Mark Valentine – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 851

Amber Light, a print by Phil Greenwood.

• “When I heard the term industrial music, I mistook it for techno and soon learned it was not.” Steven Heller talks to Chris Grimley and Alan Rapp about Industrial Music/Graphics: A Visual History of a Movement.

• Halloween approaches, as does Ghosts on the Cam. Editor Robert Lloyd Parry talks to Swan River Press about his latest story collection.

• “There we were, and we could be naked”: Stanley Stellar’s photographs are a record of gay life in New York from the 1970s onwards.

She researched cultures in which dreams delivered prophetic truth-telling messages from a higher plane. Like splashes and blots, dreams emanated from hidden forces, perhaps of the human mind, perhaps not. She had a metaphysical belief in their potential to put her in touch with supernatural beings, not angels or demons in any religious sense, nor the fairies or phantoms of popular belief, but spirits posited by mystical systems such as astrology and alchemy, otherworldly manifestations raised by enchanters and magi who had developed means of contacting them.

Marina Warner in a lengthy appraisal of the occult and Surrealist obsessions of Ithell Colquhoun

• The October catalogue of lots for the After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn, etc.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the house that vanished, a literal ghost house.

• At Colossal: “Amok Island’s geometric murals teem with vibrant local flora and fauna”.

• At Public Domain Review: The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677).

• New music: Trinitatis by Deaf Center; Ancient Future by Bana Haffar.

• Old music: Metal & Flesh by Hard Corps receives another reissue.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2026 at Ambientblog.

• “My one political film”: Ken Russell on The Devils.

• RIP Matt Howarth and Eva Marie Saint.

• Amber (1980) by The Residents | Amber (1996) by Little Axe | Amber (1996) by Zoviet France

Weekend links 850

Peacock Mandala (no date) by Judith Drury.

• A few links related to my own activities this week. Firstly, the mix of the week is a guest mix I put together for The Invisible College. I haven’t made a properly mixed mix for a while. This one was made with Audacity, an application that’s free, open source and multi-platform. Secondly, there’s the news that Ghosts on the Cam, another collection of spectral tales compiled by Robert Lloyd Parry, will be published by Swan River Press in December. I’ll have more to say about my cover art for the book at a later date. And on the subject of cover art, my cover for The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rowntree is being reused by Planeta9 for a Czech edition of the novel.

• Halloween approaches. At Wormwoodiana Mark Valentine looks at the first modern ghost story anthology, The Ghost Book edited by Cynthia Asquith, which was published 100 years ago this month.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “The Icebergs is one of Frederic Edwin Church’s most spectacular paintings. For decades, no one knew where it was.”

• New music: Passage by Chris Meyer’s Alias Zone featuring Robert Rich; Window To Askoy by Strugatsky Brothers.

• RIP Mighty Sparrow. Related: Two hours of Mighty Sparrow’s music at The Explorer’s Room.

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams chooses 10 great South Korean science-fiction films.

• At Nautilus: This obscure 1960s guide to LSD holds up. Kristen French reports.

• At Colossal: The painted mandalas of Mu Pan.

• The Strange World of…Steve Reich.

• Bastardica

• Mandala (1973) by Stomu Yamash’ta’s Red Buddha Theatre | Mandala (1980) by Fondation | Sand Mandala (1997) by Philip Glass

Weekend links 832

Dark Corridor (1990s) by Unknown Artist.

• “I greatly enjoyed this rich, allusive and strange text, which has affinities to the literary form and style of TS Eliot, David Jones and Iain Sinclair, uniting high modernism with demotic and pulp elements, as well as to the occult thrillers of Charles Williams, Mary Butts and others.” Mark Valentine reviews B-Movie: Serial of Seven Stars by Andrew Duncan.

• New music: Electronic Meditation For Inner Space Travel by Studio Kosmische; Fathom Tides by Werner Dafeldecker & Lawrence English; rust/wave by Tewksbury.

