{music} – Page 34 – { feuilleton }

The Dillons at Caedmon

L. Frank Baum: Queen Zixi Of Ix (Or The Story Of The Magic Cloak) Read By Ray Bolger (1977).

There’s a lot you could write about illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon. They were very prolific for a start, creating many book covers and interior illustrations in a variety of styles and different media. They also maintained a long-running association with Harlan Ellison whose praise for the pair was never less than fulsome. Like Bob Pepper and other versatile illustrators, they created art for album covers as well as books, with regular commissions from Caedmon Records, a label that specialises in spoken-word recordings.

Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass Read By Ed Begley (1959).

During the time the Dillons were working for Caedmon most of the label’s releases were on vinyl, a format that tended to restrict the readings to poetry, short stories or extracts from novels and plays. The format was limited for writers and listeners but beneficial for book illustrators, giving them a larger canvas to work on. These examples are a small selection of the Dillons’ output, more of which may be seen at Discogs. Not everything on Caedmon looked this good. I used to own the David McCallum reading of The Dunwich Horror, an album whose cover art was so amateurish it might have been drawn by Wilbur Whateley himself. The Dillons’ cover for The Rats in the Walls is much better, with a gnawing figure that resembles the woodcut-style illustrations the pair created for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthologies. I’ve never read anything about the Dillons’ techniques so can’t say whether their woodcut style was a product of actual wood engraving rather than linocut, a more convenient medium. I’d guess the latter since the end results look pretty much the same, but if anyone knows the answer then please leave a comment.

The Stories Of Kafka Read By Lotte Lenya (1962).

Great Scenes From Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Anthony Quayle, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Stanley Holloway (1962).

Great Scenes From Shakespeare’s Antony And Cleopatra: Pamela Brown And Anthony Quayle (1963).

Continue reading “The Dillons at Caedmon”

Weekend links 653

The Snow Queen (1916) by Harry Clarke.

• “…blogging remains my favourite format precisely because the writing so rarely feels like labour. Liberated from the need to pitch an idea or wield credentials, blogging—for a professional writer—frees you up to address topics outside your perceived expertise. It feels like a leisure activity because it’s leisurely—a ramble across fields of culture and knowledge, during which you sneak short cuts and trespass into areas you are not meant to go. A post doesn’t have to have a destination, a point. You can bundle or concatenate several different topics, push into adjacency things that don’t obviously or naturally belong together—like oddments inside a Cornell box. You can start somewhere and end up somewhere completely different, without any obligation to tie things up neatly.” Simon Reynolds reflecting on 20 years of the blogging thing, and neatly summarising the attractions of the medium. For some of us, anyway…

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Structural colour was first documented in the 17th century, in peacock feathers, but it is only since the invention of the electron microscope, in the 1930s, that we have known how it works.” Tomas Weber on Andrew Parker’s nanotechnology developments which are creating some of the brightest hues in the world.

• “Bring back the Cailleach, beloved Scottish goddess of winter, shaking out the snow on the land. Bring back Mother Holda, with her wild geese and her snowflakes landing on the tongue like a gift from the sky…” Yvonne Aburrow would like to see the festival of Yule returned to its anarchic origins.

• Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, an extract from a recent audience-less concert by Ryuichi Sakamoto which he says is liable to be his last.

• At Unquiet Things: S. Elizabeth posts some of the pictures that couldn’t be fitted into The Art of Darkness.

• Mix of the week: A Tribute to Manuel Göttsching by Low Light Mixes.

• It’s the end of December so it must be time for Alan Bennett’s diary.

• RIP Mike Hodges.

• Vale Berfrois.

• Snow (1985) by Takashi Toyoda | Snowfall (2000) by Haruomi Hosono | Snowfall (2005) by Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd

Pixillation, a film by Lillian Schwartz

A new arrival at Rarefilmm, Pixillation (1970) is another example of short, abstract film-making which nevertheless may be unique in its combination of early computer graphics with organic effects created by illuminated oils and crystalline growths. This was Lillian Schwartz’s first film (made in collaboration with Ken Knowlton) after she become artist-in-residence at Bell Labs. Many more such films followed, continuing her exploration of computer graphics.

