{music} – Page 32 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 669

Love (1973), a poster by Nicole Claveloux.

• “Warner Brothers had been keen on a Rolling Stones movie. Jagger was keen on being a movie star. But Donald Cammell’s script was no Beatles’ jolly japes musical comedy…” Des Barry examines the ninth minute of Cammell & Roeg’s Performance.

• “…part of what made his 1970s work so original was the degree to which his band cross-pollinated guitar with synthesizer.” Aquarium Drunkard explores the esoteric jazz-rock of Steve Hillage.

• Magma, the cosmic jazz-rock group from France, have been around for 50 years without making a music video. Hakëhn Deïs is their first.

There was half-Tarkovsky embedded in async, “Solari” and “Stakra” and “Walker”, a hand outstretched to those great poems of living and light that we call films. “I had a strange dream last night,” Andrey Tarkovsky wrote in one of the diary entries collected in Instant Light, “I was looking up at the sky and it was very, very light and soft; and high, high above me it seemed to be slowly boiling, like light that had materialised like the fibres of a sunlit fabric, like silken living stitches in a piece of Japanese embroidery.”

David Toop remembers Ryuichi Sakamoto

• “Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station…”

• The Electrifying Dreamworld of The Green Hand: Dan Clowes on the comic-art of Nicole Claveloux.

• At Bandcamp: Andy Thomas on the post-punk pop subversion of David Cunningham.

• At Unquiet Things: An enigmatic baroness and her collection of skulls.

• New music: River Of Dreams by Romance & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ray Gun.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – April 2023.

• RIP Al Jaffee.

• Skulls Of Broken Hill (1996) by Bill Laswell | The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (2008) by Earth | Black Skulls (2018) by Jóhann Jóhannsson

Kris Guidio, 1953–2023

A self-portrait, 2011.

Farewell to the artist I used to refer to as my partner in art-crime. We weren’t really criminals but in the 1990s we’d both seen our published works for Savoy Books condemned as obscene in British courts of law, a farcical set of circumstances looking back, although it all seemed serious enough while it was happening. Kris and I began working for Savoy in the late 1980s, during which time our creative confederacy might be characterised as familiarity at a distance. He lived in Liverpool, and generally remained there, while the rest of us were in Manchester, so I saw his drawings much more than I saw him in person. I don’t think I ever met him more than 10 times in 30 years, yet his art was as familiar as my own, especially when I was being called upon to add backgrounds to some of his figures. I even ended up making a font based on the lettering he used in his comic strips in order to standardise the captions in the later books.

Kris and I shared a symbiotic relationship with writer David Britton, who pushed the pair of us to take our art into places we might otherwise have avoided, while we opened up artistic possibilities for Dave’s characters and the settings they occupied. We were an ideal team in this respect, each of us having strengths in different areas that suited the titles on which we worked. I brought a greater sense of realism to the Lord Horror comics, while Kris developed a hitherto unexplored flair for satire and caricature in the Meng & Ecker series. Kris was a natural cartoonist, as well as a natural humorist to a degree you wouldn’t have predicted looking at his early strips and illustrations featuring The Cramps.

The Meng & Ecker comics provoked the ire of the authorities, thanks in part to Dave’s frequent digs at the Greater Manchester Police, but there was a lot more to Kris’s art than outrage, a quality which is always easy to generate if you push the right buttons. His Cramps strips are gems of that minor form, the rock’n’roll comic, while his later illustrations for the La Squab character had a lightness of touch that suited Dave’s conception of a world where fairy tales and childhood fantasies collide with adult themes and sensibilities. Kris’s art was analogue to the last (I don’t think he ever owned a computer), drawn with whatever pens he had to hand; watercolour-hued, and fuelled by endless cigarettes. Kris in person was generous, witty, and erudite in the autodidactic manner common to all at Savoy. Remote or not, we’ll miss him here.

