HP Lovecraft – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Tadami Yamada’s weird covers

Earlier this year when I wrote about Tadami Yamada’s illustrations for William Hope Hodgson I mentioned the existence of books by other authors that were published along with the Hodgson as part of a series. Kokusho Kankōkai published ten of these books from 1976 to 1977, most of them being collections of short horror fiction by European and American authors, with the series as a whole being referred to as the “Dracula” editions. Yamada painted the covers and provided interior illustrations for eight of the books, including, as I suspected earlier, a Lovecraft collection. I was hoping I might be able to find copies of his interiors for the Lovecraft but so far nothing has turned up, Yamada’s web pages only featuring illustrations from the Hodgson and Henry S. Whitehead collections. Searching elsewhere is complicated by a number of factors such as the age of the books, their being Japanese publications, and the sheer quantity of Lovecraft-related material to sift through.

Yamada says that his illustrations weren’t appreciated by readers who were expecting more typical horror imagery. This doesn’t surprise me given the Surrealist tenor of his work as a whole. The Hodgson illustrations are relatively orthodox but many of his other book illustrations from this period are collages that resemble the simpler things Max Ernst was doing in his collage novels. Collage is also evident on the “Dracula” covers, together with decalcomania, another Surrealist technique visible in the Hodgson illustrations. These books are a minor diversion in Yamada’s wide-ranging career but, as is often the case with Asian publications, none of them are currently listed at ISFDB. I’d still like to see his Lovecraft illustrations, if only to assuage my curiosity.

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Zeuhl Ẁortz!

Kobaïa / Müh (1970), a single by Magma.

1: Zeuhl definitions

Zeuhl is an adjective in Kobaïan, the language written by Christian Vander, drummer and founder of the French band Magma.

Pronunciation: zEU(h)l, while the EU are like a French E with a slight U, and the (h) is a semi-silent letter which is an integrated part of the EU, totalling in a “syllable and a half”. (Prog Archives)

Zeuhl (pronounced [zœl]; lit. ’celestial’) is a music genre that is a hybrid of jazz fusion, symphonic rock and neoclassical music, established in 1969 by the French band Magma. The term comes from Kobaïan, the fictional language created by Magma’s Christian Vander and Klaus Blasquiz for Magma, in which Zeuhl Ẁortz means approximately ‘celestial force’.
[…]
Zeuhl is determined by several characteristic elements. Especially important are dominant rhythm fractions, usually in the form of a pumping bass guitar and sometimes sluggish or flexibly playing drum kits. Slow repetitive structures that serve to build a hypnotic atmosphere are just as prominent as solo passages of high technical finesse. Vocals are often widely present and can consist of polyphonic choral movements, such as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, or soloistically performed passages with shrill intonation. Zeuhl bands also often have solo guitarists or pianists that usually have a more than accompanying function, especially to emphasize the repetitive patterns. (Wikipedia)

2: The Birth of the Zeuhl

“1967,” he says. “The year John Coltrane died. It seemed to me that afterwards, it was as though music had to try to start all over again. Someone had to pick up the pieces, go on searching in the way that he had. Nobody could match him, but people could pick up the flame. It was almost impossible for anyone to do anything new after Coltrane, but you had to try, try to find other new directions. So that’s what I tried to do with Magma. I was a bit young at the time, but…”

Christian Vander describing the birth of Magma to Paul Stump, The Wire, July 1995

3: Zeuhl lists

Weidorje (1978) by Weidorje. Cover art by Klaus Blasquiz.

• Shindig! Magazine: Magma in seven records, and Deeper Underground: the best albums by the Magma family by Warren Hatter.

• Prog Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century: My Favourite Zeuhl Albums of All-Time by Drew Fisher.

• Bandcamp: There is No Prog, Only Zeuhl: A Guide to One of Rock’s Most Imaginative Subgenres by Jim Allen.

• Discogs: Zeuhl lists by Neit and ultimathulerecords.