• At Public Domain Review: Animal, Vegetable, Lamb: Thom Sliwowski on the history of the mysterious Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

• At Door of Perception: Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor, as photographed by Neil Burnell.

• Anne Billson selects 20 of the best corridors in film.

• More corridors: Scificorridorarchive.

• Ukrainian animation.

• RIP Sonny Rollins.

• Current Rothko

• The Black Corridor (1973) by Hawkwind | Corridor (2018) by Steve Jansen | Spectral Corridor Part 4 (2021) by The House In The Woods

Weekend links 788

The Witches’ Flight (1798) by Francisco Goya.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews the latest book from Tartarus, a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa by R.B. Russell. You don’t hear much about Rampa today but, as Mark says, old copies of his books have for many years been common sights on the Spiritualism/Occult shelves of British bookshops. Rampa wasn’t a Tibetan monk as he claimed in his first book, The Third Eye, but a very non-Tibetan Englishman, Cyril Henry Hoskin, whose stories about his early years evolved following press investigations into a claim of being possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan doctor named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Hoskin maintained the Rampa persona for the rest of his life, writing many more books about the mystic East, as well as accounts of his contact with the planet Venus and his psychic connection with his Siamese cat. The Rampa books were very popular in the 1960s—my mother had three or four of them—despite continual accusations that their author was a fraud.

• New music: The Hadronic Seeress And Other Wyrd Tales by The Wyrding Module; Master Builder by Xeeland; Resurrection Of The Foghorns by Everyday Dust.

• The twelfth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Rivers of galaxies: Mark Neyrinck on the cosmic web and other metaphors that describe the largest structures in the Universe.

• “Curation becomes subservient to metrics.” Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Erica Ward presents Tokyo as a living, breathing organism.

• At the BFI: Chloe Walker chooses 10 great films by one-time directors.

• At Unquiet Things: How Yuko Shimizu rewires ancient stories.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Jana Thork.

• RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

• Web Weaver (1974) by Hawkwind | The Web (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire | Web (1992) by Brian Eno

Weekend links 780

An early illustration by Burne Hogarth from Federal Illustrator, Winter 1931–1932, credited to the artist’s original name, Bernard Spinoza Ginsburg. (Via)

• RIP Simon House, a musician whose death was announced in the same week as news of a remixed edition of Hall Of The Mountain Grill by Hawkwind, the first of the group’s albums to feature House on violin and keyboards. House’s keyboards made a considerable difference to Hawkwind’s sound, expanding the range of their songwriting; the melodramatic scale of Assault And Battery/The Golden Void wouldn’t have been possible without those massed Mellotrons. Post-Hawkwind it was House’s violin that was sought after during his time as a session musician, on songs like Yassassin by David Bowie, and Talking Drum by Japan. He’s also one of the musicians credited on Thomas Dolby’s biggest hit, She Blinded Me With Science (violin again), although his contribution there is easy to mistake for a synthesizer.

• “We did want the name to be weighty and metal-related because it is a kind of a metal band. So what is heavy and what is metal: that was the answer.” Hildur Guðnadóttir talking about Osmium, an experimental quartet comprising Guðnadóttir with James Ginzburg, Rully Shabara and Sam Slater.

• At Criterion: Stephanie Zacharek on Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, films from a time “when delighting audiences meant more than catering to the predetermined whims of a dogged fandom”.

• The week in maps: At Public Domain Review, Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (ca. 1920 edition); at Nautilus, the first maps of the Earth’s magnetic field.

• The eleventh installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Not on any map: Mark Valentine describes the time he tried to buy a phantom island from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

• At Colossal: “In surreal portraits, Rafael Silveira tends to the garden of consciousness“.

• New music: Osmium by Osmium, and Along The Wind Spear by Survey Channel.

• Anne Billson chooses Anjelica Huston’s ten best roles.

• Owls in Towels

• Five Owls (1970) by Canned Heat | Night Owl (1996) by System 7 | Owls And Flowers (2006) by Belbury Poly