Further reading:
• Sinister Legends (1988)
• The Adventures of Meng & Ecker (1997)
• Fuck Off and Die (2005)
• La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz (2012)

Continue reading “Kris Guidio, 1953–2023”

Weekend links 668

The Drowned Cathedral (1929) by MC Escher.

• “All Saints’ was the last of the seven parish churches to fall headlong into the waves. The drowned church was doomed to lie in a gulley not far out to sea, a habitat for sponges and crabs, and yet it lives on, unvanquishable; for—as the story of Britain’s lost cities, ghost towns, and vanished villages tells us—what has disappeared beneath the sea can rebuild itself in the mind.” Matthew Green explores the history of Dunwich, Suffolk.

• “Why do certain artists endure and become (dread word) ‘iconic’, while some are forgotten or sidelined or only grudgingly acknowledged?” Ian Penman talking to Jeremy Allen about his new book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: A new edition of England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan’s study of the lives and music of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93.

• “What is electronic music?” Daphne Oram, Desmond Briscoe and David Cain of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop are here to explain.

• “Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis.”

• New music: Timespan by Majeure, and Microdosing by African Head Charge.

• “Future of Borges estate in limbo as widow doesn’t leave will.”

• Arooj Aftab’s favourite albums.

• Paperback Covers on Tumblr.

• The Engulfed Cathedral (1974) by Tomita | Engulfed Cathedral (1981) by John Carpenter | La Cathédrale Engloutie (2003) by Sora

B-2 Unit by Ryuichi Sakamoto

RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto. I bought quite a few of his albums over the years but these are only a small fraction of his huge and diverse discography; Discogs lists 116 albums recorded solo or in collaboration with other artists. B-2 Unit, released in 1980, was the first one I discovered, and it’s still a great favourite. The CD shown here was a replacement for a secondhand vinyl copy I bought circa 1982, at a time when albums by Japanese artists were often hard to find unless you could afford expensive imports. As with albums on German labels such as Brain and Sky, if you saw anything like this secondhand you grabbed it, even if the artists were a complete mystery.

Design (after El Lissitzky) by Takeo Aizawa and Tsuguya Inoue.

Sakamoto wasn’t a mystery—I was already listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra and some of the other people he’d worked with—but I wasn’t sure what to expect from a solo release, especially one with such an enigmatic title. B-2 Unit turned out to be closer to the more experimental post-punk albums than anything by YMO: jerky rhythms, scratchy guitar, atonal electronics, distorted vocals, offbeat songs, plus that staple of post-punk music, dialogue samples from TV and radio. Subsequent interviews revealed that Sakamoto had arrived in London with the intention of making a dub (or dub-style) album like the one Andy Partridge released as Take Away/The Lure Of Salvage, hence the credits on B-2 Unit for both dub producer Dennis Bovell, who engineered some of the recording, and Partridge himself, the presence of the latter seeming very unusual at the time, as well as being hard to locate in the music when two guitarists are credited. (YMO ally Kenji Omura is the other guitarist. Andy Partridge apparently gave Sakamoto a tape of those scratchy guitar lines which were then dropped into the recordings.) The dub influence is most evident on E3-A, and the album’s stand-out track and only single, Riot In Lagos, a piece which sounds like an electronic composition deconstructing itself while it plays. The minimal documentation means it can be hard to tell who did what on the album but I’d be surprised if Hideki Matsutake hadn’t helped with the programming, if not the deconstruction, of Riot In Lagos. Matsutake was the synth programmer for YMO, he’s often referred to as the fourth member of the group, yet you never see his name mentioned in discussion of B-2 Unit. As for Sakamoto, he never did anything like this again. His experimental side still came to the fore now and then, especially the superb run of albums and EPs he recorded with Alva Noto, but his solo work during the 1980s and 90s was increasingly commercial, on albums over-burdened with international guests. For a taste of his less commercial side, here’s an improvisation with Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) in Philip Johnson’s Glass House, recorded one evening while the daylight was fading.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zen-Gun and The Zen Gun
• El Lissitzky record covers

New Wave Strangeness: Hawkwind’s Calvert years

Antique badges not included.

