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Weekend links 851

Amber Light, a print by Phil Greenwood.

• “When I heard the term industrial music, I mistook it for techno and soon learned it was not.” Steven Heller talks to Chris Grimley and Alan Rapp about Industrial Music/Graphics: A Visual History of a Movement.

• Halloween approaches, as does Ghosts on the Cam. Editor Robert Lloyd Parry talks to Swan River Press about his latest story collection.

• “There we were, and we could be naked”: Stanley Stellar’s photographs are a record of gay life in New York from the 1970s onwards.

She researched cultures in which dreams delivered prophetic truth-telling messages from a higher plane. Like splashes and blots, dreams emanated from hidden forces, perhaps of the human mind, perhaps not. She had a metaphysical belief in their potential to put her in touch with supernatural beings, not angels or demons in any religious sense, nor the fairies or phantoms of popular belief, but spirits posited by mystical systems such as astrology and alchemy, otherworldly manifestations raised by enchanters and magi who had developed means of contacting them.

Marina Warner in a lengthy appraisal of the occult and Surrealist obsessions of Ithell Colquhoun

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

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the house that vanished, a literal ghost house.

• At Colossal: “Amok Island’s geometric murals teem with vibrant local flora and fauna”.

• At Public Domain Review: The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677).

• New music: Trinitatis by Deaf Center; Ancient Future by Bana Haffar.

• Old music: Metal & Flesh by Hard Corps receives another reissue.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2026 at Ambientblog.

• “My one political film”: Ken Russell on The Devils.

• RIP Matt Howarth and Eva Marie Saint.

• Amber (1980) by The Residents | Amber (1996) by Little Axe | Amber (1996) by Zoviet France

Ghosts on the Cam

Presenting my latest cover illustration for Swan River Press, and another story collection edited by Robert Lloyd Parry:

Ghosts on the Cam is the third in a series of linked anthologies. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020) collected supernatural tales by members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club, of which MR James was a leading light. Friends and Spectres (2024) looked more widely at works by MRJ’s friends outside the club. In the present volume the authors’ personal connections with MRJ are less strong, though his literary influence is just as powerfully felt. But what really binds the tales collected together here is the town of Cambridge itself, with its libraries and chapels and echoing cloisters, its murky river and misty streets. Many of the authors studied at Cambridge; several worked there; two were born there. In a series of introductory essays Robert Lloyd Parry looks at how and why a small market town on the edge of the Fens has produced so many writers of the supernatural.

A photochrom print from 1905.

As with the cover wrap for Friends and Spectres, we’re out in Cambridge at night, only this time the scene is a distinctly chilly one. The Cam is the river that runs through Cambridge, so a view of the river itself seemed unavoidable, especially when it’s crossed by the elegant Bridge of Sighs which connects two of the buildings of St John’s College. The name of the bridge derives from the Ponte dei Sospiri in Venice, a more appropriate borrowing than when applied to the Hertford Bridge in Oxford which also bears the name Bridge of Sighs even though it spans a narrow road. The bridge over the Cam was built in 1831, and is especially attractive for its Gothic styling which matches the college buildings while making the structure seem much older than it is. The bridge also benefits from having been built parallel to an older bridge close by, the so-called Kitchen Bridge (or St John’s Bridge), which has provided a platform for numerous photographers to capture the Bridge of Sighs from the middle of the river.

The abundance of photo reference was certainly useful but cameras can generate unforeseen problems when you’re trying to create a single extended view of a place which has only ever been photographed as isolated details. Most of the photos of the area concentrate either on the bridges or the mass of college buildings which are enclosed by a wall pierced by Gothic windows. David Hockney used to say that photographs never show you things the way they are, by which he meant that they don’t show you the world as it appears to our eyes: photo views are cropped more narrowly than our field of vision, and lenses of all kinds distort perspectives. Hockney’s dissatisfaction with photography led him to create his mosaic views of people or places constructed from multiple overlapping photographs. I had to do something similar (albeit much more precise) to achieve this view of the Bridge of Sighs which is wider and deeper than anything you’d be able to capture with a camera. The older photos of the bridge revealed that the group of trees by the bank have been pruned back several times, while the river wall had gone in the opposite direction, having once been overgrown with ivy. Since all the stories are set in the past I’ve restored some of these earlier appearances although the buildings themselves have changed very little since the bridge was built.

That’s a lot of words about architecture for a book which is really concerned with the supernatural. There is a ghost in the widescreen picture if you look carefully, possibly two ghosts. As with Friends and Spectres I leave it to the viewer to decide about the second figure.

Ghosts on the Cam will be published in December, and is available for pre-order here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Friends and Spectres
• Ghosts of the Chit-Chat

Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century

In which orchestral conductor Simon Rattle explores a century of music in much the same way that Robert Hughes explored a century of art in The Shock of the New. Or almost… It’s unfair to compare this more modest TV series to a landmark which was shot on film and with a budget large enough to allow Hughes to present his art history from locations all around the world.

