The Dukes of Stratosphear – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 675

Lucifer (1890) by Franz Stuck.

• “I wanted to reclaim the word ‘psychonauts’ and take it back into the 19th century, where it describes not only renegades and rebels, but also establishment scientists, doctors, and pillars of the literary establishment. The word that was used at the time was “self-experimenter.” Mike Jay (again) talking to Steve Paulson about psychoactive research and the scientists who taste their own medicine.

• “How did countercultures commune before the internet?” asks J. Hoberman, reviewing Heads Together: Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate, 1965–1973 by David Jacob Kramer.

• At Public Domain Review: Medieval advice concerning the mythical Bonnacon: “the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels”.

• DJ Food unearths posters and badges for The Kaleidoscope, a short-lived Los Angeles music venue of the late 60s.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Gaku Yamazaki has documented thousands of unusual road signs across Japan.

• New music: Psalm013: Unland by Pram of Dogs, and Intimaa by Bana Haffar.

• At Unquiet Things: A sneak peek from the forthcoming The Art of Fantasy.

• The Strange World of…Shirley Collins.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bruce Posner Day.

• Kenneth Anger: a life in pictures.

• RIP Tina Turner.

• Kaleidoscope (1967) by Kaleidoscope (UK) | Kaleidoscope (1984) by Rain Parade | Collideascope (1987) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear

Weekend links 670

An octopus catching a lobster (1894) by Gustav Mützel.

• RIP Barry Humphries. He emailed me a couple of years ago in his capacity as a collector of fin-de-siècle art, hoping I might answer a question about a very obscure artist. If you require justifications for the blogging habit then add this to the list. Humphries’ first book, Bizarre (1965), is a more cerebral counterpart to Charles Addams’ Dear Dead Days, and a compendium of oddities that I’d buy if I ever saw it in a secondhand shop. RIP also to incendiary singer Mark Stewart.

• “Schulz gets compared to Kafka because of his dreamy, disconcerting stories, but in Balint’s book, a version of Schulz emerges that is closer to one of Kafka’s characters—a man on the run who can’t get past the city walls; an artist exiled by a shape-shifting, unknowable tormentor—than to Franz himself.” Leo Lasdun reviewing a new biography of Bruno Schulz by Benjamin Balint.

• “Instead of asking whether an octopus shows aspects of human intelligence, perhaps the better question is whether humans can show aspects of octopus intelligence.” David Borkenhagen on octopuses and what they might teach us about the perception of time.

• “Uproar was my element, I wanted to get people moving, the more they roared, the bolder I became.” The pioneering theatrical performances of Valeska Gert are explored at Strange Flowers.

• Digital copies of albums by the mighty Earth may currently be purchased at the group’s Bandcamp page for $1 each. I’ve got everything already but you may wish to sample something.

• Charles Drazin on the director who dared to tell uncomfortable truths: Lindsay Anderson at 100.

• Steven Heller on Commercial Art, a magazine from the 1920s that chronicled UK design.

• At Unquiet Things: The luminous drama of Frants Diderik Bøe’s bejewelled floral still lifes.

• New music: This Vibrating Earth by Field Lines Cartographer, and Draw/Orb by Extra.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R podcast 796 by Gold Panda.

• The Strange World of…Andrzej Korzynski.

• The Jewel In The Lotus (1974) by Bennie Maupin | Jewel (1985) by Propaganda | Black Jewelled Serpent Of Sound (1985) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear

Weekend links 488

Poster by Zdenek Ziegler for Marketa Lazarová (1966), a film by Frantisek Vlácil.

• I’ve spent the past couple of weeks watching a number of films by Béla Tarr, including his 432-minute masterwork, Sátántangó (1994). The latter was based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, an author who not only worked with Tarr on the screenplay but helped with several of his other features. So this piece by David Schurman Wallace, about a more recent Krasznahorkai novel, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, arrives at just the right moment.

• The Paris Review unlocked its Art of Fiction interview with Italo Calvino. William Weaver and Daniel Pettigrew ask the questions. And at the same site: Ivan Brunetti on the deceptive simplicity of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

• Halloween approaches so Sudip Bose suggests 10 pieces of orchestral music to set the mood. I made a similar list of my own in 2011. Related: Adam Scovell on 10 lesser-known folk horror films.

I thought, “When I grow up, I’m going to be in a group making this kind of music.” Slowly and Shirley, I did grow up and found myself in a group but they weren’t making that kind of music. It was a hole of longing in my guts that I needed to fix.

Andy Partridge, aka Sir John Johns, on his love of psychedelic music and the remixed reissue of the Dukes Of Stratosphear catalogue

• Faye Lessler on how the Internet Archive is digitizing LPs to preserve generations of audio.

