{music} – Page 225 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 150

One of A Pair of Peacocks (2012) by Feanne.

• Jonathan Barnbrook reveals his package design for the new David Bowie CD. The Barnbrook studio has also designed the catalogue for the forthcoming V&A Bowie exhibition. And there’s more (don’t worry, it’ll be over soon): Jon Savage on When Bowie met Burroughs.

• “Witches have a fashion moment,” says the NYT. Nice clothes but the writing trots out too many of the usual lazy clichés. Related: A Tale of Witches, Woodland and Half-remembered Melodies…, a new mix by Melmoth the Wanderer.

• Calidostópia! is a free album (FLAC & mp3) from Marcus Popp aka Oval: “an enticing 16-track collaboration…with seven wonderful singers/musicians from all over South America”.

Before meeting Moorcock in person, [Hari] Kunzru went on to say, ‘I didn’t realise the role he’d played in connecting so many different scenes and undergrounds together – the psychedelic music scene, the science fiction scene, the hip experimental literature scene around people like William Burroughs, pop art’.

Brave New Worlds: A Michael Moorcock Retrospective by Carol Huston. Moorcock’s Elric novels will be published by Glénat in new bande dessinée adaptations later this year.

• More art by Michael W. Kaluta at The Golden Age. And more fantastic comics/illustration by Philippe Caza at 50 Watts. There’s more Caza here.

• Mine and David Britton’s new book, Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, was reviewed at The Spectator.

• Google Street Scene: “Moments of cinema captured by Google Street View cameras”.

• Cosmic Sentinels and Spiral Jetties: JG Ballard, Robert Smithson & Tacita Dean

• Strange Flowers showcases the heads of Pavel Tchelitchew, 1949–1952.

• Setting in the East: Diamanda Galás on Women and Real Horror

• Little Joe: “A magazine about queers and cinema, mostly.”

• Nanoparticles loaded with bee venom kill HIV.

• Treatises on Dust: Antic Found Texts

• The Wizard Blew His Horn (1975) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock) | Brothel In Rosenstrasse (1982) by Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix | Running Through The Back Brain (1983) by Hawkwind (with Michael Moorcock)

() by Morgan Fisher

Here’s a good one for enthusiasts of cinematic formalism. () (2003) is a 20-minute soundless assembly by Morgan Fisher of isolated moments from many feature films:

() is made up entirely of “inserts” from feature films organized according to Oulipian principles. Inserts were usually shot by assistants when star actors, large crews, or expensive sets were not needed. These include details of weapons, wounds, letters, signs, tombstones, machinery, games of chance, timepieces, money, and even intimate caresses. Fisher culled the inserts from a number of films he collected for that purpose and edited them together under constraints he does not fully reveal; he places the inserts from a given film in the order in which they appeared in that film, but two inserts from the same film never follow each other directly in his assemblage. Alternating among them we catch glimpses of violence, intrigue, high-stakes gambling, and sexual adventure.

Morgan Fisher is an expert musical collagist as well as a notable anthologist. His Miniatures (1980) anthology is a particular favourite, being a collection of one-minute recordings by a host of different artists. () is the first of his films that I’ve seen, however. The idea is superficially similar to Christian Marclay’s recent The Clock (2010), although Marclay’s concept is rendered more audience-friendly by sticking to a single theme which requires little explanation.

Both works remind me that some years ago I spent two weeks labouring with a pair of video recorders and a huge stack of tapes to collage together three hundred separate clips from famous films. The resulting 15-minute piece was intended as a visual complement to Holger Czukay’s Hollywood Symphony, the last track on his Movies (1979) album. That collage seemed impressive at the time, mostly because the effort required to produce anything decent via such crude methods was considerable. In the age of non-linear editing and YouTube supercuts few people would be impressed at all. I did send a copy of the video to Holger Czukay, however, and received a pleasant phone call by way of thanks. I still relish that.

Morgan Fisher’s () can be seen at Ubuweb. Fisher writes about the Miniatures tracks in great detail on his blog.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La Région Centrale
• Downside Up

Raising the roof

Roger Dean’s album cover art extends further than his sleeve illustrations for Yes. His earlier designs for the Vertigo label showed his visual invention to good effect, and a couple of those designs have had their imitators. The cover art for Dedicated To You, But You Weren’t Listening by the Keith Tippett Group is one that I’ve seen copied although I forget where for the moment so you’ll have to take this on trust. (Ahem.)

The church steeple blasting off from Space Hymns (1971) by Ramases is borrowed somewhat crudely in a 2011 ad for the Wien Museum which shows Vienna’s St Stephen’s cathedral undergoing a similar transformation. The Ramases idea is so eye-catching I’m surprised I’ve not seen it imitated before, although it wasn’t Dean’s invention; in his Views book he says that it was the group’s idea, and they gave him a thorough brief. I presume by this he means that they also wanted the spire as a cover detail, and looking sufficiently rocket-like to give a surprise when the sleeve is opened.