• Prog Archives: Top 100 Zeuhl.

4: Live Zeuhl

A poster by Jofre Conjota for a concert in Chile demonstrating that Zeuhl can exist without electricity.

• Magma, Hippodrome du Pantin, Paris, 1977 (46 mins; a French TV film that captures one of the 70s lineups in peak form. Includes an almost complete performance of Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh.)

• Weidorje, French TV, 1979 (11 mins; Magma offshoot Weidorje were only active for a couple of years, this may be their only TV appearance.)

• Magma, Théâtre Bobino, Paris, 1981 (A complete concert—1 hr 53 mins—from the group’s weird-funk period: Christian Vander leaves his drumkit to sing and rant at the audience, everyone is dressed in spacey glitter outfits, and some of the songs from the Merci album can’t be classed as Zeuhl at all. The musicians are all first rate, however.)

• Magma play Köhntarkösz, 2005 (A fantastic 32-minute performance in a very cramped venue.)

• Collectif PTÄH interprète Magma (12 mins; a Magma covers band playing in a village square.)

5: Cinematic Zeuhl

• Tristan et Iseult (1972): a French feature film with a score by Christian Vander and three members of Magma. The soundtrack album was later incorporated into the Magma official discography as Ẁurdah Ïtah.

• Moi y’en a vouloir des sous (1973): a French satire in which Magma make a brief appearance as a way-out rock group.

6: Lovecraftian Zeuhl

Les Morts Vont Vite (1986) by Shub Niggurath. Cover art: La Ballade de Lénore (1839) by Horace Vernet.

• Liriïk Necronomicus Kanht (1978) by Magma.

• Dagon (1980) by Eskaton.

• La musique d’Erich Zann (1981) by Univers Zero (a Belgian group, originally named Necronomicon, which included former members of an earlier group named Arkham).

• Yog-Sothoth (1986) by Shub Niggurath.

7: Comic Zeuhl

Magma’s Christian Vander and Klaus Blasquiz in a three-page comic strip from Pop & Rock & Colégram (1978), a collection of satirical music-themed pieces by Jean Solé, Alain Dister & Marcel Gotlib.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dune: some French connections
• HR Giger album covers

Tadami Yamada’s illustrated Carnacki

It’s William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective again. Late last year I was looking for Hodgson illustrations after reading Timothy S. Murphy’s William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark but couldn’t find much of interest apart from book covers I’d seen many times before. Tadami Yamada’s illustrations for a Japanese edition of Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder have yet to be catalogued at ISFDB, and don’t seem to have been disseminated much at all. Once again, I’m indebted to 70sscifiart for turning up art that I might not otherwise have seen.

The Thing Invisible.

Information about the Japanese collection was difficult to find in general, a common problem with older Japanese books when most of the online documentation hasn’t been translated. The book was published by Kokusho Kankōkai in 1977 as part of a series of weird fiction reprints along with collections by HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood and others. The Hodgson volume contains the expanded collection of Carnacki stories, with the three posthumously published tales–The Haunted “Jarvee”, The Find and The Hog–appended to the original 1913 edition.

The Gateway of the Monster.

As to the illustrations, these were early works by Tamada, an artist with a lengthy career as an illustrator and painter. The copies of the illustrations don’t reveal much about their medium but they all appear to be paintings; the ones for The Find and The Hog (whose Japanese title translates as The Witch Pig) both show signs of the patterning you get with the decalcomania process, something you can’t easily create in other media. If this book was part of a series then I don’t imagine it was the sole illustrated edition, which raises the possibility that the Lovecraft, Blackwood and other titles were fully illustrated as well. Once again, further research is required.

The House Among the Laurels.

The Whistling Room.

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Weekend links 811

A still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), a feature-length animated film by Lotte Reiniger.

• Hélice 39 is a speculative-fiction journal (in Spanish) whose current issue includes an article by Marcelo Sanchez: “What did Borges think of Lovecraft?”

