Pye Corner Audio – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 826

Hexa (1971) by Victor Vasarely.

• New music of the week is Tape 05, three minutes from Boards Of Canada following their thirteen-year silence, which was released on Thursday after several days of the group and their record label teasing a comeback with mysterious VHS cassettes and cryptic posters. I’ve been listening to the Sandison brothers’ discography for most of the week while trying to get a major illustration commission finished; this revelation has been the icing on a deteriorated, over-processed cake. I’m now looking forward to whatever emerges next.

• The Long London Uncovered: Alan Moore (again) and Iain Sinclair (again) in conversation. Alan’s second novel in the Long London cycle, I Hear A New World, will be published next month.

• RIP Chris Mullen. Not a name that most will recognise but Mullen’s sprawling website, The Visual Telling of Stories, has been linked here on many occasions. A remarkable resource.

• More new music: Boots On The Ground by Massive Attack, Tom Waits; Angel Lost by Luca Formentini; Phaser For The Ocean, Chorus For The Moon by Hatchback.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Sensual Laboratories, Light Shows, Experimental, Film and Psychedelic Art by Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

• At Public Domain Review: “A beautiful purplish hue”: Frank Dudley Beane’s experience with ergot and Cannabis Indica (1884).

• Mixes of the week: An Invisible Jukebox mix for Irmin Schmidt at The Wire; and DreamScenes – April 2026 at Ambientblog.

• At The Quietus: Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) discuss their love of hiking.

• At Film Quarterly: Elinor Dolliver on the surprising folklore of analogue horror.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Gilway Paradox.

• The Strange World of…Spacemen 3.

• Tape Kebab (1974) by Can | The Attic Tapes (1975/6) by Cabaret Voltaire | The Black Mill Video Tape (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 802

November (1879) by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

• As usual, the first links in November are heavy with the spirit of Halloween. At the BFI: Zombies in the Lake District: how locations from The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue look today; Adam Scovell looks back at one of the more curious zombie films of the 1970s, a Spanish/Italian production directed by Jorge Grau in and around my home city. Also at the BFI: Georgina Guthrie selects 10 great erotic horror films.

• “We must recognise that reality without mystery is impossible.” In a recently digitised film clip, René Magritte is interviewed (in French) by Belgian TV in 1961.

• The Italian edition of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is out now from Panini. Thanks to Smoky Man for posting photos!

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Short Fiction by Saki.

• At Smithsonian Mag: Elizabeth Djinis explains how an Italian town came to be known as the “City of Witches”.

• New music: The Whole Woman by Anna von Hausswolff ft. Iggy Pop; Forces, Reactions, Deflections by Scanner.

• RIP Jack DeJohnette, jazz drummer; Prunella Scales, actor; Peter Watkins, film-maker.

• Space Type Generator

• Algiers November 1, 1954 (1965) by Ennio Morricone | November Sequence (2011) by Pye Corner Audio | Richter: November (2019) by Mari Samuelsen

Weekend links 778

Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (c. 1470–75) by Martin Schongauer.

• “Physique was a response to restrictions and laws that kept photographers on a short leash, and what made it lively was they were constantly pulling at that leash.” Vince Aletti discussing Physique, his new book about the history of homoerotic photography. There’s more homoerotica at the latest Vallots After Dark art auction.

• Mentioned here before, but I was reminded of the place last week: 366 Weird Movies, “Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!”

• “When the gods and goddesses of the great religions first emerged, they came into a world already populated with daimons.” David Gordon White on the many lives of Eurasian daimonology.

• At The Wire: Read an extract from Studio Electrophonique: The Sheffield Space Age From The Human League To Pulp.

• At Public Domain Review: Gilded Fish—Illustrations from Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780).

• SFJAZZ Digital Media Archive: “…over 2,000 recordings of jazz, world, folk, and roots artists”.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2025 at Ambientblog.

• New music: Lake Deep Memory by Pye Corner Audio.

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

• Ella Guru (1970) by Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band | Ella Megalast Burls Forever (1988) by Cocteau Twins | Ella (1996) by Faust

Weekend links 747

Eden Flag with Solar-Anal Emblems and Hexes (2017) by Elijah Burgher.

