{music} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Symphonie Fantastique

1955. Cover art by Jane Sinnickson Flora.

The programme for the symphony (1845 version) by Hector Berlioz:

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.

This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations—all this forms the subject of the first movement.

Part Two: A Ball
The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own… But what if she betrayed him!… This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his “ranz des vaches” the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.

1958. Cover art by Richard M. Powers.

The programme for the symphony (1855 version) by Hector Berlioz:

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.

Part Two: A Ball
He meets again his beloved in a ball during a glittering fête.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him… One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets… distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance-tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roars of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. The dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies Irae.

1958. No cover artist credited.

1959. Cover art by Hieronymus Bosch.

1960. No cover designer credited.

1964. Cover art by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Continue reading “Symphonie Fantastique”

Weekend links 843

Total solar eclipse over Zaragoza, Spain, 12th August, 2026. Photograph by Ruiyu Zhang.

• Kenneth Anger (again), in a transcript for another KPFA radio interview, in which we Anger have mentioning HP Lovecraft. Not a major revelation in itself but it’s not something I’ve seen before. On a related note, Anger wrote to August Derleth in 1947 asking permission to adapt The Dreams in the Witch House for one of his films. Another tantalising might-have-been from the Anger filmography, along with his unfinished film of Maldoror. (Thanks to Hagen for the info.)

• A recording of Jon Hassell’s final concert (London, 2015) will be released later this year as Music Is Invisible, which will become the third part of the Pentimento series. This may not be the last Hassell album, however. Other live recordings exist, and you could make a substantial compilation from all the one-off pieces Hassell recorded over the years.

• No City Fun: Manchester in 1979 (again) in a short film by Charles Salem with the music of Joy Division on the soundtrack.

• New music: Melting Days by Lusine; Yours Sincerely by Haruomi Hosono; Seedhead by Avi Engel.

• At Unquiet Things: Rebecca Chaperon‘s dreaming thresholds and painted portals.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #322 by Tyondai Braxton.

• Finalists for the Ocean Photographer of the Year.

• Old music: Arles 75 Sechs by Can.

• RIP John Crowley.

• Eclipse (1968) by The Moving Sidewalks | Total Eclipse (1974) by Billy Cobham | Eclipse (1998) by Talvin Singh

“A Love Vision”: Kenneth Anger in 1967

Art by Rick Griffin with Gustave Doré. San Francisco Oracle, Vol. 1 No. 7, February 1967.

In his later years Kenneth Anger often seemed to spend more time giving interviews than making films, even though he was keeping busy when out of the public eye. Most of the discussions cover familiar ground, recycling anecdotes about the creation of the Magick Lantern Cycle, and the people who contributed to the films. More interesting—and harder to find—are interviews from the time when Anger was still at work on his magnum opus, which is why this radio interview from 1967 is a very welcome discovery:

John Cott, host of the Coconut Grove show on KPFA, and co-hosts Tom Luddy and Juris Svendsen interview Kenneth Anger about his latest film, Lucifer Rising. At the time of the interview, Anger had not yet begun shooting Lucifer Rising; he discusses his vision for the film as a sequel to Scorpio Rising, talks about the film’s magick symbolism. The hosts play a tape of Anger performing an invocation for the film. He is joined in the studio by Gary (?), who is introduced as the star of the film, and Joy (no last name given), who plays music in the background throughout the interview and performs a song from the film. They are also briefly joined by author and critic Susan Sontag, who discusses her love of Anger’s films.

KPFA is a listener-funded radio station serving the San Francisco Bay area which is still active today. The interview, which is really more of a round-table discussion, took place in July 1967, when the “Summer of Love” was in full swing. Susan Sontag’s presence surprised me, I’ve never seen her mention Anger’s films anywhere yet here she is, declaring him to be the greatest living American director. She’s only there for a third of the discussion but during this time Juris Svendsen tries to isolate what it is that makes her regard Anger’s films so highly. Later on the conversation turns to the youthful demographic referred to as “the Love Generation”, a cohort who the participants all discuss as something separate from themselves. Kenneth Anger was 40 in 1967 yet he talks sympathetically about the youth of the day, seeing the hippies as catching up with many of the impulses that drove avant-gardists like himself in the 1950s: the growing interest in occultism, the disregard for the demands of “straight” society, and all forms of psychotropic exploration. When the discussion turns to Lucifer Rising, Anger emphasises the subtitle that appears on the film’s promotional poster by Rick Griffin: “A Love Vision”. It’s tempting to read this as opportunism, especially when the subtitle was missing from the film that was eventually released in 1980, but Anger regarded the original Lucifer Rising as an answer to the “Death Vision” of Scorpio Rising. Here, as elsewhere, he emphasises the positive aspects of Lucifer, the Bringer of Light, while love was an important component of the Thelemic philosophy which Anger followed: “Love is the law, love under will.”