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

• Old music: Hydrophony For Dagon by Max Eastley & Michael Prime; The Adventures Of Prince Achmed by Morricone Youth.

• Public Domain Review lists some of the writers whose works will enter the public domain this year.

• “Modern Japanese Printmakers celebrates vibrant mid-20th-century innovation“.

• At Nautilus: “Here’s what’s happening in the brain when you’re improvising.”

• At the BFI: Pamela Hutchinson selects 10 great films of 1926.

• New music: The Future Is Now by Pietro Zollo.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Phil Solomon Day.

• 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse.

• Runaway Horses (“poetry written with a splash of blood”) (1985) by Philip Glass | Unicorns Were Horses (1996) by New Kingdom | Red Horse (2002) by Jack Rose

Illustrating Hyperborea

The Book of Hyperborea (1996). Cover art by Robert H. Knox.

“My Hyperborean tales, it seems to me, with their primordial, prehuman and sometimes premundane background and figures, are the closest to the Cthulhu Mythos, but most of them are written in a vein of grotesque humor that differentiates them vastly.” — Clark Ashton Smith

Since re-reading Clark Ashton Smith’s The Tale of Satampra Zeiros I’ve been revisiting more of Smith’s stories set in the lost world of Hyperborea. And having put together a post some years ago that gathered all the original illustrations for Smith’s Zothique cycle, I thought I’d try and do the same for another of his story series. As I noted in the earlier post, we’re fortunate today that it’s so easy to see illustrations that in the past would have been impossible to find unless you owned (or had access to) a huge collection of pulp magazines. Pulp illustrations aren’t always very good—in the case of the early issues of Weird Tales, they’re frequently amateurish—but those that illustrate new fiction for the first time are historically important if nothing else.

Lost Worlds: Volume 1 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington. Lost Worlds was a single-volume collection published by Arkham House (USA) and Neville Spearman (UK). The Panther paperback covers by Bruce Pennington could easily be used on other books but these were the first Smith volumes I owned.

The first Hyperborea stories were among Smith’s earliest prose fantasies, owing something to Lord Dunsany on the one hand (HP Lovecraft detected a Dunsanian quality), and the writers of antiquity on the other, the name “Hyperborea” (“Behind the North Wind”) being borrowed from the Greeks. The northern location is about the only feature of the continent that the Greek writers would recognise, Smith’s world being a temperate pre-Ice Age realm of mountains and verdant jungles. Dinosaurs and megafauna share the lands with human inhabitants for whom sorcery is a common practice. As with Zothique, the cycle was an influential one. Lin Carter in the introduction to his Ballantine collection, Hyperborea (1971), suggests that the name of the continent might have prompted Robert E. Howard to set his Conan stories in “the Hyborean Age”. This could be the case: Howard and Smith were writing for the same publications, and the first Conan story was published in Weird Tales shortly after The Tale of Satampra Zeiros; but Howard was also reading the Greeks as well. A more substantial influence may be found in Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, a world in which aspects of Hyperborea and Zothique are combined. Sword and sorcery begins “behind the North Wind”, in other words, although there’s very little sword-play in Smith’s fiction, that was Leiber and Howard’s department.

Lost Worlds: Volume 2 (1974). Cover art by Bruce Pennington.

The original Hyperborea illustrations are fewer than those for Zothique. As with the later cycle, several of the stories are unillustrated, while others were given lacklustre artwork. In the earlier post I followed the story order chosen by Lin Carter which attempted to contrive an internal chronology for the cycle. Carter did the same with his Hyperborea collection so I’ve followed his example once again. Later collections, like Will Murray’s Book of Hyperborea, tend to order the stories by publication date.

The Seven Geases, Weird Tales, October 1934.

An illustration of Tsathoggua by Smith himself. The toad-god turns up in person in this story.

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, Weird Tales, June 1932.

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