A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Technology
Being 25 minutes of alien architecture, or extraterrestrial lifeforms, or DMT landscapes… There’s something of all these things in Daybreak in the Universe, a journey through shimmering fractal geometries, with music by synthesist Michael Stearns from his 1980 album, Morning Jewel. Looks best on a big screen, needless to say. There are similar explorations at the Julius Horsthuis YouTube channel.
Via Scotto Moore.
Continue reading “Daybreak in the Universe, a film by Julius Horsthuis”
Cover Design for ‘The Yellow Book’ Vol.I (1894) by Aubrey Beardsley.
• “[Dorian Gray’s] version of Decadence filled the popular imagination when Decadence became an ostentatiously stylish zeitgeist—stylish being the operative word. For Decadent style encapsulated the attitude of being hellbent on thrilling experiences.” The danger of Decadence is also its value. We need more of it, says Kate Hext.
• At Swan River Press: Of Wraiths, Spooks and Spectres. Robert Lloyd Parry, in an interview with John Kenny, talks about the researches that led to the compiling of his latest ghost-story collection, Friends and Spectres.
• The latest pictorial accumulation from DJ Food is a collection of late-60s concert posters by Jim Michaelson, an artist whose designs look like Mad magazine going fully psychedelic.
• Old music: Future Travel by David Rosenboom; new music: Taking Shasta Mountain (By Strategy) by John Von Seggern & Dean DeBenedictis.
• At Public Domain Review: Hunter Dukes on Rückenfiguren, views of the human back as a subject in the history of art.
• In a week when Adobe has been in the news for pissing off its users, a list of alternatives for Adobe software.
• At Spoon & Tamago: Hokusai-inspired erasers reveal Mt. Fuji the more they get used.
• At Unquiet Things: A celebration of Annie Stegg Gerard’s enchanting worlds.
• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2024 by Ambientblog.
• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Diamanda Galás.
• Wraith (2002) by Redshift | El Wraith (2002) by Amon Tobin | Wraith (2015) by John Carpenter
Composition: Cones and Spirals (1929) by Edward Alexander Wadsworth.
• “Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know.” John Seamon on the vicissitudes of memory, and how actors remember their lines.
• “Mary McCarthy described it as ‘Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, and do-it-yourself novel’, among other things.” Mary Gaitskill on the pleasures and difficulties of Nabokov’s greatest novel, Pale Fire. Also a reminder that I ought to read it again.
• New music: Movement, Before All Flowers by Max Richter; A Thread, Silvered And Trembling by Drew McDowall; Unspeakable Visions by Michel Banabila.
• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Ulysses by James Joyce.
• The latest cartographical design from Herb Lester Associates is Facts Concerning HP Lovecraft and His Environs.
• At the Daily Heller: A look back at the craze for poster stamps.
• Mix of the week: A tuning mix for The Wire by Tashi Wada.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Michael Lonsdale Day.
• Annie Hogan’s favourite music.
• Clockworks (1975) by Laurie Spiegel | Tin Toy Clockwork Train (1985) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear | Clockwork Horoscope (2008) by Belbury Poly
Dr Faustus Conjuring Mephistopheles (1928) by Eric Ravilious.
• Materialising in July from a cloud of sulphurous smoke: The Devil Rides In – Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The Rockult 1967–1974. Cherry Red Records, home of the well-sourced, well-researched multi-disc compilation, might have been channelling my inner desires with this one, a Sabbath-esque soundtrack to the Occult Revival. I ordered it faster than you can say “Hail Satan!”
• A Series of Headaches: Shakespeare’s First Folio meets the London Review of Books. “In this film, letterpress printer Nick Hand pulls apart the whole process, from making ink from crushed oak galls to heaving the levers of a replica Jacobean press, and shows how we produced our own (almost) authentic version of the LRB circa 1623.”
• Alan Moore will be subject to greater attention than usual in October. In addition to the forthcoming Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, the month will also see the publication of The Great When, the first novel in his Long London series. Bloomsbury now has cover art to go with their description of the novel.
• Mad Dogs & Englishmen: Faust On Virgin Records: An extract from Neu Klang: The Definitive Story of Krautrock by Cristoph Dallach, “the first comprehensive oral history of the diverse and radical movement in German music during the late 60s and 1970s.”
• Alien life is no joke: Adam Frank on combating “the giggle factor” in the search for extraterrestrial life.
• At Colossal: Lauren Fensterstock’s Cosmic Mosaics Map Out the Unknown in Crystal and Gems.
• New music: Ritual (evocation) by Jon Hopkins; Time Is Glass by Six Organs Of Admittance.
• At Unquiet Things: The Gentle, Jubilant Visual Poetry of Tino Rodriguez.
• At Retro-Forteana: Colin Wilson, Philosopher of the Paranormal.
• DJ Food on Jeff Keen’s Amazing Rayday Comic collages.
At Dennis Cooper’s: Alan Clarke Day.
• Krautrock (1973) by Faust | Krautrock (1973) by Conrad Schnitzler | The Kraut (2007) by Stars Of The Lid
Flags of the Undiscovered Planets: 3 (1985) by César Manrique.
• “That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie.” Ray Newman goes looking for a typeface that immediately says “Britain in the 1950s”. I used to refer to one of its relatives as “the launderette font”, although it was also a common sight on shopfronts, public buildings and other mid-century signage. Today I know it as the slab serif named Profil (aka Decorated 035), although as Newman demonstrates, this is only one of several slab-serif variants popular in the 1950s and 60s.
• The Man Who Killed Google Search is a deep dive by Ed Zitron into why Google’s search has turned to shit. I recently changed the search option for all the browsers on my machines to DuckDuckGo. It’s not perfect but it’ll do for now.
• New music: Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie, music by Sun Ra performed by Laraaji and the Kronos Quartet; Chroma by Loscil / Lawrence English; Homage To Hennix (The Electric Harpsichord Reinterpreted) by Dave Seidel.
• At Colossal: Tune into your own brain waves with Steve Parker’s suspended constellations of salvaged brass.
• At Bajo el Signo de Libra: Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840): Icono del Romanticismo Alemán.
• At Public Domain Review: Maria Catharina Prestel’s Printed Cabinet of Drawings (ca. 1780s).
• At Unquiet Things: The teeming, tumbling, tangled cosmos of Madeline Von Foerster.
• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by FUJI||||||||||TA.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: 77 planetariums.
• Planet D (Portishead Remix) (1994) by The Sabres Of Paradise | Planet Munich (1998) by Add N To (X) | Planet Vega (2000) by Air