Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips.
• “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before Boards Of Canada made the announcement they’d been teasing for the past two weeks—the new BOC album, Inferno, will be released at the end of May—a coincidence that felt vaguely significant. “How random is random?” as William Burroughs used to say. It’s tempting to describe the moment as the passing of a creative torch but I doubt either of the groups would agree. Boards Of Canada’s approach to electronic music has always been very different to that of Cabaret Voltaire: less aggressive, more melodic, more pastoral, more concerned with memories and the past than with the present or the near future. But the promotional videos for Inferno are reminiscent of the scratch videos that Cabaret Voltaire were creating in the 1980s: degraded VHS assemblages collaged from TV broadcasts and home-movie footage, visual equivalents of a tuning dial running through the shortwave radio spectrum. Then there’s the latest BOC album art which, when taken with details from the teaser video, foregrounds the same fascination with American bastardisations of Christianity that the Cabs were referring to in Sluggin’ Fer Jesus and The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. I’ll leave it to others to play with the interpretations that can be brought to an album title like Inferno. We’ll no doubt be seeing a great deal of journalistic musing around this and related issues before and after the end of May.
• Jiří Barta’s Expressionist animated adaptation of the Pied Piper story, Krysař (1985), has turned up in high definition at YouTube. Ignore the credit for Wilfred Jackson, an American animation director who had nothing to do with Barta’s film.
• At Public Domain Review: Magic by return of post: Allan Johnson explores the history of those mail-order occult outfits whose ads fill out the pages of the early American pulps.
• Visual Music: a lecture by Simon Reynolds describing the use of electronic music as a soundtrack for abstract cinema.
• At the BFI: Anton Bitel selects 10 great Brazilian horror films.
• There’s more intermediate eyeball fodder at Unquiet Things.
• Disco Inferno (1976) by The Trammps | Inferno (Main Title Theme) (1980) by Keith Emerson | Om Riff From The Cosmic Inferno (2005) by IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno