A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
In the mail today from Burning Shed, the debut album by Air French Band [sic] in an expanded three-disc set, housed in a card wallet and featuring blu-ray audio and video. On the second CD there’s a live version of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Who knew? etc. The duo’s last album was in July 2014, so it’s anyone’s guess when they might record again, but this will do nicely for now, thanks.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Voyage dans la Lune
René Magritte with a newspaper.
La Nouvelle Médication Naturelle Traduit de l’Allemand – Vol. 2 (1899) by FE Bilz
Man with a Newspaper (1928) by René Magritte
Fuzz Against Junk (1959) by Akbar Del Piombo
The Oxford Book of Short Poems (1986) edited by PJ Kavanagh and James Michie
Mensonge (1987) by Malcolm Bradbury
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2015), illustrated by Anthony Browne
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fuzz Against Junk & The Hero Maker
Under Water/In Air.
This recently-released video for Under Water/In Air by Starfucker (or STRFKR, as they often have to style themselves) is an animated production by Edward Carvalho-Monaghan, an artist whose visuals may be seen to similar effect in an earlier animation for Starfucker’s Armatron. Carvalho-Monaghan’s artwork has appeared on a number of the group’s record sleeves, including the latest album, Parallel Realms, which combines a Surrealist dose of the visual style that I refer to as the groovy look with the kind of impossible architecture popularised by MC Escher. Armatron, meanwhile, features more architecture in what may be borrowings from Giorgio de Chirico.
Armatron.
I lost interest in music videos years ago, I’d much rather listen to the music than have to experience it as a soundtrack to some director’s attempt to illustrate a song with visual novelty. But animated music videos are easier to take, in part because the pairing of animation with music goes back to the earliest days of the medium. The Starfucker videos have had me wondering how much video or animation might suit the “groovy” definition if you went looking for it. And by this I mean following the limits defined by my earlier post which is predominantly concerned with heavy outlines and flat, bold colours rather than quasi-psychedelic effects. I don’t have the time just now to start searching for other examples but The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine is the Ur-text in this department, and the film’s influence may be found in both Carvalho-Monaghan animations.
Sing, Sang, Sung.
One other music video that does come to mind is for Sing, Sang, Sung by Air, directed by Mrzyk & Moriceau. The colour palette is desaturated but the rest of the graphics are definitely in the groovy zone, with the video as a whole coming across like a Surrealist take on those endlessly scrolling, mutating computer games. When the black ball reaches its destination you’re tempted to watch it all again.
(Under Water/In Air tip via Scotto Moore’s This Newsletter Cannot Save You.)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy look
• Tadanori Yokoo animations
The Vision of Endymion (1902) by Edward John Poynter.
• The Art and History of Lettering Comics by Todd Klein. Eight of the pages in the forthcoming Moon & Serpent book have been lettered by Todd.
• At Igloomag: Chang Terhune looks for music to help you sleep. No mention of an obvious (and superior) candidate, Sleep by Max Richter.
• New music: Ghosted II by Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin; and The Ship by David Shea.
But unlike macroscopic drugs like cannabis, LSD is so small and so powerful that its consumption almost always requires an inert housing—the water, tablets, sugar cubes, bits of string, or pieces of paper that transport the drug from manufacturer to tripper. In the law, this vehicle is described as the “carrier medium,” an object impregnated with drugs, one that can be sold, seized, presented as evidence, and dissolved into the hearts, minds, and guts of consumers.
When you print images onto a paper carrier medium, you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission. Hence, a meta medium, a liminal genre of print culture that dissolves the boundaries between a postage stamp, a ticket, a bubble gum card, and the communion host. This makes blotter a central if barely recognized artifact of psychedelic print culture, alongside rock posters and underground newspapers and comix, but with the extra ouroboric weirdness that it is designed to be ingested, to disappear. Blotter is the most ephemeral of all psychedelic ephemera. It is produced to be eaten, to blur the divide between object and subject, dissolving material signs and molecules into a phenomenological upsurge of sensory, poetic, and cognitive immediacy.
Erik Davis, in an extract from Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium
• At Wormwoodiana: John Howard on The London Adventure, or, The Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen.
