A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
When you work your way through a director’s filmography, particularities of mise-en-scène often become apparent. Nicolas Winding Refn’s next film—The Neon Demon—has a title that promises more of the same. I’m looking forward to it.
Pusher (1996)
Kim Bodnia (above) and Laura Drasbæk (below).
Bleeder (1999)
Zlatko Buric (above) and Kim Bodnia (below).
Untitled artwork by Melinda Gebbie.
• “Johnny Rocket is like a Chaucerian epic retold by David Peace with music by Bruce Haack and The Focus Group for a music hall located in Hell.” John Doran talks to Maxine Peake and the Eccentronic Research Council about their “psychedelic ouija pop”.
• Allison Meier looks at a new exhibition of Victor Moscoso’s psychedelic drawings. Related: Julia Bigham writing in Eye magazine in 2001 about London’s psychedelic poster scene.
• “Oh to eye the very enfilade through which that orchidaceous entity would make his stately progress…” Strange Flowers on the eccentric Count Stenbock.
• Melinda Gebbie: What Is The Female Gaze? The artist is in conversation next month with Mark Pilkington and Tai Shani at the Horse Hospital, London.
• Pamela Colman Smith: She Believes in Fairies. The Tarot artist and illustrator in a rare interview from 1912.
• Minimalist posters: “a lack of nuance disguised as insight,” says John Brownlee.
• Saturday night in the City of the Dead: Richard Metzger on the John Foxx-era Ultravox.
• The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble plays the Brandenberg Concerto No. 3.
• “In a weird way”: a brief history of a phrase by Ivan Kreilkamp.
• Die Hexe: An installation by Alex Da Corte.
• RIP Daevid Allen
• You Can’t Kill Me (1971) by Gong | Master Builder (1974) by Gong | When (1982) by Daevid Allen
A companion film to yesterday’s The Spider, this short animation by Croatian directors Marks and Jutrisa was made three years earlier. A surreal fable about the hazards of mistreating insects. Watch it here.
A short animated film from Croatia for arachnophobes everywhere. The Spider was made in 1969, and, as with many animated films from the Eastern Bloc countries, there may be a political subtext in its sinister narrative.
When it comes to my work for the music world, this week has ranged from one pole to the other. On Tuesday Enki , the album whose cover I designed last year for Melechesh, was released in the US on multiple formats including coloured vinyl and (if you want the expensive option) a CD with bundled T-shirt; on Wednesday local musicians Watch Repair released The Tidal Path, a hand-crafted CD-R limited to 100 copies for which I designed the Risographed insert.
Musically you can’t compare these releases, and it would be unwise to do so, they’re both operating in very different areas. Watch Repair (who otherwise prefer to remain anonymous) have for the past two years been producing a distinct form of improvised music that combines acoustic instruments, ambient recordings and treated/processed sounds. The predominant atmosphere on The Tidal Path is winter, frozen water and icy wastes, hence the choice of an old map of the northern polar regions for the insert artwork. The map also features a few surreptitious references to related works by other artists but I’ll leave it to informed listeners to detect those. The Tidal Path is a release on Manchester’s Ono label which may be ordered from Piccadilly Records.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Watch Repair