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Kosmische vampires

Here at last is something I’ve been waiting many years to see. Vampira is a strange German TV film which shouldn’t be confused with the horror comedy from 1974 that shares its name. Descriptions of the German Vampira make it sound like a drama-documentary but it’s really a kind of illustrated lecture with vampires as the predominant theme. George Moorse directed for the WDR TV channel which broadcast the film in 1971. Vampira is almost solely of interest today for the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream, a unique collection of short pieces totalling around 34 minutes which have never been officially released. The music offers the same spectral timbres that you hear on the group’s early kosmische albums—Alpha Centauri (1971), Zeit (1972) and Atem (1973)—and is close enough to the atmospherics of Zeit to sound like rehearsals for their droning meisterwerk.

The existence of the music always raised the question of what Vampira might actually look like, especially when the musicians sound as though they’re playing more for themselves than accompanying anything on a screen. Moorse’s film is stranger than the low-budget horror I was expecting. The first thing we see is Manfred Jester, a bespectacled man surrounded by old books, who proceeds to describe (in unsubtitled German) the history of vampires. After a minute of two of this there’s a cut to the first interlude which illustrates the preceding sequence—or so I’m guessing since I had to rely on my rudimentary schoolboy German to understand what Herr Jester was talking about. The rest of the film follows this format: a minute or two of Jester’s lecturing (with references to the Tarot, Montague Summers, Baudelaire and so on) separated by dramatised interludes, all of which are scored by Tangerine Dream. The dramatisations are the oddest part of the whole enterprise. Aside from the music these sequences are almost completely silent (with one brief exception), and acted in a manner which is more symbolic than conventionally dramatic, giving the appearance in places of Kenneth Anger directing one of Jean Rollin’s vampire films. Moorse’s visuals are quite striking in places; if you clipped out all the Jester sequences you’d have 34 minutes of languid Gothic weirdness with a kosmische soundtrack.

The remaining mystery is why the film and its music have been buried for so long, especially when the Tangerine Dream estate has been releasing old recordings for the past few years. I’d guess that the tapes have been lost, but then the same might once have been said about the 1974 Oedipus Tyrannus score until the whole thing was released for the first time six years ago. Vampira was so scarce that I thought it too might have been lost for good, or destroyed like many of the BBC productions from the early 1970s. The music was at least available in unofficial form in the Tangerine Tree bootleg set, a fan-made series which still circulates today if you know where to look. Many of the Tangerine Tree concerts have since been officially reissued, as have other soundtrack recordings the group made for German television. More recently, the Vampira score turned up on another bootleg, a vinyl release limited to 38 copies. All the isolated cues don’t provide a great deal of music for a standalone album but any future release which added the short Oszillator Planet Concert (which also dates from 1971) would push things to a more substantial 42 minutes. It’s likely that the Vampira music was originally a single improvised piece that was then edited to match the film; the pieces certainly blend very easily if you mix their beginnings and ends together.

George Moorse followed Vampira with many more TV films including HP Lovecraft: Schatten aus der Zeit (1975), an adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time starring Anton Diffring. Now that I’ve finally seen the vampire film I’m a little more inclined to see how Moorse treats Lovecraft.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cosmic music and cosmic horror
• Tangerine Dream in concert
• Drone month
• Pilots Of Purple Twilight
• A mix for Halloween: Analogue Spectres
• Edgar Froese, 1944–2015
• Tangerine Dream in Poland

Weekend links 800

Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) (1799) by Francisco Goya.

• At Senses of Cinema: An interview with Jacques Rivette from 2001 in which the director passes judgment on a variety of feature films, old and new. Having read a couple of Cocteau-related books recently, I was pleased to see his comments about the importance of Cocteau’s example for his own film-making. Via MetaFilter.

• “Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight?” A long read by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on the nature of sleep.

• “Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery.” Alan Hollinghurst on the paintings and drawings of Denton Welch. (Previously.)

• At Colossal: Sinister skies set the scene for derelict buildings in Lee Madgwick’s surreal paintings.

• New music: The Mosaic Of Starlight Slips Back Like The Lid Of An Opening Eye by Paul Schütze.

• At Public Domain Review: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great French horror films.

• Winners of the 2025 Photomicrography Competition.

• RIP Diane Keaton.

• Sleep (1981) by This Heat | Sleep (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep (2006) by DJ Olive

Weekend links 799

A Night Alarm: The Advance! (1871) by Charles West Cope.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Meet the artist creating humorous, nihonga-style images of daily life with their rescue cat.

