Sunn O))) – { 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 818

The Bookworm (no date) by Arthur Paunzen.

• New Cabaret Voltaire: Nag Nag Nag (Live 2025 Single Edit). Good to hear they’ve reinstated the Patrick Moore dialogue sample, something that’s on the studio version but usually missing from live recordings. The single is a trailer for a forthcoming album based on the group’s recent anniversary tour.

• The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981), a wacky Czech comedy, one of many directed by Oldřich Lipský. With a story by Jules Verne, music by Luboš Fišer, and steampunk props by Jan Švankmajer.

• More new music: Butch’s Guns by Sunn O))); Sidings by Craven Faults; Frequencies In The Fog by Rod Modell.

What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call “containers for attention”—bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible—and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture. Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem, says librarian Carlo Iacono

• At Colossal: “Striking photos by Peter Li capture the soaring majesty of sacred spaces.”

• At Public Domain Review: The Eight Horses of King Mu, Son of Heaven (ca. 1300).

• At the BFI: Brogan Morris selects 10 great political thrillers.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Roland Topor’s Brain.

• RIP Robert Duvall and Tom Noonan.

• The Book Lovers (1997) by Broadcast | Tiny Golden Books (2000) by Coil | Library Of Solomon Book 2 (2011) by Demdike Stare

Weekend links 813

Dwellers of the Sea (1962) by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Conan Stories by Robert E. Howard.

• At Colossal: “Uncanny personalities appear from nature in Malene Hartmann Rasmussen’s ceramics.”

• New music: Glory Black by Sunn O))); Through Lands Of Ghosts by Foster Neville; Sirenoscape by NIMF.

If we insist that art functions as a tool for promoting a limited set of political principles, what happens when an ideology that doesn’t share our values sweeps into power? Learning to engage with complexity is a necessary skill if we are ever to drag ourselves out of the puerile swamp of the culture wars. But if we continue to reduce art to moralistic soundbites, we will only succeed in stripping it of its capacity to transform us, which would be a huge loss. Art can help us to better understand ourselves, and the world we live in, by expressing those things that words cannot. It exposes us to a vast range of experiences, and asks us to sit with the fundamental ambivalences, moral complexities and conflicting emotions that are a part and parcel of being human.

Rosanna McLaughlin on attempts to make art of the past reflect the moral platitudes of the present

• Strange Attractor is having a winter sale with 30% off all its available titles.

• At the BFI: Miriam Balanescu selects 10 great filmmaker biopics.

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

• The Strange World of…Free Jazz & Improvised Music.

• Free (1991) by Mazzy Star | The Free Design (1999) by Stereolab | Everything Is Free (2001) by Gillian Welch

Weekend links 698

Contained Maze (1966) by Michael Ayrton.

• At Public Domain Review: Skeletons (1692) by Ikkyu, a Japanese monk, whose book is “a mixture of poetry and prose that comes down to us in printed editions supposedly replicating a manuscript, now lost, by the monk’s own hand. The text describes a series of visions of animated skeletons that Ikkyu had when he visited an abandoned temple. The lively illustrations testify to their maker’s sardonic sense of humour: he images skeletons dancing, drumming, drinking sake, having sex.”

• At The Daily Heller: Victor Moscoso’s Psychedelic Valedictory Exhibit. The exhibition will be at the Instituto Cervantes in New York City which has an accompanying 224-page catalogue of Moscoso’s posters and other designs.

• More Moscoso: Color (1971) and Moscoso Comix (1989), free to download at the Internet Archive. Moscoso’s underground comics experimented with the form in a manner that still looks radical today.

Drone and ambient metal is often invoked in elemental terms. There is something antediluvian and beyond about it. Pierce the earth’s crust, and there is liquid fire, ever so slowly shifting the tectonic plates we inhabit. Such music is envisaged as massive and totally beyond our control. It infuses the foundations of civilization. As Attila Csihar intones on Sunn O))) track ‘Aghartha’, named for a legendary subterranean kingdom: “Into the memories of the consciousness of ancient rocks/ Nature’s answer to eternal question”.

Stripped of the trappings of modern pop and rock, ambient metal invites a search for answers to the bigger questions. Ancient musical modes are resurfaced to get us closer to a putative godhead.

Dan Franklin on Earth 2, the deceptively-titled debut album by Earth. The album’s 30th anniversary has prompted a collection of remixes, Earth 2.23, by various artists

• At Spoon & Tamago: Download over 30 butterfly designs by Meiji-era artist Yuho Tanaka.

• New music: HYbr:ID II by Alva Noto, and The View From Vega by Benge.

• The winners of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2023.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Guy Maddin Day (restored/expanded).

• A happy 20th birthday to Swan River Press.

• Industrial Landscape (1980) by Marc Barreca | Desolate Landscape (2012) by John Zorn | Primordial Landscape (2013) by Patrick Cowley

Weekend links 599

Taarna by Chris Achilleos for Heavy Metal, September 1981. A typical piece by Achilleos, whose death was announced this week, and very typical for a Heavy Metal cover. Achilleos was a prolific illustrator.

• New music: The Truth, the Glow, the Fall (Live At Montreux) by Anna von Hausswolff, from her forthcoming album, Live At Montreux Jazz Festival. The last gig I went to was in October 2019, to see Sunn O))) supported by Anna von Hausswolff. Easily one of the best things I’ve ever experienced. Meanwhile, Anna von Hausswolff has had to cancel a Paris church concert following protests by a rabble of outraged Catholics. Bravo les crétins!

• “…it is easy to forget that Montesquiou—regardless of his own work—was not merely emblematic of Decadence, he was essentially patient zero in its viral spread.” Strange Flowers explores the exquisite life of the bat-obsessed, hydrangea-cultivating Robert de Montesquiou.

• “Kotatsu have been around longer than we imagine. And art history has the proof.” Spoon & Tamago on an old Japanese method for warming a room during winter. Also further evidence that cats always find the warmest place in any house.

• Dennis Cooper‘s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2021. Thanks again for the link here!

• The Wire magazine has opened its collection of articles by the late Greg Tate so they may be read by non-subscribers.

• “Neil Bartlett is a gay writer’s gay writer,” says Jeremy Atherton Lin reviewing Bartlett’s latest, Address Book.

• James Balmont on the psychedelic cinema of Nobuhiko Obayashi.

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

• Northern lights photographer of the year.

• The Strange World of…Takuroku.

• RIP Robbie Shakespeare.

• Robbie Shakespeare’s bass x 3: King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (1974) by Augustus Pablo | Nightclubbing (1981) by Grace Jones | Bass And Trouble (1985) by Sly & Robbie