Short films by Hideki Inaba

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Berg.

One of Scotto Moore’s recent newsletters pointed to Flow , a short video by Japanese animator Hideki Inaba whose collection of similar works may be seen at YouTube. Inaba’s specialty is bewilderingly complex scenes of kaleidoscopic metamorphosis. His older films like Berg are populated by clusters of fungal forms or simple organisms that look like refugees from some of Haeckel’s zoological studies, writhing or dancing together in a manner and style that wouldn’t be out of place in an old Disney cartoon. His more recent works tend towards greater abstraction with a sharper edge, although the most recent one, Time Tides, takes an unexpected change of direction at its very end.

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Tape, a music video for Canigou.

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Flow.

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Time Tides.

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The teamLab experience

Ritual by Jon Hopkins

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My music listening for the past week has comprised alternations between various Hawkwind albums and this, the latest release from Jon Hopkins. Ritual is so good I’ve been trying not to overplay it, a 40-minute composition divided into eight connected parts which is sufficiently beatless to be described as ambient, although the ambient tag usually refers to music that drifts quietly in the background. Ritual may work at low volumes but it generates an intensity that warrants immersion in its field of sound, especially on The Veil/Evocation where a slow and increasingly powerful detonation emerges from the boundless spaces. The album has been promoted with a pair of videos, a typical constituent of any high-profile release but one which in this case spoils the flow of the album where the music only fades to silence at the very end. The second video by UON Visuals does at least communicate something of Hopkins’ transcendent reach, an extension of the cover art into a glittering psychedelic vortex.

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Ritual, Part II: Palace by UON Visuals.

It took me a while to get round to Hopkins’ brand of electronic music, mainly because his early releases don’t distinguish themselves very much from similar explorations of the post-techno landscape. Opalescent was his first album in 2001, a release that I now own but might not have bothered with if his work hadn’t improved a great deal over the past two decades. The discography gets really interesting with Singularity in 2018, an album whose thumping four-four rhythms continued the trend of previous releases but now with a distinct flavour of their own. The same goes for Hopkins’ use of the piano which, being classically trained, he plays with considerable skill. Music for Psychedelic Therapy followed Singularity, an unexpected swerve into ambient territory which abandoned any relation to the dancefloor for a kind of throwback to the better class of New Age albums being released in the 1980s, with natural sounds—wind, rain, bird and animal calls—mixed into the music. The New Age connection was reinforced by the final track which features a platitudinous monologue from the late Ram Dass, the American mystic formerly known as Richard Alpert who was one of the early promoters of psychedelic therapy in the 1960s along with his erstwhile colleague, Timothy Leary. I’d consider the album a perfect one if it wasn’t for this coda. With a few exceptions (William Burroughs, for one), I’ve never liked lengthy spoken-word pieces on otherwise instrumental albums, and Ram Dass seems especially out of place when he spent the latter part of his life proclaiming the virtues of meditation and Hindu-derived mysticism over psychedelic voyaging. The latest album applies the power of Singularity to the ambient spaces of Music for Psychedelic Therapy. It’s the best thing Hopkins has done to date. I can’t wait to hear what he does next.

Occult rock: The Devil Rides In

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The Devil rode in at the weekend on three shiny compact discs crammed with Satanic psychedelia and the pentagram-branded rock music of the early 1970s: 55 tracks in all. I’d been hoping for some time that an enterprising anthologist might put together an officially-sanctioned collection like the series of mixes compiled by The Ghost of the Weed Garden. Cherry Red Records are ideal candidates for the task, having distinguished themselves in recent years with a series of multi-disc compilations that mine specific periods of British music: psychedelia, heavy rock, folk, punk, reggae, post-punk, experimental electronics, electro-pop, and so on. The Devil Rides In bears a subtitle that ties the collection to the prime years of the Occult Revival, “Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The Rockult 1966–1974”, a period when the Aquarian transcendence of the hippy world was jostling with darker trends in the media landscape. 1967 was the year the Beatles put Aleister Crowley on the cover of the Sgt Pepper album; it was also the year that Hammer were filming their first Dennis Wheatley adaptation, The Devil Rides Out. The song of the same name by Icarus appears on the second disc of this compilation, a single intended to capitalise on the publicity generated by the film. For all the serious occult interest that flourished during by this period many of the cultural associations were frivolous or superficial ones, either cash-ins like the Icarus single or exploitations by those who followed in Dennis Wheatley’s wake. Serious occultists no doubt abhorred the exploitation but it helped create a market for Man, Myth and Magic magazine, and for all the reprints of grimoires and other magical texts that were appearing in paperback for the first time. I’ve always enjoyed the frivolous side of the Occult Revival, probably because I grew up surrounded by it. Without Ace of Wands and Catweazle on the TV I might not have been so interested in my mother’s small collection of occult paperbacks, or gravitated eventually to the Religion and Spirituality shelves of the local library.