• The thirteenth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• New music: I Remember I Forget by Yasmine Hamdan; Clearwater by Maps And Diagrams.

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown—and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly”—for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities.

William T. Vollmann reviews Shadow Ticket, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon

• At Colossal: Twelve trailblazing women artists transform interior spaces in Dream Rooms.

• At Public Domain Review: Ballooning exploits in Travels in the Air (1871 edition).

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams on where to begin with the films of Satoshi Kon.

• Colm Tóibín explains why he set up a press to publish László Krasznahorkai.

• At Print Mag: Ken Carbone on a pool of perfection in Paris.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #310 by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is OTC Textura.

• Ron Mael’s favourite albums.

• Shadowplay (1979) by Joy Division | Shadow (1982) by Brian Eno | Shadows (1994) by Pram

Weekend links 798

Atlantis (1971) by Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos.

• “Given the workaday settings of many of his movies (a hotel, a summer camp, a science fair), their mortal stakes may come as a surprise, or at least as a paradox—yet paradox is at the heart of his entire body of work.” Richard Brody explores the New Yorker roots of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.

• “The power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in how all the elements harmonise to create something visually spectacular.” Michael John Goodman on William Morris and his reinvention of book design.

• At Smithsonian Mag: “What actually sparks Will-o’-the-Wisps? A new study traces the science behind the mysterious, wandering lights“.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: A chronology of 26 things with Clive Barker’s name on them and what he thinks about that.

• At Wormwoodiana: The novels of Derek Raymond and the type of crime fiction he called “The Black Novel”.

• At Colossal: Untamed flora subsumes abandoned greenhouses in Romain Veillon’s Secret Gardens.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from James Tenney: Writings and Interviews on Experimental Music.

• The Strange World of…Mulatu Astatke.

• RIP Patricia Routledge.

• The Garden (1981) by John Foxx | The Secret Garden: Main Title (1993) by Zbigniew Preisner | Secret Garden (2011) by Sussan Deyhim

Firebirds

Ivan Tsarevich Catching the Firebird’s Feather (1899) by Ivan Bilibin.

The firebirds are those that you find on the covers of recordings of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet score, or on its popular distillation, The Firebird Suite. The latter has long been one of my favourite pieces of classical music, in fact it was one of the first I owned, via a cheap vinyl pairing with The Rite Of Spring that was mainly of interest for being conducted by Stravinsky himself. The cover photo showed a ballerina as the Firebird in a ballet performance, a common choice for the covers of Firebird recordings.

No artist/designer credited, 1955.

Much better was the cover of Tomita’s Firebird album (see below) which I bought around the same time, an uncredited tapestry design which is also a better album cover than the painting used on the earlier Japanese release. Depicting the Firebird itself is the other obvious choice when designing Stravinsky albums, and the dazzling, magical bird has helped this particular opus fare better in the world of classical album design than many other recordings.

No artist/designer credited, 1958.

It’s easy to cast aspersions at the designers or art directors of classical records when you see an uninspired cover design, but the format presents a number of difficulties. There’s no such thing as a fixed design for a classical album because classical albums have no fixed form. With the exception of albums devoted to a single long composition most classical albums are compilations, pairing longer works with shorter ones, often by two or more composers. This confusion of identity creates problems for the designer, as does the huge quantity of classical releases. Then there’s the problems posed by the music itself which is so often abstract; you can’t “illustrate” The Goldberg Variations. The default choice is to use a painting or a drawing or a photograph of the composer as a cover image, or a photo of the conductor or performer. The easiest assigments, as these Firebird covers demonstrate, are albums based around a composition with a well-defined theme that can be depicted visually. Nobody has ever had a problem designing a cover for recordings of Debussy’s La Mer, for example, the only difficulty is deciding what picture of the sea you want to use.

No artist/designer credited, 1960.

I’ve never had the impression that classical devotees care very much about these issues, it’s the music and the performance they’re interested in. Record labels (or their marketing departments) do seem to pay attention to visual matters now and then, and you’ll find occasional attempts to create a new line of themed covers. (The Orphic Egg series was one of the more bizarre examples from the 1970s.) Deutsche Grammophon have a history of decent cover design but even they resort to using photos of the artist or conductor far too often. I’ve never been asked to design a classical release, and I’m not sure I’d relish the task, but the problems raised by the form fascinate me. This is a subject I’ll no doubt keep returning to.

Irma Seidat, no date.

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