“Ramases” was ~~Martin Raphael~~ Barrington Frost, an Egypt-obsessed British musician who recorded two albums and a single with wife, “Selket”. The single B-side, Mind’s Eye (1968), is a decent piece of psychedelia that turns up on compilations. The same can’t be said for Space Hymns, unfortunately; the presence of 10cc as backing band isn’t enough to rescue songs whose cosmic titles offer more than they deliver. But that’s still a great sleeve. Thanks to @weird_prophet for the Wien tip!

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Roger Dean: artist and designer

Weekend links 149

It’s not cheap but it’s rather tasty: The Changing Faces of Bowie, a limited print at the V&A shop produced for the forthcoming David Bowie exhibition. One hundred artists and designers were asked to choose or create a Bowie-related type design, the collection being printed on holographic paper. Creative Review looked at some details. Related: Bowie’s new album, The Next Day, is now streaming in full at iTunes.

• Marisa Siegel reviews The Moon & Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling, “a fully enchanting if somewhat mysterious collection of poems, written entirely as footnotes”. BlazeVOX has an extract here.

• “[Clement] Greenberg came round to our house in Camden Square. He started telling Bill what he should do to improve a work. Dad lost patience and kicked him out.” Alex Turbull of 23 Skidoo on sculptor father William Turnbull.

“You get the impression that a lot of these young directors have never gained much experience of life outside their film schools or their video-rental stores.”

Anne Billson met Roman Polanski in 1995 to discuss Death and the Maiden.

• Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite, and Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory are available in new print-on-demand and ebook editions from Michael Walmer.

• “Bring Back the Illustrated Book!” says Sam Sacks. Some of us would reply that it never went away but merely remains subject to much unexamined prejudice.

• The Forest and The Trees: A blog by Genevieve Kaplan about altered texts and book art by herself and other artists.

• The Homosexual Atom Bomb: Sophie Pinkham on gay rights, Soviet Russia and the Cold War.

• Who’s Afraid Of The Art Of Zang Tumb Tuum? A blog devoted to the ZTT record label.

• Nigel Kneale’s TV ghost drama, The Stone Tape, is reissued on DVD later this month.

• The drawings of Victor Hugo.

• David Bowie at Pinterest.

• The Man Who Sold The World (1994) by Nirvana | V-2 Schneider (1996) by Philip Glass | ‘Heroes’ (2000) by King Crimson

Zone music

Undulating terrain: Stalker (1979).

Marking the boundaries of an obsession, this post follows the discovery last week of the Sine Fiction soundtracks for science fiction novels, one of which was five tracks by Jos Smolders for Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. That album set me wondering what other recordings might have been inspired by that bounded region known as the Zone, whether derived from the Strugatskys’ novel, from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker (for whom the Strugatskys provided a screenplay) or even from the real-life Zone around the irradiated Chernobyl disaster site in Ukraine.

The cult status of the book and film can be measured by the following list which I’m sure will have many omissions, not least because searching music sites for “stalker”, “zone” and “roadside picnic” yields multiple results; all three of those terms happen to also be the names of musical artists or groups, as well as the names of labels, albums and individual recordings. (I’ll skip over the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of computer games. All have music but since I’ve not played any of them I can’t say much about them.)

The stalker’s dream from Stalker.

The first release is of course the haunting film theme by Edward Artemyev, a mere five minutes of music which nonetheless adds a great deal to Tarkovsky’s unforgettable images. Artemyev also provided music for Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Mirror (1975) yet nothing else I’ve heard by the composer resembles this piece which wouldn’t be out-of-place on a compilation of German Kosmische music from the 1970s.

While that long camera shot over waterlogged objects is still in mind, there’s the following from Nova Swing (2006) by M. John Harrison, a science fiction novel which riffs on both Stalker and Roadside Picnic:

Upstairs, Emil Bonaventure was propped upright against the pillows like a corpse, his skin yellow in the streetlight from the window, his old ribs slatted with shadows. The energy had drained out of his smart tattoos and he was breathing ever so lightly. Edith watched the pulse in his neck. She could almost see the life through the skin, the thoughts in his head, and what were they but the dreams he couldn’t any longer have? Shallow water over cracked chequerboard tiles and cast-off domestic objects, books, plates, magazines, empty tunnels smelling of chemicals, a black dog trotting aimlessly round him in his sleep on some dirty waterlogged ground neither in nor out of anything you could think of as the world, while a woman’s voice mourned open-throat from a house not far enough in the distance.

Nova Swing will be available in a new edition later this year.

Stalker (1995) by Robert Rich & B. Lustmord.

The doomy atmospherics which have become the hallmark of Zone music begin with this album by Robert Rich and B. Lustmord. Seven tracks take Tarkovsky’s film as an inspiration with vaguely allusive titles—Undulating Terrain—and occasional snatches of dialogue buried in the mix. A superb piece of late-night listening even without the associations.

Continue reading “Zone music”