If you’ve ever felt in need of an intelligent introduction to the challenges of orchestral music then Leaving Home is the ideal guide. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) in 1996, a time when the channel still was still devoting a considerable portion of its programming to the arts. Simon Rattle was a wise choice as a presenter, being a conductor with a less intimidating demeanour than some, as well as a proselytising nature. His intention here was to dispel the difficulty which many people still feel when faced with atonal compositions (twelve-tone music, aleatory music, serialism) by explaining how these musical forms evolved and why they’re not so difficult at all once you appreciate the reasoning behind them and the context out of which they emerged. Music is a curious medium in this respect. Where other art forms can start to feel distinctly old-fashioned and even thoroughly antiquated once a few decades have elapsed, there’s a lot of European music which is well over a hundred years old yet can still challenge and disturb an audience today if that audience is unprepared. Rattle’s explanations parallel The Shock of the New by dividing a century of artistic evolution into distinct modes or themes. The structure of the series and the music under discussion is as follows:

Programme 1: Dancing on a Volcano
Wagner, Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
Schoenberg, Transfigured Night
Mahler, Symphony no. 7
Strauss, Elektra
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, nos. 1 and 2
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, nos. 3, 4 and 5
Berg, Violin Concerto

Programme 2: Rhythm
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
Varèse, Ionisation
Mahler, “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Reich, Music for Pieces of Wood
Nancarrow, Piano Roll no. 21
Boulez, Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna
Messiaen, Turangalîla Symphony

Programme 3: Colour
Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Stravinsky, The Firebird
Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé
Debussy, Jeux
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, no. 3 “Farben”
Boulez, Notations
Messiaen, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
Takemitsu, Dream/Window

Programme 4: Three Journeys through Dark Landscapes
Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin
Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 4
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 14
Lutosławski, Concerto for Orchestra
Lutosławski, Venetian Games
Lutosławski, Symphony no. 3

Programme 5: The American Way
Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
Ives, Decoration Day
Carter, A Celebration of Some 100 x 150 Notes
Copland, Appalachian Spring
Weill, “Lonely House” from Street Scene
Bernstein, “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story
Cage, Sonatas and Interludes
Cage, First Construction in Metal
Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at 90
Riley, In C
Adams, Harmonium

Programme 6: After the Wake
Strauss, “Im Abendrot” from Four Last Songs
Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw
Boulez, Le marteau sans maître
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, no. 4
Stockhausen, Gruppen
Britten, Serenade for tenor, horn and strings
Stravinsky, Agon

Programme 7: Threads
Berio, Laborintus II
Henze, Symphony no. 8
Gubaidulina, Zeitgestalten
Kurtág, Grabstein für Stefan
Birtwistle, Ritual Fragment
Turnage, Drowned Out
Knussen, Flourish with Fireworks

“Leaving home” in Rattle’s explanation is a phrase that refers to music leaving behind the rules and harmonic bases of the previous centuries. It also refers to various forms of exile and social change, departures from earlier orthodoxies. Much of the music explored here was created in years and nations beset by wars and revolutions, and, as Rattle notes, art created under such conditions can’t help but reflect its time. I have the book of the series by Michael Hall which is very good in its own way, filled with a more detailed history and musicology, as well as many photographs and paintings relevant to the compositions. What the book lacks is the music itself, and this is the real strength of the TV series. Rattle spends each programme either sitting at a piano or conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra who play extracts of all the pieces under discussion. Rattle is a proficient pianist which that means in the first couple of programmes he’s able to physically emphasise some of his talking points, in particular those instances when a composer deliberately deviates from expectation. Watching an orchestra perform a composition you’ve just heard described is much more effective than listening to a recording, especially when we reach the 1950s with extracts from a performance of Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

Continue reading “Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century”

Weekend links 850

Peacock Mandala (no date) by Judith Drury.

• A few links related to my own activities this week. Firstly, the mix of the week is a guest mix I put together for The Invisible College. I haven’t made a properly mixed mix for a while. This one was made with Audacity, an application that’s free, open source and multi-platform. Secondly, there’s the news that Ghosts on the Cam, another collection of spectral tales compiled by Robert Lloyd Parry, will be published by Swan River Press in December. I’ll have more to say about my cover art for the book at a later date. And on the subject of cover art, my cover for The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rowntree is being reused by Planeta9 for a Czech edition of the novel.

• Halloween approaches. At Wormwoodiana Mark Valentine looks at the first modern ghost story anthology, The Ghost Book edited by Cynthia Asquith, which was published 100 years ago this month.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “The Icebergs is one of Frederic Edwin Church’s most spectacular paintings. For decades, no one knew where it was.”

• New music: Passage by Chris Meyer’s Alias Zone featuring Robert Rich; Window To Askoy by Strugatsky Brothers.

• RIP Mighty Sparrow. Related: Two hours of Mighty Sparrow’s music at The Explorer’s Room.

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams chooses 10 great South Korean science-fiction films.

• At Nautilus: This obscure 1960s guide to LSD holds up. Kristen French reports.

• At Colossal: The painted mandalas of Mu Pan.

• The Strange World of…Steve Reich.

• Bastardica

• Mandala (1973) by Stomu Yamash’ta’s Red Buddha Theatre | Mandala (1980) by Fondation | Sand Mandala (1997) by Philip Glass

Panic by Sándor Reisenbüchler

I suspect that if Sándor Reisenbüchler had been French, say, rather than Hungarian his animated films might be better known today. Panic (1979), like Moon Flight (1975), is another of his short exercises in Pop-art science fiction, a rush through a series of vivid and hyperactive scenes where everything is flattened and stylised, often to a point of abstraction. Panic, as its title suggests, is an especially frenzied piece in which three of the humanoid creatures living on a small island are sucked into a flying saucer occupied by human beings who take their captives to a city where they bombard them with unidentified rays. Whatever the creatures are, the experiments cause them to mutate and grow to a giant size after which they retaliate against their captors.

All of Reisenbüchler’s films were short ones, and all the ones I’ve seen to date follow a similar format: a simple narrative where the vivid graphics are as much of interest as the story. On the graphic level Panic is incredibly complex, composed throughout of very brief shots, nearly all of which show entirely new scenes and bits of collage or other visual invention. As for the story, this is probably the closest thing you’ll find to a Hungarian take on the kaiju film.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moon Flight by Sándor Reisenbüchler