{music} – Page 271 – { feuilleton }

The psychedelic art of Howard Bernstein

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967).

I made a post a while back about the work of Bob Pepper, an artist whose illustrations from the 1960s can also be described as psychedelic and who was equally visible in the music and book publishing worlds. Howard Bernstein (not to be confused with musician Howie B) wasn’t as prolific as Pepper but this post was prompted by the appearance at Sci-Fi-O-Rama of the swirling abstractions of his Roger Zelazny cover. Like Pepper, Bernstein produced album cover art as well as book covers although it’s possible the Zelazny piece may have been a one-off. This was the jacket of the first edition and a rather flagrant attempt by Doubleday to co-opt the trendiness of the psychedelic style for a science fiction readership. They tried something similar with the cover for Harlan Ellison’s landmark anthology Dangerous Visions in the same year, the art in that case being the work of Leo & Diane Dillon. The Zelazny cover caught my attention for another reason, the typography is a variation on the 19th century Kismet typeface by John F Cumming which I used for my two Alice in Wonderland calendars and which turns up regularly in psychedelic design. And while we’re considering conjunctions of music and science fiction, I ought to note that the Hawkwind song Lord of Light lifts its title from Zelazny’s novel.

The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Vol. I (1965).

As for Bernstein’s music work, most of this appears to have been for Bernard Stollman’s eccentric ESP Disk label where the roster of artists included many free-jazz greats along with The Fugs, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary and fringe psychedelic groups such as Pearls Before Swine, Cromagnon, The Godz and others. Bernstein’s Cromagnon cover (below) exists in both monochrome and coloured versions but the monochrome one seems to be the original. In fact much of his art looks like it was drawn in black-and-white with the colours being created by separations at the print stage. His poster for The Godz is especially striking, so much so I’m surprised to find there isn’t more of his work around. Wolfgang’s Vault has a blacklight poster and there are some other blacklight works here. If anyone knows of other posters, please leave a comment although I suspect if there was much more then Wolfgang’s Vault would have the goods.

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Aguirre by Popol Vuh

Design by Sawyer Studios, painting by Michael J Deas.

If you’re a music obsessive d’un certain âge it’s a common thing to get bees in your bonnet about the reissues of favourite albums. For Krautrock aficionados the reissues of Popol Vuh‘s releases have been more frustrating than most. Aguirre was the band’s seventh album released in 1976, four years after Werner Herzog’s film, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, for which the group provided a score and from which the album borrows its title.

The album isn’t quite a soundtrack—although it contains a snatch of ethnic music from the film and a recurrent theme—and it’s also less of a whole than the albums which preceded and followed it. The film’s ethereal title theme was played by Florian Fricke on a “choir-organ“, a mysterious Mellotron-like instrument which had previously been employed by Amon Düül II. The rest of the album was fleshed out with variations on tracks from earlier Popol Vuh releases, none of which are used in the film. Side 2 of the vinyl edition featured a single track entitled Vergegenwärtigung (Visualisation) which is also absent from the film and whose doomy ambience would have been more suited to Herzog’s later Nosferatu the Vampyre. This lengthy piece is a drifting slab of drone-werk which would have been recorded in the early 1970s when Florian still had his enormous Moog synth. It’s probably the most minimal thing in the whole Krautrock canon, sounding at times like a lost fifth track from Zeit, Tangerine Dream’s collection of drones which featured Florian as a guest performer. As such Vergegenwärtigung is an overlooked, if minor, piece of Kosmische electronica which has only ever been available on vinyl. And there, dear reader, is the rub.

No designer credited but it was probably Peter Geitner.

The various CD reissues of the album added and removed tracks from the band’s catalogue seemingly at random. I have the Spalax reissue which featured the film’s title theme then nothing else from the original album, the following tracks being the entirety of Popol Vuh’s second album, In Den Gärten Pharaos, and a beautiful solo piano suite, Spirit of Peace. Yes, it’s nice to have them there but, you know…it’s not Aguirre! When a Japanese edition appeared in 2006 the track they call Vergegenwärtigung turned out to be the errant electronic piece with additional pieces of music layered over it for no apparent reason. The Japanese are usually very good with CD reissues so this was a particular disappointment. After many years of living with a ruined vinyl copy of the album it was gratifying this weekend to find an mp3 of the original of Vergegenwärtigung which can be downloaded here. For the moment you’re unlikely to find it anywhere else.

YouTube has some choice Popol Vuh moments including a Florian Fricke Moog improvisation from 1971 and the band miming to Kyrie from the Hosianna Mantra album. Most fascinating for me has always been this scene from Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser with Florian playing a blind pianist. The music is a variation on his Agnus Dei theme which he obsessively reworked on several Popol Vuh albums and which is also one of the highlights of Aguirre.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A cluster of Cluster

Weekend links 43

From the video for I See, So I See So by Broadcast.

• RIP Trish Keenan of Broadcast. Tributes here and here. The Broadcast/Focus Group collaboration …investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was The Wire‘s album of the year for 2009. Joseph Stannard interviewed Trish Keenan and James Cargill in October of that year.

• Who Knows What Tomorrow Might Bring, a new pay-what-you-please Arthur mixtape. Also at Arthur, Sunday Lectures by Freeman House here, here, here and here.

• Cormac McCarthy’s description of American pioneers in Suttree (1979) kept coming to mind during the past week:

Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.

• Born This Way: “A photo/essay project for gay viewers (male and female) to submit pictures from their childhood (roughly ages 4 to 14), with snapshots that capture them, innocently, showing the beginnings of their innate LGBT selves. It’s nature, not nurture!”

• Mischievous street art characters. Chris Marker wouldn’t want us to forget Monsieur Chat. Speaking of Chris Marker, there’s Plato’s Cave as Kino: Owl’s Legacy Excerpt & Becoming Imperceptible.

With the point of a knife Dr. LeBaron took from the little round box a small quantity of a dark, greenish-colored gum, which, as it was passed from one to another for inspection, gave off an agreeable, aromatic odor. Then, as he was engaged in filling two capsules from the box, he explained:

“As le docteur read from ze book of Monsieur Richet, ze favoreet méthode in ze Orient ees to take ze Haschisch by ze smoke in ze Persian pipe—ze hookah, ze nargileh. But zey also take eet in ze great varieté. Ze principal kind zat come to ze market of Europe, ees zat I show you—ze Haschisch, an’ ve take eet like ze dose of quinine,” said he, as he handed a well-filled capsule to both Smith and Arnold.

Throwing back his head, Smith bolted his dose without ceremony, and Arnold immediately followed his example.

Haschisch: A Novel (1886) by Thorold King. Related: Haschisch Hallucinations (1905) by HE Gowers.

• Dan Hill’s personal report from the drowned world of Brisbane. Related: Hayley Campbell recalls swimming in the city’s hazardous floodwaters when she was a wild child. Also: Canoeing in McDonald’s.

• Cabinet Card Backmarks, florid advertisements from Victorian cabinet photos. Callum James made a post on the subject in 2008 and has a Flickr set showing his discoveries.

• The Brothers Quay made a public information film about AIDS in 1996. (Now deleted from YouTube…boo!)

• The secret stories of book inscriptions. Related: The Book Inscriptions Project.

• Ani, Turkey: City of 1001 Churches, all of them abandoned and ruined.

• Vulgar Army: Octopus in Propaganda and Political Cartoons.

• Designer John Gall makes collages in his spare time.

• Phantasmaphile at Tumblr.

• Witch Cults and I See, So I See So, both by Broadcast & The Focus Group.

Weekend links 42

Blasphemous Rumours (2009/2010) by Ryan Martin. The artist now has a dedicated site for his paintings.

• The Museum of Censored Art, a mobile gallery, will be showing the withdrawn David Wojnarowicz film outside the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, until their contentious gay art exhibition closes next month. Related: Bishop of Mallorca criticises calendar—which shows Catholic youths posing naked—for ‘not respecting Christian symbols’.

• Didier Lestrade published French gay zine Magazine in the 1980s, and later co-founded Têtu. He’s interviewed at BUTT and has started uploading the entire run of Magazine about which he says: “I don’t want to stamp some kind of logo on this material. It’s gay. It’s gay history. It belongs to everybody. If you want to take a piece of it, please try to mention the origins of it, a simple code word “Magazine” will be enough. If you wanna be more specific, be my guest.”

• HMV, Britain’s last big music chain, is closing 60 branches. Yet a new wave of CD stores is thriving. Oh, HMV, how I’ll miss your £17 CDs (and double-CDs at £34)… On second thoughts, no I won’t, your wretched retail barns always exemplified the greed endemic in the music business.

Love Comes/Destroyer by Stephen Kasner.

• Artist Stephen Kasner‘s work has adorned music releases by Sunn O))), Isis and others. He’s currently another American creator in need of assistance with medical expenses. Details here.

• The Ghosts of Old London: the gloomy Victorian metropolis in all its deteriorated splendour. See also: In Search of Relics of Old London.

• “It’s time to recognise [Sandy] Denny as not simply a folksinger but one of Britain’s great poets of song,” says Rob Young.

• Louis Pattison talks to Locrian about JG Ballard, old VHS tapes and their new album The Crystal World.

• The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of: Lebbeus Woods’ big drawings.

• Hannes Bok portfolios at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• An Iranian rapper named Salome. Also here and here.

• A Moment of (Alan) Moore.

• RIP Mick Karn.

• Book Worship.

• Sons of Pioneers (1981) by Japan; Tao-Tao (1982) by Masami Tsuchiya; Glow World (1983) by Bill Nelson.

Alastair’s Carmen

“The artist at home” from Alastair: Illustrator of Decadence (1979) by Victor Arwas.

More Beardsley derivations in the form of some illustrations by Hans Henning Voigt (1887–1969), better known as Alastair, and an artist who more than anyone carried the Beardsley style and the fin de siècle ethos into the 20th century. If the photograph above is anything to go by he seemed to take Beardsley’s effete and languid characters as role models for an equally effete and languid manner.

The drawings here are a selection from twelve pieces for a 1920 edition of Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, the novel upon which Bizet based his opera. Alastair for me has always been an artist whose enthusiasm for his subject matter outpaced his technique, his figure drawing can be rather weak at times which perhaps explains some of his more eccentric costume designs. Every so often the weakness becomes a virtue when it provides a surprising composition. Carmen didn’t seem to inspire him as much as other works, his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé are a lot better and I may post some of them here if I can find a way of scanning my Victor Arwas book without spoiling it. There still isn’t much else of his work on the web but S. Elizabeth did make a start recently with her post A Decadent Parade of Outrageous Fancies at Coilhouse.

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