{music} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 837

Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay, Leeds (1872) by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

• “In many cases, the rules of physics that apply in a real scene appear to be optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to enhance the painting’s intended effect.” An extract from The Visual World of Shadows by Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, in which the authors examine some of the rule-breaking that takes place when artists are dealing with shadows in paintings. I mentioned this aspect of artistic licence in a recent interview, making the point that meticulously accurate light and shade is a tell-tale sign of AI art.

• Orson Welles’ unfinished film of Don Quixote is back in the news again. Welles spent twenty years shooting scenes when he had the time and the money, and I seem to have spent an equivalent time reading about attempts to release the film. Any assembled footage will lack Welles’ bravura editing but I’d still like to see it.

• Read an extract from Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers And The Reinvention Of Rock, 1984–994 by Simon Reynolds.

• Mixes of the week: King Tubby – The Heaviest Dubs – A DJ Mix by Mista Savona, and Bleep Mix #319 by Yu Su.

• “What makes music psychedelic?” James McKeown on the music of Terry Riley.

• At the BFI: Gayle Sequeira selects 10 great films about dinner parties.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Loopy.

• The Strange World of…King Tubby.

• Shadows (1967) by The Leather Boy | The Never-Deserting Shadow (1991) by Jarboe | Moon Shadows (2001) by Laraaji

Weekend links 836

Narcissus (1881) by Gyula Benczúr.

• AnOther reposts an old interview with Dennis Bell of the Bob Mizer Foundation to coincide with an exhibition of homoerotic drawings from Physique Pictorial at JW Anderson Soho, London. The drawings by the pseudonymous (and still unidentified) “Spartacus” don’t bear comparison to those by Mizer’s celebrated discovery, Tom of Finland, but they’re part of a pioneering history. There’s more “Spartacus” at Wallpaper*.

• “Ever the deviant, Bidgood initiated a style that rebelled against the dominant sensibility of his physique-magazine peers, treating his subjects with the same love that a studio-era auteur may have bestowed upon his leading ladies.” Mayukh Sen on the tawdry, opulent world of James Bidgood’s underground classic Pink Narcissus.

• “Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf.” Samuel Cox on 50 years of La Düsseldorf by La Düsseldorf.

[Adrian] Sherwood argues that Perry’s antics often mask his genius. “What upset me in later years was people marvelling at him as some kind of joke,” says Sherwood. People saw a clown, when they should have seen someone who re-engineered music. From reimagining the studio as an instrument, pushing dub reggae to the sonic limits or inventing sampling, few producers have come anywhere close to matching Perry’s impact.

Lanre Bakari on the life and musical work of Lee “Scratch” Perry

• New music: Arles 75 Drei by Can; Voyager by PJ Harvey; Fantasy by Julia Holter.

• At the BFI: Adam Nayman chooses 10 great Canadian debut features.

• At Colossal: James Turrell’s 100th Skyscape opens in Aarhus.

• At The Daily Heller: Vector art by Catalina Estrada.

• A belated RIP for writer Sandy Robertson.

• Sky – Rhythm (1972) by Dub Specialist | Skyliner (2006) by Boards Of Canada | The Sky Torn Apart (2018) by Paul Schütze

Weekend links 835

Kites of Fukuroi and Distant View of Akiba in Totomi Province, from the series One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (1859) by Utagawa Hiroshige II.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: International Freak: Robin Farquharson and the Dream of Psychedelic Revolt by M. Syd Rosen.

• At the Daily Heller: the Brooklyn Botanical Garden looks back at the psychedelic Sixties with Flower Power.

• At the BFI: Sophia Satchell-Baeza selects 10 great queer American underground features of the 1970s.

• At Colossal: “Surreal Figures Step from Leonora Carrington’s Paintings into Shape of Dreams”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Surreal Paperback Visions of Richard Powers.

• The Reinvention of the Guitar in 13 Albums by Simon Reynolds.

• At Public Domain Review: The Art of Kite Flying (1430–1929).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2026 at Ambientblog.

