Weekend links 805

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A poster by Peter Strausfeld for a 1966 screening of Alphaville and La Jetée.

• At Bandcamp Daily: “Caroline True obsesses over compilations so you don’t have to,” says Erick Bradshaw. I recommend CTR’s compilations.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Music Stones: The Rediscovery Of Ringing Rock by Mike Adcock.

• At Colossal: Pastoral landscapes brim with patterns in luminous paintings by David Brian Smith.

One of the markers that sets Mamoru Oshii apart from his peers is his willingness to allow place to speak for itself. From the seasonality captured in his works, like the first two Patlabor films, to the otherworldly environments of Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence (all projects in which Ogura was also involved heavily) and even the fantasy scapes of his Angel’s Egg, Oshii’s attention to place, and allowing it to be a player in the story, gives as much voice to world building, as he does to characterisation. This attentiveness and patience for place, allows us to settle deeply inside a worldview that is often simultaneously familiar but unerringly alien.

Lawrence English talks to art director Hiromasa Ogura and composer Kenji Kawai about their work on Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell

• At the BFI: Leigh Singer suggests where to begin with the films of Lucile Hadžihalilović.

• Necromodernist Architectures in Contemporary Writing: an essay by David Vichnar.

• New music: Hydrology by Loula York; Love Letters Via Echelon by Nerthus.

• There’s more Intermittent Eyeball Fodder at Unquiet Things.

• The Strange World of…Early Cabaret Voltaire.

• Winners of the Drone Photo Awards 2025.

Lautréamont’s Apocrypha

Drone Um Futurisma (1992) by Cusp | ABoneCroneDrone 1 (1996) by Sheila Chandra | Suspicious Drone (2009) by Demdike Stare

Weekend links 795

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Heksenkeuken I: The Witches’ Sabbath (1916) by Lizzy Ansingh.

A trailer for The Ice Tower, a new feature film by Lucile Hadžihalilović. Good to see the Hadžihalilović brand of weirdness being supported once again, but then they do things differently in France. Charlie Kaufman was complaining this week that nobody in Hollywood will fund his films. Maybe he should look elsewhere?

• Dreaming of Shadow and Smoke: Jim Rockhill talks to John Kenny about the enduring influence of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s stories of the supernatural. Rockhill’s latest book is A Mind Turned in Upon Itself, a collection of writings about Le Fanu published by Swan River Press. I designed the exterior of this volume which I’ll be discussing at a later date.

• “Eerie strangeness is abroad, sometimes beautiful, much more often menacing.” Derek Turner reviews Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, a novella by Rebecca Gransden. The book is published by Tangerine Press. I recommend it most highly.

• At Public Domain Review: Ivan Aivazovsky’s miniature seascapes (c.1887), which the artist painted into small photographs of himself at work.

• At The Wire: Against The Grain: Mattie Colquhoun on Mark Fisher’s cultural pessimism.

• At the BFI: Miriam Balanescu chooses 10 great mockumentary films.

• Winners and finalists of Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Emma Kunz.

• New music: Magnetism by Kali Malone and Drew McDowall.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix 308 by DJ Food.

Daveed Diggs’ favourite albums.

Magnetic Dwarf Reptile (1977) by Chrome | Magnetic North (1998) by Skyray | Feed Me Magnetic Rain (2018) by Cavern Of Anti-Matter

Earwig

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In today’s post, the third feature film by Lucile Hadžihalilović on blu-ray from Anti-Worlds. I’ve been waiting a while to see this one.

Limited edition blu-ray special features

Director supervised presentation of the film
Original 5.1 surround sound
Newly filmed interview with director Lucile Hadžihalilović
Feature length Documentary on the original novel author Brian Catling
“A New Music” – Short documentary about the unique instrument used extensively in the score
Theatrical trailer
Optional English Hard of Hearing subtitles and audio description for the visually impaired
Limited edition exclusive 52-page booklet containing new writing on the film by Anton Bitel, Geoff Cox and Brian Catling, film credits and technical details
O card Limited edition of 500 copies ONLY from the website!

Weekend links 635

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A close-up image of the surface of a soap bubble. The image reveals ‘lipid islands’ of soap floating on a very thin film of water. The film on which the soap floats is so thin that it does not interfere with the light hitting it, therefore allowing the light to pass through. This creates an appearance of a black abyss. Magnification x250.”

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor Press: Everything Keeps Dissolving, Conversations with Coil edited by Nick Soulsby. I helped out a little with this one so I’m looking forward to seeing it. And since the cult fervour around the group remains undiminished, anyone interested in buying a copy is advised to do so sooner rather than later.

• There are over 90 stories in The Complete Short Stories of JG Ballard (quantities vary according to edition) but few of them have been adapted into other media. The Drowned Giant is an exception, an animated short directed by Tim Miller.

• “You could spend your life exploring its dream logic without arriving at a definitive destination.” Anne Billson on the mysteries of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig.

• Meta-mix of the week: links to yearly mixes of favourite ambient releases by A Strangely Isolated Place.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Matchstick cookies keep the flame of tradition alive.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: George A. Romero Day.

Felicia Atkinson’s favourite music.

• RIP Wolfgang Petersen.

Das Boot: Titel (1981) by Klaus Doldinger | Martin (1983) by Soft Cell | Everything Keeps Dissolving (2000) by Coil

Weekend links 625

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Hand (1940) by Jindřich Štyrský.

• “I love very much Symbolist painters like Odilon Redon, Ferdinand Knopf or Léon Spilliaert. Or Nordic European painters such as Munch or Gallen-Kallela. I like the way they often mix nature and mythology. Some Surrealist painters are very inspiring too: De Chirico, Tanguy, Toyen, Styrsky, or Dorothea Tanning, for instance.” Lucile Hadžihalilović talking to Mark Cousins about her new film, Earwig, and her approach to cinema.

• “It was no accident that Mishima chose to experiment with science fiction. It was a genre he had long admired. He adored Arthur C. Clarke, and lavished praise on Godzilla…” Alexander Lee on Yukio Mishima’s sole venture into science fiction, Beautiful Star.

• Old music: Roforofo Fight by Fela Kuti, a great favourite round here, is receiving a 50th anniversary reissue.

Readers of Berlin’s Third Sex were confronted with a whole fête galante of misfits, deviants, and sexual mutineers cavorting on the legal edgelands of society. There’s the “gathering of obviously homosexual princes, counts and barons” discussing Wagner, the women-only ball where a “dark-eyed Carmen sets a jockey aflame”, the drag act burlesquing Isadora Duncan, a café in the city’s north where Jewish lesbians play chess, gaggles of gay labourers meeting up to gossip before tending to their needlework, the Russian baron distributing alms to hustlers in the Tiergarten, a canal-side tavern where soldiers from the nearby barracks find gay men only too willing to pick up their tab, and the encrypted classified ads with which the lonesome and horny sought to make the vast metropolis just a little smaller.

James Conway on the pioneering sexology of Magnus Hirschfeld

• At Aquarium Drunkard: The Miles Davis Septet playing live at Chateau Neuf, Oslo, in 1971.

Industrial Symphony No. 1 by David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti featuring Julee Cruise.

• Mix of the week: Ghosts & Goblins 1 by The Ephemeral Man.

• New music: The Homeland Of Electricity by Scanner.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Pufff.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents Ilse Bing.

• RIP Paula Rego and Julee Cruise.

Teacher Of Electricity (1970) by Old Gold | Electricity (1980) by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark | Night Electricity Theme (2017) by Dean Hurley