A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Music
top left: Hawaii; Dance Characteristic (1897).
top right: Cannibal Island (1920).
bottom left: Zanzibar; Oriental Song (1919).
bottom right: Nagasaki (1928).
Samples from the wealth of covers at the Hula Pages, not all of which show palm trees and beach scenes. One nice thing about these is the diversity of illustration and design styles which change gradually over time, and with more variety than you’d find in a collection of magazine covers.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exotica!
The (Electric Seance) concept was inspired by the discovery that many early pioneers and inventors of electrical apparatus and radiophonic equipment believed that they could use their inventions to contact ‘the other side’.
Scott Johnston
This month’s issue of The Wire has Birmingham group Pram on the cover. Inside they discuss working with filmmaker Scott Johnston whose Electric Seance production was used as part of the group’s Photophonic Experiment shows last year. I have to admit I was never much taken with Pram’s early work, preferring their Too Pure stablemates Laika and Mouse on Mars circa 1997. (Having said that, I’m listening to their Helium album now and it sounds better than I remembered.) I did appreciate the references, however, which encompassed a range of interests including White Noise, Maya Deren and the films of Karel Zeman, all of whom have been the subjects of previous posts here. The band were keen to produce an alternative soundtrack for Zeman’s Invention of Destruction but the Czech Film Archive refused their offer.
Pram seem to have become more interesting in the intervening years, unlike their compatriots. Laika lost me when they got too poppy while Mouse on Mars abandoned melody for a blizzard of increasingly tiresome electronic abstraction. Electric Seance gives some idea of where Pram are at now which isn’t too far removed from the same world of retro-electronica and English spookiness being explored by the Ghost Box artists. The Wire has the soundtrack to Electric Seance as a free download.
And following from yesterday’s reference to Last Year in Marienbad, another film in Scott Johnston’s YouTube collection, The Arranged Time, is a tale of sinister recursion which he says is indebted to Resnais’s classic enigma.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• New Delia Derbyshire
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box
• The Photophonic Experiment
Refreshing The Wire
| Redesigned website for the music mag.
It’s always nice when something you’ve worked on turns up in the post and there’s been a double helping of that this week with the arrival of the Chaoticum CD and the catalogue for the Maison D’Ailleurs exhibition. Since both of these are either partly or wholly connected to HP Lovecraft, their simultaneous arrival is fitting.
The CD is a digipak on textured art paper and another quality production from Horus CyclicDaemon. The exhibition catalogue manifested as a small hardback book which was a pleasant surprise, with the skull maze design blocked in silver on the cover. Each artist is allotted a single page and the book also includes some original fiction based on Lovecraft’s story notes by a number of well-known writers. My picture is rather shrunken the way it’s positioned across the centre of a page (would have been better running vertically) but then it was my decision to make it so wide in the first place.
The Chaoticum CD is limited to 500 copies and can be ordered here. The catalogue is available from Maison D’Ailleurs or the Payot Libraire bookstore for CHF 37.00 + p&p (or 38, depending on which page you look at).
Also arriving this week is my illustration of ex-Sun City Girls guitarist Sir Richard Bishop for an Arthur Magazine interview by Erik Davis. Arthur #27 will be hitting the stands in the US and Canada shortly but for now you can download it in PDF form here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs
• New things for October
So then, where were we? There’s a few things to catch up with… First up, a recent design of mine for CD and vinyl has been released this month, Underwater Dancehall by Pinch, an acclaimed dubstep album from Bristol. I was very pleased at the way this came out, not least because of the excellent photos by Liz Eve I was given to use.
Then a couple of gratuitous plugs: Thom sent me a copy of his Arcanta CD, Book of Mirrors, this week. The luscious cover art is by Philip Shadbolt and you can learn more about Arcanta at their MySpace page. And Mr PK (who you should know now from BibliOdyssey) has a book out this month, a paper approximation of his excellent pictorial smorgasbord. PK denies his book is the perfect present for Christmas and discusses his book and blog at 3quarksdaily.