• At Unquiet Things: Hidden Marvels on Your Bookshelf: The Artistic Legacy of Laurence Schwinger.
• “Some intelligent civilizations will be trapped on their worlds”. Evan Gough explains.
• At Vinyl Factory: The Latin-American women of 20th-century electronic music.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Steve Erickson presents A Black Psychedelia Primer Day.
• At Public Domain Review: Animated Putty by Walter R. Booth.
• Vinita Joshi’s favourite music.
• Sleepy Theory (1982) by Weekend | Sleep 3 (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep Games (2012) by Pye Corner Audio
Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere.
Thus Discordian anarchist Stella Maris, making her first appearance in my re-reading of Illuminatus! (previously) in a week when more synchronicities related to the novel have been imposing themselves. “The Werewolf of Anarchy” (published on the 23rd of the month, of course) was a picture that turned up a couple of days ago when I was searching through the back issues of Punch magazine. Punch did a lot of this kind of thing, dropping the humour now and then for some heavy-handed pictorial comment about international affairs. Given my current reading the word “anarchy” was bound to catch my attention but the werewolf image is unusual—why not a regular wolf?—while being further bound to the novel via Robert Anton Wilson’s fondness for Lon Chaney Jr’s lycanthrope. I often wondered why Wilson used to refer to this as much as he did. Illuminatus! mentions the werewolf legend from the first Universal film in its grab-bag of cultural weirdness, and I seem to recall there being more references in Wilson’s later novels. In the 1980s Wilson was living in Ireland where he wrote a werewolf-themed song with a local band, The Golden Horde, one of the few (only?) Irish groups who can be counted as part of the fleeting psychedelic revival that took place in the middle of the decade. The Golden Horde’s first album, The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy, appeared in 1985, and ends with Lawrence Talbot Suite, a number which is “explained” with the following words: “Lon Chaney Jr, The Easter Bunny, The primeval sleeve note, red curtain, the stings, a crush-can dominates a scowling buddha”. Whatever that means.
Meanwhile, my RSS feed informs me that Pentagrams Of Discordia have just released a new album whose final number bears the title Planetary Radiation (RAW); Robert Anton Wilson turns up again at the end of the track to talk about Chaos Theory in relation to Discordian history. And the above item arrived in the mail this week, a two-disc CD release of a newly-discovered live recording of Steve Hillage and band performing at the Bataclan in 1979. I own a lot of live Hillage albums, along with all his studio recordings, and this is one of the very best. The concert is pertinent for including an early rendition of New Age Synthesis (Unzipping The Zype), a song that made its first appearance in 1979 on the studio side of Live Herald, and which contains what may be the first reference to Illuminatus! in song form (the album sleeve includes thanks “to Robert Anton Wilson for his intriguing books”). Hillage offered an explanation of the studio songs’ lyrics in his own mysterious sleeve note:
For those who find the lingo a bit strange—“unzipping the zype” can be defined as (rising organ music please!):—the spontaneous inner exorcism by which a person can neutralise the harmful, consciousness-distorting effects of the artificial elemental spirits (zypes) formed around each word of everyday language.
The zypes are built up by the identification process by which we manufacture “reality.” Occultists refer to them as “astral glamour,” yogis as “the web of Maya”—but no word is zype-proof, not even zype. Cherish this phrase—it’s a royal flush!
Hmm, okay… No indication there or in the lyrics as to how you go about “unzipping the zype”. New Age Synthesis is a call-and-response between Hillage and partner Miquette Giraudy in which Hillage recounts his experience with the zypes. In the first verse he mentions “word spirits” to which Giraudy replies “Egregores!”, an occult concept which—quelle surprise—has connections to Chaos Magic. In the next verse Hillage blames the existence of the word spirits on the Illuminati—”Paranoia!” responds Giraudy—only to discard this claim in the lines that follow: “It isn’t really them at all, but you and me”. Hillage’s albums of the 1970s are filled with all manner of New Age business—flying saucers, ley lines, mysticism of various kinds—but he isn’t a David Icke. Why werewolves? What zypes? Mysteries abound. This is a great album, anyway, in or out of the Synchronicity Zone.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ewige Blumenkraft
• Twinkle, twinkle little stars