{occult} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 828

Visitation (1976) by Gilbert Williams.

• “It’s the perfect storm of a UFO case.” Daniel Lavelle explores the Rendlesham Forest mystery of 1980, Britain’s own answer to the Roswell Incident. The case has more substantial documentation than most close encounters but it also has its share of conflicting reports, claims and interpretations. The truth is out there but it’s not evenly distributed.

• The Science of Spooky Sounds: Kristen French talks to researcher Rodney Schmaltz about his theory that infrasound may be responsible for the haunted feelings people experience in some buildings.

• New music: Six Organs of Admittance featuring The Six Organs Olive Choir by Six Organs of Admittance; Blue Loops by Kevin Richard Martin; Passage of Time: The Music of Michael F. Hunt by Michael F. Hunt.

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller on The Complete Zap Comix, an expensive reprint of the pioneering underground title coming soon from Fantagraphics.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun edited by Amy Hale.

• At Colossal: Linocuts by Eduardo Robledo celebrate Mexican heritage and community.

• Object of the week at the BFI is Vic Fair’s poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth.

• The Strange World of…Hildur Guðnadóttir.

• Wide-band WebSDR in Enschede, NL

• Lights At Rendlesham (2012) by Time Columns | Rendlesham Forest (1980) (2019) by Grey Frequency | Lights Over Woodbridge (2021) by A Farewell To Hexes

Weekend links 827

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips.

• “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m not what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before Boards Of Canada made the announcement they’d been teasing for the past two weeks—the new BOC album, Inferno, will be released at the end of May—a coincidence that felt vaguely significant. “How random is random?” as William Burroughs used to say. It’s tempting to describe the moment as the passing of a creative torch but I doubt either of the groups would agree. Boards Of Canada’s approach to electronic music has always been very different to that of Cabaret Voltaire: less aggressive, more melodic, more pastoral, more concerned with memories and the past than with the present or the near future. But the promotional videos for Inferno are reminiscent of the scratch videos that Cabaret Voltaire were creating in the 1980s: degraded VHS assemblages collaged from TV broadcasts and home-movie footage, visual equivalents of a tuning dial running through the shortwave radio spectrum. Then there’s the latest BOC album art which, when taken with details from the teaser video, foregrounds the same fascination with American bastardisations of Christianity that the Cabs were referring to in Sluggin’ Fer Jesus and The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. I’ll leave it to others to play with the interpretations that can be brought to an album title like Inferno. We’ll no doubt be seeing a great deal of journalistic musing around this and related issues before and after the end of May.

• Jiří Barta’s Expressionist animated adaptation of the Pied Piper story, Krysař (1985), has turned up in high definition at YouTube. Ignore the credit for Wilfred Jackson, an American animation director who had nothing to do with Barta’s film.

• At Public Domain Review: Magic by return of post: Allan Johnson explores the history of those mail-order occult outfits whose ads fill out the pages of the early American pulps.

• Visual Music: a lecture by Simon Reynolds describing the use of electronic music as a soundtrack for abstract cinema.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel selects 10 great Brazilian horror films.

• There’s more intermediate eyeball fodder at Unquiet Things.

• Your Name in Landsat

• FruitierThanThou

• Disco Inferno (1976) by The Trammps | Inferno (Main Title Theme) (1980) by Keith Emerson | Om Riff From The Cosmic Inferno (2005) by IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno

Weekend links 825

Hexagon Sequence II (c. 1970) by Rosalie de Meric.

• Boards Of Canada obsessives have been in a frenzy this week following the appearance of mysterious VHS cassettes sent at random to a small number of users of the Warp Records mail-order service. The contents of the tapes look like this. With the group having been silent for the past thirteen years there’s been an understandable flood of wild speculation on the BOC Reddit page, the supposition being that the tapes (and now an equally cryptic set of posters) mean that a new record release is on the way. We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, here’s DJ Food’s O Is For Orange 2025 (version 3), a Boards Of Canada-themed mix that I neglected to link to last year.

• “There is no artistic process that isn’t magical in that it’s an attempt to magically conjure an idea, something that is invisible and intangible, into material form…” Alan Moore (again) talking to Dominique Musorrafiti about art and magic. Also the comics business, which people really ought to stop asking him about when his reluctance to discuss his old work is so evident.

• “I’m not a commercial director—I’m not even a professional film-maker.” Jim Jarmusch talking to Amy Raphael about his career and his latest film, Father Mother Sister Brother. At Little White Lies, Claire Biddle examines the music in Jarmusch’s films and his collaborative albums.

• “Painting and sculpture influenced me greatly. You start to see the world, the outside, everything around you, the tone, with the eyes of seeing a picture that’s framed.” Irmin Schmidt talking to Adelle Stripe about his early life and Requiem, his new album.

• New music: All Clouds Bring Not Rain by Memorials; Afterlife Requiem by Those Who Walk Away; Where Light Pauses In The Silence Of The Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• At Colossal: Daniel Sackheim traverses Los Angeles’ noir side in The City Unseen.

• At Bandcamp Daily: Jim Allen on the sound of the ’70s French Underground.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Australian debut features.

• NASA Johnson

• Hexagon (1990) by Ruins | Octagon (1994) by Basic Channel | Triangles And Rhombuses (1998) by Boards Of Canada

Weekend links 823

“NASA’s Hubble revisits Crab Nebula to track 25 years of expansion.“

• Snakes and Ladders is a video adaptation of the one-off Moon and Serpent performance presented by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins at Conway Hall, London, in 1999. With visual samples from Eddie Campbell’s comic-strip adaptation of the audio recording, plus my artwork from the CD release. (Thanks to Francis for the tip!)

• The spring catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• New music: State Of Matter by Dobrawa Czocher; Plague Dogs by The Heartwood Institute.

• “Why we made a film about Mark Fisher called We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher.”

• At Colossal: “Ambiguity reigns in Olaf Hajek’s mysterious illustrations”.

• At Public Domain Review: Monet’s early caricatures (ca. late 1850s).

• At the BFI: George Orwell, film critic.

• The Strange World of…Ladytron.

• The Plague (1967) by Scott Walker | A Plague Of Angels (2007) by Earth | The Plague (2014) by Cosmic Ground

Weekend links 819

Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992), poster art by Noriyoshi Ohrai.

• At Wormwoodiana: Douglas A. Anderson on the first English translation of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, a multi-author serial that formed the basis for Ishirō Honda’s film about the giant moth.

• At the Library of Congress: “Lost 19th century film by Méliès discovered at the Library“. 45 seconds of Gugusse and the Automaton (1897).

• At Public Domain Review: The Blinkered Flâneur: Walking with Franz Hessel in 1920s Berlin by Paul Sullivan.

• At Juno Daily: Kevin Richard Martin lists ten albums that shaped his Sub Zero album.

• New music: And All The Clocks Ran Dry by Andreas Voelk & Scott Monteith.

• “Behold Belgium’s beauty in these 15 scenic photographs.”

• A Spoon and Tamago Guide to Tohoku.

• The Strange World of…Shane Parish.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Occults.

• RIP Éliane Radigue.

• Mothra’s Song (1961) by Yuji Koseki | Mothra (1984) by Frank Chickens | Mothra (2014) by The 5.6.7.8’s