• A note for regular readers that I’ll be in London for a couple of days next week, so the weekend post may be delayed by a day, if it arrives at all. I’ll be attending this event at The Century Club, Shaftsbury Avenue, a talk about The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which will be published here and in the USA a few days from now. I’m told that copies of the book will be on sale if anyone wishes me to sign a copy.

• “Published two years before André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), which delineated the contours of the capital-S Surrealism movement, Les Malheurs represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence.” Daisy Sainsbury on Les Malheurs des immortels (1922) by Paul Éluard and Max Ernst.

• “It has been two decades since Japan’s tidying boom began, and the nation remains as cluttered as ever. I know this because I live here.” Matt Alt in a long read exploring the Japanese cultivation of clutter. Don’t be shamed by minimalist interiors.

…with the Bumper Book, we wanted to present what we hope are lucid, coherent and joined-up ideas on how and why the concept of magic originated and developed over the millennia, a theoretical basis for how it might conceivably work along with suggestions as to how it might practically be employed—and, perhaps most radically, a social reason for magic’s existence as a means of transforming and improving both our individual worlds, and the greater human world of which we are components. And we wanted to deliver this in a way that reflected the colourful, psychedelic, profound and sometimes very funny nature of the magical experience itself. That, we felt, would be the biggest and most useful rabbit to pull out of the near-infinite top hat that we believe magic to be.

Alan Moore talking to Rob Salkowitz about the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

• “When it comes to pure cinematic terror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has no equal,” says Mat Colegate. I’d avoid being quite so definitive but it’s a film I’d put in a list of my favourite cinematic horrors.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

• At The Quietus: Lara Rix-Martin on the heavy existentialism of Soviet science fiction. Previously: Zone music.

• New music: Decimation Of I by Meemo Comma.

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

• Hex (1971) by Gil Mellé | Hex (1978) by Jon Hassell | Hexden Channel (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 745

Eros (1905) by Julius Kronberg.

• At the Internet Archive (for a change): All 15 episodes (with English subs) of Návštevníci (The Visitors, 1983/84), a Czech comedy TV serial about time travellers visiting the present day. Directed by Jindrich Polák, better known for the serious science fiction of Ikarie XB-1 and another time-travelling comedy, Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea. The main interest for this viewer is the involvement of Jan Švankmajer who creates collage animation for the first episode while animating food and other objects in later episodes. This was the period when Švankmajer was mainly working as an effects man at the Barrandov Studios after the Communist authorities had put a stop to his film-making. Even with Švankmajer’s involvement I’m not sure I can endure 450 minutes of Czech wackiness but it’s good to keep finding these things.

• “…for the melomaniac who wasn’t in and around Bristol in the 1980s or 90s, the term [trip hop] simply opens the door to a whole universe of music that blurs the lines between so many styles in a way that is still compelling three decades on.” Vanessa Okoth-Obbo on the 30th anniversary of Protection by Massive Attack.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Moon’s Milk: Images By Jhonn Balance, compiled by Peter Christopherson & Andrew Lahman.

For some in Ireland, [The Outcasts] is a dim but impressive memory, glimpsed on late-night television during its only broadcast in 1984. The Outcasts over the decades became a piece of Irish cinema legend, less seen and more peppered into conversations revolving around obscure celluloid. The Irish Film Institute describes this film as “folk horror”, a phrase I find too liberally applied these days to just about anything featuring sticks, rocks, and goats or set in the countryside. The Outcasts does not necessarily strive for the ultimate unified effect of horror. Instead, this film is of a rarer breed, more akin to Penda’s Fen (1974) in its otherworldly ruminations. I’ve come to prefer the phrase “folk revelation” as perhaps a more accommodating description for these sorts of stories. Whatever the case, I hope you get to see this remarkable film.

Brian Showers discussing the contents of The Green Book 24, newly published by Swan River Press. The Outcasts has just been released on blu-ray by the BFI

• Still casting a spell: Broadcast’s 20 best songs – ranked!

• New music: Earthly Pleasures by Jill Fraser.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: John Carpenter‘s Day.

• RIP Maggie Smith.

• The Visitors (1981) by ABBA | Two Different Visitors (2003) by World Standard & Wechsel Garland | We Have Visitors (2010) by Pye Corner Audio