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The Devil Rides In was conceived, designed and annotated by Martin Callomon, working here under the “Cally” pseudonym he uses for many of his activities. The accompanying booklet is evidence of a labour of love, the detailed notes being illustrated throughout with Occult Revival ephemera: film posters and magazines (the inevitable Man, Myth & Magic), also plenty of paperback covers which tend towards the lurid and exploitational end of the magical spectrum (the inevitable Dennis Wheatley). Cherry Red always take care with their sleeve notes but Cally’s booklet design has gone to considerable lengths to track down many obscure book covers, some of which I’d not seen before. The same diligence applies to the music, with the proviso that compilations are often restrained by the hazards of licensing law. There’s a track list on the Cherry Red page but this doesn’t tell you that the collection is divided into eight themed sections:

1) Buried Underground
2) Phantom Sabbaths
3) Popular Satanism
4) She Devils
5) Folk Devils
6) Evil Jazz
7) Beelzefunk
8) Let’s All Chant

Many of the selections on the first disc are the kinds of songs I’d usually avoid outside this collection, the lumbering heavy rock that filled the Vertigo catalogue for the first half of the 1970s. But groups that you wouldn’t want to hear at album length become palatable when placed in a context such as this.

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Among the immediate highlights I’d pick Race With The Devil by The Gun, already a favourite of mine by the group that launched Roger Dean’s career as a cover artist; Black Mass by Jason Crest, a psychedelic B-side whose subject matter and high-pitched wailing is a precursor of the heavy-metal future; and the perennially popular Come To The Sabbat by Black Widow. A few of the selections have been chosen more for their name than anything else, something I’m okay with so long as the choices are good ones. Cozy Powell’s Dance With The Devil, for example, is a drum-led instrumental with a musical theme swiped from Jimi Hendrix; it has nothing at all to do with the Devil but it’s still a great piece of music which was also a surprise UK chart hit in 1973. More of a reach is Magic Potion by The Open Mind, a song about psychedelic drugs not witches’ brews. I included this one on one of my psychedelic mixes so I can tolerate its presence here. Less tolerable is Long Black Magic Night by Jacula, an Italian prog band whose contribution features Vittoria Lo Turco as “Fiamma Dallo Spirito” stuck in one channel of the stereo mix where she intones monotonously in very poor English; the cumulative effect is diabolical in the wrong way. And I would have prefered Julie Driscoll’s long, slow version of Season Of The Witch instead of Sandie Shaw squeaking her way through Sympathy For The Devil. But you can’t always get what you want, as Mick Jagger reminds us elsewhere, something which is especially true of compilation albums.

Continue reading “Occult rock: The Devil Rides In”

Weekend links 736

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South Polar Map of Jupiter by the Cassini spacecraft, 2000.

• “A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a son, Jozef, visiting his dying Father in a remote Galician Sanatorium. Upon arrival Jozef finds the Sanatorium entirely moribund and run by a dubious Doctor Gotard who tells him that his father’s death, the death that has struck him in his country has not yet occurred, and that here they are always late by a certain interval of time of which the length cannot be defined. Jozef will come to realise that the Sanatorium is a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness and that time and events cannot be measured in any tangible form.” The Quay Brothers have finished their third feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a combination of live action and animation which is being premiered next month at the Venice film festival. No sign of a trailer as yet but the curious can prime themselves by watching (or rewatching) the Quays’ Street of Crocodiles—their first adaptation of Bruno Schulz—or Hourglass Sanatorium, the first screen adaptation of Schulz’s stories by Wojciech Has.