My weekend has been spent immersed in Days Of The Underground, the latest box of Hawkwind albums from Cherry Red Records. I’d avoided many of the earlier sets but this one was irresistible for being a 10-disc collection (8 CDs and 2 blu-rays), the core of which is three of the four albums recorded by the group for the Charisma label–Quark, Strangeness And Charm (1977), 25 Years On (credited to Hawklords, 1978), and PXR 5 (1979)–with all three albums being given the Steven Wilson remix treatment. The studio material is complemented by further Wilson mixes of live recordings and alternate takes, plus demo tracks (previously available but I didn’t have them). You also get three bonus video clips: Hawkwind (minus Dave Brock) playing the Quark single on Marc Bolan’s TV show in 1977, together with two promo films from the 1978 Hawklords concert at Brunel University. Absent from the set is the group’s first album for Charisma, Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (1976), also the two singles that were released that year. I’ve not seen any explanation for these omissions but reasons may include the uneven quality of the music (recorded shortly before the group imploded), and Dave Brock’s lasting dislike of the album.

Cover design by Hipgnosis; photography by Peter Christopherson with graphics by Geoff Halpin. Aubrey Powell says that Robert Calvert commissioned this one after the pair met each other at a party. The photography made use of the interior of Battersea Power Station in the same year that Hipgnosis used the building for a rather more famous album cover.

Steven Wilson did a great job of remixing the Warrior On The Edge Of Time album so I had high hopes for this set, hopes that have been substantially fulfilled. Many of the adjustments are individually minor–boosted bass, more prominent keyboards, some extended intros–but taken together they offer a refreshed experience of three very familiar albums. The packaging has been well-designed by the estimable Phil Smee with a booklet that presents a snapshot of the graphics produced for the group during this period, not only album artwork but also posters, ads and pages from the tour programmes. As a bonus there’s a small reproduction of the 1977 tour poster, a welcome inclusion since I used to own an original one of these which I’ve either misplaced or lost altogether. The attention to detail extends to the animated graphics of the blu-ray interface; when the Quark album is playing you can watch sparks dancing around the control room. The Marc Bolan TV appearance was something I’d seen many times before (including its original broadcast) but the live Hawklords films are revelatory when there’s so little footage of the band from the 1970s with synched sound. The performances of PSI Power and 25 Years offer a frustratingly brief taste of Robert Calvert’s magnetic stage presence, and make me hope that a video of the entire concert may be released eventually.

Cover art by Philip Tonkyn.

Robert Calvert is the key figure here, to a degree that Hawkwind’s Charisma years are also known as the Calvert years, this being the period when the group’s part-time lyricist, occasional singer and conceptual contributor graduated to lead vocalist and songwriter. Calvert’s new role as front man changed Hawkwind from an ensemble of underground freaks into a more typical rock group, albeit one with a very theatrical singer prone to changing outfits to suit the songs, and with props that included a loudhailer, a machine-gun (fake) and a sabre (real). The songs became shorter and, in places, poppier, although none of the singles managed to repeat the chart success of the Calvert-penned Silver Machine. Nevertheless, Brock and Calvert were a great song-writing team, and the lyrics that Calvert wrote from 1976 to 1978 are better than anything else in the discography: witty, alliterative, and filled with clever rhymes that range widely in their subject matter, from the usual science-fiction fare to Calvert’s own obsessions, especially aircraft and flying. Calvert’s approach to science fiction was more sophisticated than the freaks-in-space approach of the group’s UA years. You get a sense of this from his contributions to the Space Ritual album (only Calvert would have known what an orgone accumulator was), but his Charisma songs go much further, condensing whole novels—Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley and Jack of Shadows, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—while maintaining the spirit of the New Wave of SF, where the emphasis was as much on inner as outer space.

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