Update: Jay reminds me that he wrote a piece for the LA Weekly back in 2003 about the ongoing interest in music of the past.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Obsolete formats continued
• Old music and old technology

Martin Rushent, 1948–2011

Pop music is one of the best forms of time travel when it summons a memory that returns you to a specific time and place. All I need to revisit the summers of 1981/82/83 is a blast from one of these albums, each a Martin Rushent production that benefited from his expertise with synth and drum-machine programming. Much as I enjoyed Dare, I tended to play Love and Dancing a lot more, a follow-up to the League’s finest album that was dismissed at the time as a quick cash-in but which was a perfect dub of the album proper, pieced together from extended mixes on the 12″ singles. Rushent was an early master of the extended mix, a side of his production skills I’ve not seen mentioned in the obituaries circulating this week. Reggae artists had been doing this for years but Rushent was ahead of the game in turning successful pop songs inside out, extending tracks without taxing the patience of the listener.

One of Rushent’s pet projects in the mid-1980s has also fallen by the wayside in the career retrospectives. Hard Corps were an outfit comprising three British guys and one French woman, Regine Fetet, who presented themselves as a kind of UK answer to Computer World-era Kraftwerk, albeit with more eros than Kraftwerk generally manage. Their sound was a combination of hard electronics and pop tunes which I found irresistible but the rest of the world stubbornly resisted, being too hard for the pop crowd and too poppy for the second generation Industrial crowd. (Propaganda were doing something similar during this period, and also managing to alienate too many people to be anything more than a cult success.) Martin Rushent produced two of Hard Core’s singles including the closest they got to a hit, Je Suis Passée (1985). There’s a site devoted to the group here.

• Telegraph obit by Paul Gorman

• Altered Images: I Could Be Happy (extended mix) (1981)
• Pete Shelley: Homosapien (elongated mix) (1981)
• Pete Shelley: Witness The Change (dub mix) (1981)
• The Human League: Don’t You Want Me? (1981)
• The League Unlimited Orchestra: Hard Times (1982)
• Pete Shelley: What Was Heaven? (1983)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Secret Wish by Propaganda
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score

Weekend links 61

Marbles and Butterflies (2011) by Jennifer Knaus.

• “Cutter’s Way is a cinematic masterpiece” says John Patterson. Yes, it is, and it’s often been difficult to see (although it’s now on DVD) being one of those cult films that rarely surfaced on TV or video. Another cult film surfacing at last is Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (yes, again…) which will be out on DVD & Blu-ray next month. I missed this Telegraph piece about the film. You want more? Lint: The Movie is showing at the Kino Club, Brighton, later this month.

• This week’s Eno haul: Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno; Eric Tamm’s 1995 study Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound is now available for free at the author’s website; Imagine New Times is an outtake from Eno’s forthcoming Drums Between the Bells which can be downloaded here.

• Mixtapes of the week: Demdike Stare with a suitably sinister and eclectic mix are out-curated by Current 93’s David Tibet who mashes together a unique blend of folk, prog, riffs, choral works and glam rock.

I began to realize the hypocrisy about sexual freedom in the feminist establishment was as bad as it is in the religious right. They do whatever they want. They look at whatever they want, they masturbate to whatever they want, they fuck whoever and however they like. I couldn’t even say everything I know in the book because it would just be too cruel and personally invasive. But I’ve had it with their lying. I spent so long trying to have these earnest conversations and now I’m like, “Fuck you — you’re as bad as the Vatican!”

Susie Bright interviewed by Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon sounding as happy and positive as she always does.

• The Gnostic #4 is out this month featuring Alan Moore’s essay on magic and related matters, Fossil Angels, and a piece examining the Gnostic influences on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

• “Nobody should be sent to prison for taking drugs,” says Richard Branson. Many politicians agree with him but they’re all too cowardly to do anything about it.

Untitled work by Kilian Eng.

• The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, The English Assassin (1969–70). A comic strip written by Michael Moorcock & M John Harrison with art by Mal Dean & Richard Glyn Jones.

• The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K Johnson is available as a free ebook here.

• “If I was to try to write a mainstream book I would be constantly bumping my elbows up against the restrictions.” Tim Powers is interviewed by Alison Flood.

• HOMO Online, Adventures in Homosexuality: Fiction, Fact, Art and Porn.

• Your Rainbow Panorama, a new work by Olafur Eliasson.

• Self Suck, a poem by Angelo Nikolopoulos.

• Map Of Dusk (1987) by Jon Hassell | Lam Lam (1998) by Baaba Maal (with Jon Hassell & Brian Eno) | All Is Full Of Love (1999) by Björk (Guy Sigsworth mix featuring Jon Hassell).