• Photographing the Dark: Allison C. Meier on Nadar’s descent into the Paris Catacombs.

• At Wormwoodiana: Go Back at Once, Robert Aickman‘s unpublished second novel.

• Queen of the Flies: Mica Levi talks to Charlie Bridgen about her soundtrack music.

• At Dangerous Minds: Sex, Nazis, and classical music: Ken Russell’s Lisztomania.

• The first new Ghost Box recording artist of 2020 will be…Paul Weller.

• Mix of the week: There’s No Going Back by The Ephemeral Man.

• The Dead Travel Fast: The Gothic Ballad of Lenore in paint.

• Catacombs/Cum Mortuis In Lingua Mortua (1980) by Mussorgsky (George Solti/Chicago SO) | Fade In Hong Kong (1981) by Video Liszt | La Ballade De Lenore (1986) by Shub-Niggurath

Weekend links 349

• Before Stanley Kubrick fixed an image of Alex and his droogs in the popular imagination, artists could get away with playing on the threat of biker gangs as Wilson McLean does in this vaguely psychedelic cover from 1969. (McLean’s interpretation may possibly derive from a 1965 edition.) LibraryThing has a collection of Clockwork Orange covers from around the world which run the gamut of cogs, orange hues and variations on David Pelham’s famous Penguin design from 1972. Meanwhile, AL Kennedy celebrates 100 years of Anthony Burgess by examining the writer’s career as a whole, although the web feature still manages to get a photo of Malcolm McDowell in there.

• “Even bad books can change lives,” says Phil Baker reviewing The Outsider by Colin Wilson and Beyond the Robot, a Wilson biography by Gary Lachman. I wouldn’t call The Outsider a bad book but Wilson’s more wayward opinions (and later works) are best treated with scepticism.

• “Murtaugh refers to his subject’s ‘pervasive sense of doom’ and Welch himself speaks of ‘the extraordinary sadness of everything.'” David Pratt reviewing Good Night, Beloved Comrade: The Letters of Denton Welch to Eric Oliver, edited by Daniel J. Murtaugh.

• At The Quietus this week: Tinariwen bassist Eyadou Ag Leche is interviewed by Richie Troughton, Jane Weaver unveils a new song from her forthcoming album, Modern Kosmology, and Danny Riley explores the strange world of Ben Chasny.

• “A micro-history of cultural gatekeeping: once told by the censors what we may read, then by critics what we should, we are now told merely what we can read.” Ben Roth writing against the use of “readability” as a literary value.

• Yayoi Kusama’s amazing infinity rooms are at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, until May. For the rest of us, Peter Murphy’s panoramic photo is still online.

• More music: my friends Watch Repair have become visible enough to be interviewed by an Argentinian website. The group’s Bandcamp page recently made three new releases available.

• Yet more music: They Walk Among Us, a new song and video by Barry Adamson, and Anymore, a new song and video by Goldfrapp.

• Earth and The Bug announce Concrete Desert, a collaborative album inspired by Los Angeles and the fiction of JG Ballard.

• Bad Books for Bad People: Episode 7: The Incal – Epic French Space-Opera Comics.

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 589 by Aisha Devi, and Secret Thirteen Mix 212 by Qual.

• Eduardo Paolozzi‘s forays into fashion and furnishings.

• Cooking with Vincent [Price]

• Moroccan Tape Stash

• Tin Toy Clockwork Train (1986) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear | Clock (1995) by Node | Clockwork Horoscope (2009) by Belbury Poly

The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!

25 O’Clock (1985). Andy Partridge’s great cover design.

The DUKES say it’s time…it’s time to visit the planet smile…it’s time the love bomb was dropped…it’s time to eat music…it’s time to kiss the sun…it’s time to drown yourself in SOUNDGASM and it’s time to dance through the mirror. The DUKES declare it’s 25 O’CLOCK.

It was twenty-five years today—April 1st, 1985—that Virgin Records released what was supposed to be a reissue of a lost psychedelic album from the late 1960s, 25 O’Clock by The Dukes of Stratosphear. The catalogue number was WOW 1 and the vinyl label was printed with the old black-and-white Virgin logo by Roger Dean even though Virgin Records wasn’t founded until 1972. No one was supposed to know that the album was really a pastiche project by XTC but I don’t recall anyone actually being fooled by this, all the reviews acknowledged XTC as the originators, and band members Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding were happy to give interviews enthusing about their musical obsessions. As well as being incredibly successful artistically the album was a surprising commercial success which led the bemused record label to ask for a sequel. Psonic Psunspot followed two years later, and the Dukes’ vibe infected XTC’s own work for a while, with their 1988 album, Oranges & Lemons, pitched somewhere between the pastiches and XTC’s more usual sound .

Psonic Psunspot (1987). Design by Dave Dragon and Ken Ansell.

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