Weekend links 822

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Untitled (2013) by Fred Tomaselli.

• The latest book from A Year In The Country is Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968–1995, an exploration of “a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet”.

• New music: After The Rain, Strange Seeds by The Leaf Library; Music For Intersecting Planes by Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone.

• RIP airbrush artist Philip Castle. Steve Mepstead talked to Castle in 2011 about his work for Stanley Kubrick and others.

Strassman began to see patterns in these encounters and created a typology: aliens; guides and helpers; clowns, jokers and jesters; elves and dwarves; or reptilian or insect-like figures. Variations and outliers notwithstanding, this spectrum remains remarkably consistent with DMT studies today. Strassman also looked into the historical literature and found similar descriptions as far back as Szára, who wrote that one of his subjects reported meeting “dwarfs or something.” Forty years later and a continent away, one of Strassman’s participants put it succinctly: “That was real strange. There were a lot of elves.”

A long read by Joanna Steinhardt on the history and nature of hallucinated spirit guides and “self-transforming machine elves”

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Ben Cardew on the pivotal role of Stereolab’s Super-Electric.

• At Colossal: Pejac transforms basic graph paper into detailed, trompe-l’œil tableaux.

Sixty finalists from the 23rd Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest.

• At BLDGBLOG: The landscape architecture of auroras on demand.

• Mix of the week: Float V mix by DJ Food.

We Have Always Been Here (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | 5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyl- (5-MeO-DMT) (1998) by Time Machines/Coil | Machine Elves (2024) by Polypores

Locked Groove

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It’s been a while since Scotto Moore’s newsletter turned up any of the abstract animated visuals I enjoy. Locked Groove by Emanuele Kabu fits the bill perfectly, an exercise in vibrant random symmetry which bears the subtitle “A hypnotic audiovisual animation inspired by pareidolia”. The video might also have been inspired by psychedelic hallucination given the way it captures the tendency of the abstract patterns generated by psychedelic delirium to continually change their size, shape and colour. This is one feature of the psychedelic experience you don’t see reproduced very often even though animation has long been the ideal medium for creating such effects. Kabu has soundtracked the metamorphoses with analogue synth noises but you could just as easily watch them with a suitably psychedelic piece of music.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
Short films by Hideki Inaba

Weekend links 807

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Poster art by Nicholas Kouninos for Procol Harum / Pink Floyd / HP Lovecraft at the Fillmore, San Francisco, 1967.

• Take a break from so-called reality with Gruesome Shrewd, more queasy psychedelia by Moon Wiring Club. MWC’s Ian Hodgson described his intentions to Simon Reynolds in a Reynolds roundup which notes the 20th anniversary of the Ghost Box project. The label is apparently on hold for the moment but I have to admit that my interest waned some time after the 10th anniversary, when it became increasingly apparent that the ghost had fled the box. Reynolds ends his piece with a list of favourite GB recordings which I mostly agree with, although I’d shuffle the order and swap some entries with Pye Corner Audio.

• “‘You know that feeling you get when you’ve just gotten back from the dry cleaners a pair of slacks, Dacron slacks, and you reach your hand in a pocket and you feel those fuzzy sandwiches with your fingers? Well, that’s the feeling I’m looking for.’ I just nodded and replied, ‘OK, Dave, I know exactly what you mean.’” Barry Gifford remembers David Lynch.

Aschenbach’s Last Journey: Lesley Chamberlain, the most recent translator of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, approaches the text by following the progress of its doomed protagonist from Brioni to the Venetian Lido. Related: Polly Barton describes to Katy Whimhurst some of the difficulties involved in translating Japanese fiction to English.

• From The Shout to Bait: Darran Anderson on the uses of sound in cinema. Rupert Hines’ soundtrack to The Shout has just been released by Buried Treasure.

• Video footage of modular synthesists Arc (Ian Boddy & Mark Shreeve) performing Arcturus live in 2004: part one | part two.

• At Aeon: “Black holes may be hiding something that changes everything,” says Gideon Koekoek.

• At the BFI: Michael Brooke selects 10 great Hungarian films.

• Steven Heller’s font of the year is Fillmore.

Shout The Storm (1984) by :Zoviet:France: | Shout At The Devil (2002) by Jah Wobble & Temple Of Sound | Shout (2005) by Tod Dockstader

Weekend links 806

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Cover art by George Wilson for The Twilight Zone #45, September 1972. Via.

• At Public Domain Review: Thea Applebaum Licht on the history of art within art, or cabinets of curiosity and paintings within paintings.

• The final 2025 catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• At Smithsonian Mag: See the “Mona Lisa of Illuminated Manuscripts,” a 600-Year-Old Bible covered in intricate illustrations.

It’s amazing, the number of people out there who love everything about queer life except for queer sex, who would prefer that sex and sexual orientation live in entirely different zip codes, that they exist as non-overlapping magisteria; it’s so much safer that way. Who wants gay sex polluting their enjoyment of the abstraction that is Being Gay?

That is what gay love is, now, in the collective imagination of American commerce: a set of identity relations projected onto bored and indifferent celebrities who will half-heartedly play along with the idea because doing so moves units and, anyway, what does it cost them? The more that sexual orientation slouches to the point of pure abstraction, the less effort it takes. Anyone and anything can be gay, now, because gay is just a set of pompous liberal cultural signifiers that have no earthly material relation to homosexuals.

“I miss when homoeroticism was erotic,” says Freddie deBoer. I’ve made similar complaints myself over the years. For some genuinely erotic homoeroticism, see the latest auction link above.

• At Ultrawolveunderthefullmoon: Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt.

• DJ Food’s latest harvestings of psychedelic ephemera may be seen here.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bruce Connor’s Day.

• The Strange World of…David Lynch.

• RIP Udo Kier and Tom Stoppard.

Atlanta Surrealist Group

Menergy (1981) by Patrick Cowley | Eros Arriving (1982) by Bill Nelson | Erotic City (“Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive”) (1984) by Prince & The Revolution

Weekend links 801

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The Magic Circle (1886) by John William Waterhouse.

The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic has just been published in France by Editions Delcourt. A preview here shows how carefully they’ve managed to translate and reletter my page designs.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Algernon Blackwood’s stories of John Silence, occult detective.

• Relevant to some of my recent reading: The Necronomicon Wars, an examination of the many attempts to give life to HP Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire.

Altered States is tremendously exciting to watch—and not only during its psychedelic interludes when goat Jesus is being crucified and writhing red figures are toppling, Hieronymus Bosch–like, into hell and abstract splotches give the impression of cells endlessly dividing or murky membranes dissolving and beautiful women stare into Magritte skies and waves of lava crash as though the molten core of humanity itself were erupting. Even in its quieter moments, it is a beautiful film, with Hurt’s every appearance shot by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth to emphasize his character’s alien otherworldliness.

Jessica Kiang explores the creation of Ken Russell’s flawed but fascinating psychedelic feature, Altered States

• A new catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

Tarot decks through the ages: a video showing some of the cards from Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

• More psychedelia: Neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts asks “What is your brain doing on psychedelics?”

• At the Daily Heller: Ryan Hughes has published a weighty collection of his typeface designs.

• Old music: Caged (25th Anniversary Edition) by Ian Boddy & Chris Carter.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Technicolor melodramas.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Old School Horrors of Terence Fisher.

Photographs from the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

Ambientblog celebrates 20 years of existence.

• RIP Dave Ball.

Necronomicon (1970) by Les Baxter | Liriïk Necronomicus Kahnt (1975) by Magma | Necronomicon–The Magus (2004) by John Zorn