• “No one is sure when the tremendous whirl—the largest and longest-lived storm in our current solar system, with a diameter wider than planet Earth and wind speeds of more than 260 miles per hour—began. Or why it’s red. Or even who first observed it…” Katherine Harmon Courage on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

• New music: Bórdice by Nestor, and Nightfall by Trentemøller, the latter with a video swiping shots from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. Nice song but musicians really need to stop plundering independent film-makers when they want some visual embellishment.

• At The Daily Heller: Steven Heller talks to Drew Friedman about Friedman’s new book of caricatures, Schtick Figures.

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Miaux, and Isolatedmix 127 by David Douglas & Applescal.

• DJ Food’s latest psychedelic trawl is a collection of book covers, puzzles, etc, designed by Peter Max.

• At Unquiet Things: Vic Prezio’s Gothic book covers.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Morgan Fisher Day.

Jupiter (1990) by NASA Voyager Space Sounds | Jupiter! (Feed Your Head Mix) (1994) by System 7 | Jupiter Collision (2002) by Redshift

Cosmic jokes and a cosmic conundrum

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Tangerine Dream in 1973.

Here’s an item of news that will be of little interest to many readers but I’ve not seen it reported widely so it’s worth noting. (This place is nothing if not a cornucopia of deeply excavated niches, so you can take this as further niche excavation.) The news concerns recordings that Tangerine Dream made with Timothy Leary in 1973…or Leary recordings which were added to Tangerine Dream music in the same year. One problem with writing about all of this is that documentation remains elusive. Bearing this in mind, the details are as follows:

• Tangerine Dream were signed to Ohr Records from 1970 to 1973, a label for whom they recorded their first four albums plus one seven-inch single. During this time they were also featured along with label-mates Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh and Klaus Schulze on an Ohr compilation, Kosmische Musik.

• “Kosmische” is the key word here. Ohr boss Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser liked the word enough to create an Ohr offshoot, Die Kosmischen Kuriere (The Cosmic Couriers), which later became the short-lived Kosmische Musik label.

• Also in the early 1970s, Timothy Leary, on the run from the US authorities, arrived in Switzerland where he and his allies (including Brian Barritt and Leary’s future wife, Joanna Harcourt-Smith) began hanging around with various members of the Swiss psychedelic avant-garde. Among the latter were writer Sergius Golowin, and a pair of artists, Walter Wegmüller and HR Giger.

• Ohr/Kosmische Kuriere/Kosmische Musik was based in Berlin, but at some point after Leary’s arrival in Switzerland R-U Kaiser and a handful of his recording artists met up with the Swiss psychonauts, an encounter that led to a series of musical collaborations: Seven Up, the third Ash Ra Tempel album which featured vocal intrusions from Leary and friends; Lord Krishna Von Goloka by Sergius Golowin, an album of Golowin readings with music by Klaus Schulze and others; and Tarot, an ambitious double-disc concept album narrated by (and credited to) Walter Wegmüller which included contributions from many of the major Ohr/Kosmische Kuriere artists. No Tangerine Dream, however.

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Spalax CD reissues from the mid-1990s. Cover designs by Peter Geitner.

• Here’s where things get complicated. At some point while the above were being recorded, R-U Kaiser decided to release a series of “kosmische” jams by Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze and others which were credited to an imaginary group, The Cosmic Jokers. There are various reports about these sessions, with claims and counter-claims about whether or not permission was granted by the musicians. I can’t comment on the legal history (which led eventually to the collapse of Kaiser’s company) but Kaiser and his wife, Gille Letteman, appear to have been gripped by a kind of cosmic megalomania in 1974. The Cosmic Jokers album was quickly followed by four more releases in the same year: Galactic Supermarket (yet more jams by the same musicians but credited to Galactic Supermarket); Gilles Zeitschiff by Sternenmädchen (in which Gille Letteman and friends recount Timothy Leary’s flight to Switzerland and the meetings with the Cosmic Couriers); Planeten Sit-In (a quadrophonic sampler album created as a promotion for the Kosmische Musik label in conjunction with Germany’s Hobby magazine); and Sci Fi Party, an uneven compilation album which blends various Kosmische Musik recordings into a cosmic slop presided over by the label bosses who dominate the front cover.

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