• New music: Cloud Machines by Berndt / Schmidt.

• Kites (1967) by Simon Dupree And The Big Sound | Kites I (1999) by Brian Eno | Nuclear Kites (2023) by Hawksmoor

Weekend links 834

A Bigger Splash (1967) by David Hockney.

• I was interviewed this week at Retrofuturista, the first interview I’ve done in a while, and more wide-ranging than they sometimes are. Subjects covered include illustration, design, weird fiction, the Reverbstorm comics, the Bumper Book of Magic, underground culture, and the deficiencies of AI art. Also my ongoing, mostly unseen, Axiom project.

• At Nautilus: Kristen French conducts a lengthy and fascinating interview with Andrew Gallimore and Donald Hoffman, a pair of reseachers seeking to upend theoretical physics by making consciousness the foundation of reality, rather than its inconvenient and inexplicable by-product.

• “My audience is film-smart, and I always say, ‘If they don’t get something, then do your homework.’ Sometimes you have homework when you come to see my movies to figure out what the references are.” John Waters talking to Marya E. Gates at RogerEbert.com.

• The Morgan Library & Museum in NYC launches an exhibition later this month: Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions. At Colossal there’s a look at some of the 20th-century art, while Smithsonian Magazine has a selection of older card designs.

• Inferno by Boards Of Canada is “probably as close to a political statement as these mystery men will ever approach.” Thus Simon Reynolds looking back over the history of the group following the release of their marvellous new album.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Necromancers by Robert Hugh Benson.

• New music: Demand To Be Taken To Heaven Alive by Horse Lords; A Wave Of Alarm by Comdex; Teleportations by Danalogue.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2026 so far. Thanks again for the link here!

• At Public Domain Review: Venetian Bridge Brawls in 17th and 18th Century Art.

• At Door of Perception: Sibylle Ruppert—The Inward Gaze of the Flesh.

• RIP David Hockney and James Blood Ulmer.

• The Strange World of…Melinda Gebbie.

• Splash One (Now I’m Home) (1966) by 13th Floor Elevators | Splash (1968) by Miles Davis | Splash (1974) by Can

The art of Helmut Wenske

A Tab in the Ocean (1972) by Nektar.

This is another post in which I refer to Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (Thames & Hudson, 1978) as a source of discovery. Rottensteiner is Austrian which no doubt explains why his study of fantasy and horror in art and fiction had a broader reach than you would have found in a similar study from a British or American editor. Some of the writers whose work he discusses—Stefan Grabiński, for example—hadn’t been translated into English at that time. Among the artists whose work appeared as illustration Helmut Wenske was one of several whose paintings were seldom seen in Anglophone publications, although a few album covers that featured Wenske art—those for Nektar in particular—were a common sight in British record shops in the 1970s.

Remember The Future (1973) by Nektar.

Wenske is a German artist with a penchant for Dalí-like Surrealism that might have been strained through a psychotropic filter. Most of his work in the 1970s was as an album cover designer for the Bellaphon label, and most of those covers are designs rather than paintings. There are a number of book covers, however, some of which are recycled from his album covers. From 1971 to 1975 Wenske painted the covers for a series from Insel Verlag, “Phantastische Wirklichkeit: Science Fiction der Welt”, a collection of reprints edited by Franz Rottensteiner. Wenske’s ISFDB credits list a few horror covers along with these, a small percentage of which are Lovecraft-related. In the past I’ve drawn attention to many different Lovecraft illustrators but Wenkse is one of a small number of these to have also written Lovecraftian fiction of his own (Die Krypta von Shaggay’h, 1974). He enjoys the work he’s being asked to illustrate, in other words, which isn’t something you can always expect from illustrators.

Electric Silence (1974) by Dzyan.

The covers below aren’t the best quality but better copies have proved hard to find. For those who’d like to see more Wenske art there’s at least one German catalogue that collects his work from the early 70s on.

Horizonte (1977) by PSI.

Continue reading “The art of Helmut Wenske”