The electronic score for Pixillation is by Gershon Kingsley, a composer best known for the albums he recorded with Jean-Jacques Perrey, and for writing one of the first synthesized pop hits, Popcorn, although it was a cover of Kingsley’s tune that became an international success in 1972. Kingsley made a lot of electronic music but this is the first time I’ve encountered any of it as a film soundtrack. I think it’s also the first piece I’ve heard of his that isn’t a light-weight novelty.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Switched-On… hits and misses

A.R.T. art

Some Manuel Göttsching-related graphic ephemera. This 1971 flyer for Ash Ra Tempel seems to be a rare item, the only place I’ve seen it being inside one of the inserts for The Private Tapes, a series of six CDs limited to 1000 copies each that Manuel Göttsching released in 1996. I was lucky to buy these when they were first released. A double-disc selection from the series followed two years later but neither this nor the rest of the set have been reissued since, despite containing a wealth of previously unreleased recordings from Göttsching’s archives, including many live concert recordings of Ash Ra Tempel. The flyer was the work of Bernhard Bendig who also drew the sleeve art for the group’s first two albums.

Not as scarce, but not very visible either, is this painting of another somewhat wonky temple by P. Praquin for a 1975 reissue of two Ash Ra Tempel albums: Inventions For Electric Guitar (which isn’t really ART), and Seven Up, the ramshackle studio jam which is mostly spoiled by the bellowings of Timothy Leary and friends. Discover Cosmic was a short-lived series of double-disc reissues of albums originally released on Cosmic Music, an imprint of Barclay Records that repackaged releases from Ohr and Kosmische Musik for the French market. There were three volumes of Discover Cosmic, the other two showcasing Popol Vuh and “The Klaus Schulze Sessions”, this being the first Cosmic Jokers album plus Join Inn by Ash Ra Tempel. The mysterious P. Praquin was responsible for all three cover paintings of which this is the best, wonky or not, a variation on the church-as-spaceship idea that may have been borrowed from the Roger Dean cover for Space Hymns by Ramases. This is one of those graphic contrivances that I usually expect to find repeated elsewhere, although to date the only other example I’ve seen was a Viennese museum poster. But there are more than enough churches that resemble spaceships to give people ideas, especially recent constructions like the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. If you know of any other steeples blasting off then please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Manuel Göttsching, 1952–2022
• The kosmische design of Peter Geitner
• Raising the roof

Manuel Göttsching, 1952–2022

Cover design for the French release by Peter Butschkow.

Another post about the recently deceased; my apologies. In an unhappy coincidence, Angelo Badalamenti’s death was also announced today. 2022 has been one of those years when you wish the good people could stick around for a while longer.

upper left: Ash Ra Tempel (1971) by Ash Ra Tempel; upper right: Inventions For Electric Guitar (1975) by Ash Ra Tempel/Manuel Göttsching; lower left: New Age Of Earth (1976) by Ashra; lower right: E2–E4 (1984) by Manuel Göttsching.

If I had to make a choice, these discs are my four favourite Göttsching-related releases, although I’m partial to just about everything he was involved with, whether under his own name, in Ash Ra Tempel, Ashra or The Cosmic Jokers, the fake group concocted by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. The Ash Ra Tempel debut is a power trio on a Kosmische voyage, and remarkably assured considering that two of the players were still in their teens. Inventions For Electric Guitar is really Göttsching’s first solo album, a demonstration that you could create music that sounded “electronic” (in the Tangerine Dream sense) with nothing more than an overdubbed guitar, an echo unit and a four-track recorder. As for New Age Of Earth, if you can look past the hippyish title you’ll find one of the finest synthesizer albums of the decade, one that just happens to be made by a guitarist. E2–E4 is the album that took these explorations further while also predicting future developments. There was nothing else like it in the mid-1980s. The techno-heads who contribute to its inflated reputation only ever listen to vinyl but on CD it’s a single piece of music that runs for 59 minutes.

Attention from those techno-heads has ensured that there’s a lot of live footage of Göttsching’s Ashra line-ups in later years. There’s very little from the 1970s or 80s, unfortunately, but Göttsching, Lutz Ulbrich and Harald Grosskopf did make this appearance on Musical Express for Spain’s Televisión Española in 1981. This was the same programme that filmed Vangelis improvising in his studio, embracing opportunities missed by the BBC. ¡Gracias!

• “Manuel Göttsching laid the groundwork for generations of electronic musicians,” says Brian Coney.
• From 2017: “Everything was in the moment.” Manuel Göttsching discussing his career with Robert Barry.