Art by Randy Salas.

Anger sounds relatively positive himself in the radio discussion but the rambling, unofficial biography by Bill Landis describes a not-so-love-filled atmosphere at the Russian Embassy in San Francisco where Bobby Beausoleil was supposed to be playing the part of Lucifer. I tend to be wary of the Landis account, he certainly did his research but isn’t always accurate, and some of the people he talked to (Anger wasn’t among them) would have been pushing their own agendas. A few months after the KPFA interview Anger and Beausoleil staged an occult ceremony/theatrical happening/musical concert at San Francisco’s Straight Theater. I used to think that the name of Beausoleil’s band, The Magickal Powerhouse of Oz, was a reference to Aleister Crowley’s Liber OZ (aka Liber LXXVII), a one-page distillation of the Law of Thelema which Anger happens to read out towards the end of the KPFA discussion. The band used the Crowlean spelling of Magick in their name but the Oz is merely a reference to the books by L. Frank Baum.

Berkeley Barb, Volume 5, Issue 12, Sept. 29–Oct. 5, 1967.

Fragments of the Equinox of the Gods performance may be the ones that appear in Invocation of My Demon Brother (Landis isn’t clear) but we do know that Anger’s 1969 film is made up of leftover footage from the original Lucifer Rising. The reporting here is confused by conflicting claims: Anger said that most of the original Lucifer footage was stolen from a car after the Straight Theater show; Beausoleil said that it was mainly equipment that was stolen since Anger hadn’t shot much film in the first place. Whatever the truth of the matter, the theft was reported as a news story in The Berkeley Barb at the end of September, something I was pleased to find while researching all of the above. I doubt that Anger would have gone to the press over a trivial loss but this is all rather academic now. Needless to say, whoever the thieves were they didn’t return Anger’s film which he why he spent the next decade remaking Lucifer Rising from scratch. Before he took off for London, however, he posted an ad in the Village Voice melodramatically announcing the end of his film-making career. I’ve always felt the thieves helped Anger rather than hindered him, even though he obviously wouldn’t have agreed at the time. The loss of the footage forced him to create a shorter film that wouldn’t otherwise have existed, one in which the “Death Vision” of Scorpio Rising is filtered through the hippy era to channel the growing negativity at the end of the decade: Vietnam, the Manson murders (in which Bobby Beausoleil was implicated), and Altamont (in which Mick Jagger was implicated), where the relatively harmless bikers of Scorpio Rising have been replaced by Hells Angels.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kenneth Anger: Film als magisches Ritual
• Kenneth Anger, 1927–2023
• Anger Magick Lantern Cycle, 1966
• Don’t Smoke That Cigarette by Kenneth Anger
• Kenneth Anger’s Maldoror
• Donald Cammell and Kenneth Anger, 1972
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• Brush of Baphomet by Kenneth Anger
• Anger Sees Red
• Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon
• Lucifer Rising posters
• Missoni by Kenneth Anger
• Anger in London
• Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken
• Edmund Teske
• Kenneth Anger on DVD again
• Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

Weekend links 842

An illustration by Charles Keeping for The Golden Shadow.

• At the BFI: Alex Ramon selects 10 great British TV shows of 1976. (And 50 years ago the American term “shows” was most often applied to the variety format. We would have called these “programmes”.)

• Illustrations by Charles Keeping for The Golden Shadow (1973), a retelling of Greek myths and legends by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen.

• All The Devils are here: Ken Russell’s controversial masterpiece will return to cinemas in its restored, definitive form in October.

• The Strange World of…The Cramps. Related: The Cramps on The Tube 1986, full 20-minute performance unedited.

• New music: Olùsìn (Worshippers) by Ibukun Sunday; The Will of Tongues by Sarah Davachi.

• In a previously unavailable performance, Can play Halleluhwah on Beat-Club in 1971.

• The first Polish Culture UK Podcast is an introduction to Żuławski’s cinema.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – August 2026 at Ambientblog.

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

• The Geologic Atlas of the Moon.

• Xerox Hell

• Golden Hair (1970) by Syd Barrett | The Golden Vibe (Alternative Mix) (1977) by Steve Hillage | Golden Ball (1993) by Stereolab

Snaps: The Studio tour, 1979

I’d been hoping that Malcolm Whitehead’s Snaps might be made public eventually, and here it is, a 25-minute film documenting the northern end of a British book-signing tour undertaken by three artists and their publisher in October 1979. Not only that, there’s also this shorter compilation of footage that didn’t make the final cut.

The artists were three of the four whose work is showcased in the book known as The Studio: Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson. The other member of the quartet, Barry Windsor-Smith, either missed the jaunt to Leeds and Manchester or avoided the tour altogether. The publisher was fellow artist Roger Dean whose success in 1975 with his own art book, Views, prompted him to turn his self-publishing imprint, Dragon’s Dream, into a bona fide publishing company. Views was followed by a short run of art books by prominent fantasy and science-fiction illustrators including Chris Foss, Ian Miller, Bruce Pennington and Syd Mead. The Studio was one of these titles, a collection of the art produced by the quartet working in the communal loft (“The Studio”) they established in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, a space intended for the production of more personal work than the comic art for which they were all known. Malcolm Whitehead’s film is unusual for documenting an event in sound and vision that usually wouldn’t be documented at all beyond a handful of photographs.

New Manchester Review, 1979: Michael Butterworth and David Britton in the Beardsley-papered Savoy office. Photo by Kevin Cummins.

The trail of circumstance that led to the creation of Snaps goes something like this: David Britton and Michael Butterworth were setting up Savoy Books in Manchester at around the same time that Roger Dean was expanding Dragon’s Dream. Both publishers had established co-production deals with Big O, a poster company, distributor and publisher of many pop-culture art books, notably the British edition of HR Giger’s Necronomicon. One of the first Savoy books in 1978 was James Cawthorn’s The Jewel in the Skull, an 80-page comic-strip adaptation of the novel by Michael Moorcock, which was a one-off co-production between Savoy and Big O. In addition to being a fledgling publisher, Savoy at this time also had a chain of bookshops in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, selling the usual 70s blend of genre and “cult” paperbacks, posters, comics (mainstream and underground), magazines, and so on. The main outlet was Bookchain on Peter Street, Manchester, which is where much of Snaps was filmed. Given the connection between Dragon’s Dream and Savoy I’d guess that Big O suggested the Savoy shops as venues for the Studio signing tour. Dave Britton would have been keen on this even without the extra business the signings generated for the shops. He’d bought some of the posters produced by Barry Smith’s Gorblimey Press, and always spoke highly of Smith’s Studio-era work. As for the film, Mike Butterworth was good friends with local film-maker Malcolm Whitehead, and it was he that commissioned “Malc” to document the signing. Whitehead is best known today for his subsequent involvement with Ikon, the video division of Factory Records. In addition to making Snaps, in 1979 he was also filming some of the live footage of Joy Division that’s been circulating ever since. He later directed a couple of the early New Order videos, and helped with the direction and editing of many video productions by other Factory artists and affiliated groups like The Fall and Cabaret Voltaire.

Snaps is a short and somewhat amateurish film but it’s a valuable record all the same. Anyone today can pull out their phone and record an event like this in high-definition and stereo sound; in the 1980s and 1990s you would have needed video equipment, but in the 1970s you had to have film, and 16mm film was an expensive professional product. Whitehead was using the cheaper option of Super-8 but he did at least manage to organise synchronised sound, something you don’t get on Pirate Tape, Derek Jarman’s Super-8 record of a William Burroughs signing. Mike Butterworth provides the stentorian voiceover for Snaps which he says he now regrets. Equally regrettable is his mispronunciation of the names “Paolo and Francesca” when he’s talking about Barry Smith’s art.

The film opens in Leeds for the first of the day’s two signings, a sequence I can’t say much about since I never visited the Leeds shop. The participants then pile into cars and drive across the Pennines where they pause for a brief Kraftwerk-soundtracked inspection of the landscape. The three Studio artists were Americans so all of this activity must have been very novel and interesting despite the drabness of the cities. The shots in Manchester are the ones I like to see since they capture Bookchain when the place was at its height of popularity. In 1979 I was still living in Blackpool and didn’t visit the shop until early in 1980 when I made a daytrip with friends to explore Manchester. By the time I moved to the city in 1982 Bookchain was set on its gradual decline although it managed to survive until the block of buildings it was part of was demolished in 1999. The basement area looks quite salubrious in the signing footage but I only knew it as a dank and unlit storage area with a toilet that belonged in a horror film. One thing that Whitehead didn’t capture was Dave Britton asking all the artists to sign the wall of the shop near the counter. I was in the place every Saturday when we were working on the Reverbstorm comics in the 1990s, and it was always a strange thing to see Roger Dean’s signature (plus dragon doodle) peeping out from behind rows of dusty shrinkwrapped books and magazines. You never see much discussion of this side of the city’s cultural history in writing about Manchester’s musical output. Yet without the Savoy shops, and other outlets like Percival’s and Grass Roots, Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith, Howard Devoto and others would have had a harder time finding the fuel for their imaginations.

In addition to being a record of a lost place, Snaps is also a record of lost people: Jones, Wrightson, and Britton are all no longer with us, while Malcolm Whitehead died in 2019. Whitehead’s involvement with Factory Records is documented in a scattering of posts at Cerysmatic. This one seems like a good place to start.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• David Britton, 1945–2020
• Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 1944–2011
• Roger Dean: artist and designer
• Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein