{music} – Page 36 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 648

The Twittering Machine (1922) by Paul Klee.

• “Thinking of ‘writer Twitter’ as more important than writers themselves is an insult to the profession. People have been trading words for money for thousands of years. They will continue to do so after the death of a platform built on manufactured outrage, social hierarchy, unfunny jokes, stale memes, pornography, and spam. I mention this Atlantic essay only because it echoes what so many people are saying in the ether right now, not to pick on its author. The piece reads like a parody of how writers overestimate the importance of Twitter to their work and careers. It’s frankly a little embarrassing. Your work is the product you sell! Not the shitty jokes you tell with people you want to impress.” Freddie deBoer on the kerfuffle du jour. For “writer” see also “artist” or anyone else working at the intersection between commerce and creativity. From what I’ve read this week about potential technical problems at the pestilential birdcage I’d be less sanguine about its immediate survival. Since I retreated from the place as an active user two-and-a-half years ago all I get from it is the inflated subscriber number you see on the right-hand side of this page, a combination of Twitter followers plus email subscribers. The latter currently stand at some 270 individuals so if you’re among that number you can consider yourself part of a more exclusive group. And thanks for subscribing!

• “…the books of the past, besides adding to our understanding, offer something we also need: repose, refreshment and renewal. They help us keep going through dark times, they lift our spirits, they comfort us. Which means that I also strongly agree with the poet John Ashbery, who once wrote, ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word “escapist,” but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.'” Michael Dirda makes a case for reading classic, unusual and neglected books. Kudos for the mention of Anthony Skene‘s Monsieur Zenith, a character few of Dirda’s readers will have heard of.

• “While Haeckel’s paintings turn the floating phantoms into baroque spectacles of colour and flowing form, Mayer’s medusae are more sober, their tentacles subdued, their umbellate bells transparent.” Kevin Dann on the jellyfish and other “floating phantoms” described in AG Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910).

• “The passing of time has added potency to the images, giving this interpretation of the Dracula story the feel of a distant fairy tale, a myth emerging from the mists of time, erupting across the world of cinema, its shadow reaching everywhere.” Martyn Bamber on 100 years of Murnau’s Nosferatu.

• At AnOther: Camille Vivier talks about shooting nude models in the treasure-filled home of HR Giger.

• New music: In Concert & In Residence by Sarah Davachi, and Anglo-Saxon Androids by Moon Wiring Club.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Kimono portraits were popular souvenirs for sailors visiting Japan in the 1800s.

• Mix of the week: Saturnalia: Deep Jazz for Long Nights, 1969–1980 at Aquarium Drunkard.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Clouds.

• Dark Clouds With Silver Linings (1961) by Sun Ra | Obscured By Clouds (1972) by Pink Floyd | Firmament (Cloudscape) (1995) by Main

The teamLab experience

One of the surprise pleasures of browsing Rambalac’s YouTube channel was finding two visits to his local teamLab exhibitions. teamLab is a Japan-based arts collective who use digital technology to create immersive artworks using light and sound. Rambalac’s main excursion takes you to teamLab Borderless in Odaiba, Tokyo*, a building-sized collection of the group’s past creations situated in interconnected rooms on two floors. As with other Rambalac videos, what you have here is one man wandering around the place with a camera, which in this case gives us the opportunity to see Borderless from a visitor’s point of view. teamLab also has its own YouTube channel but most of the videos there are promotional pieces, usually a few minutes in length and heavily-edited. Rambalac seldom edits his videos which generally run for an hour at a time.

The Borderless exhibits variously resemble nightclub interiors, Yayoi Kusama installations, theme-park attractions and psychedelic lightshows, with some of the larger, projection-filled areas giving the impression of walking around inside the DMT trip from Enter the Void. Kusama’s infinite mirror reflections are obvious precursors, especially in The Infinite Crystal Universe, a room containing a mass of illuminated cables running from mirrored floor to mirrored ceiling. The main difference, of course, is that Kusama’s installations are as static as most contemporary art, whereas teamLab’s creations are continually in flux. Some of the change relies on viewer participation; there are touch-sensitive surfaces and phone apps that allow visitors to adjust the parameters of specific works. It’s not all child-friendly psychedelia, at least at the conceptual level. The titles of some of the creations remind me of the portentous declarations favoured by Keiji Haino for his doom-laden recordings: Life is Flickering Light Floating in the Dark; Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity; Massless Suns and Dark Spheres; Matter is Void…

I find all of this fascinating and exciting, it’s just a shame that you have to travel halfway around the world to see the things in person. teamLab does exhibit in other countries but to date most of their external work has been close to Japan. Some of the musical accompaniment at Borderless is overly dramatic for my tastes, like extracts from an anime soundtrack, but elsewhere the exhibits have their own brand of generative ambient music which in this context is genuinely ambient, not the diluted techno that we’ve been burdened with since the early 1990s. A good example of this is can be found in the other Rambalac video which visits Resonating Life in the Acorn Forest, an exhibit in a wooded park at Higashi-Tokorozawa.

In this installation the trees are lit with coloured lights controlled by the illuminated polythene blobs sitting beneath them. The blobs emit electronic chimes when touched; each chime affects the nearest blobs which in turn change the colours of the lights. An additional bonus in Rambalac’s video is the nocturnal chirping of cicadas. teamLab are big on rippling fluctuation, it’s a quality found in many of their other exhibits. The ripples have become physical in more recent exhibits which require visitors to get their feet wet. I’ve no idea how Living Crystallized Light has been created but whatever the technology behind it the end result is quite incredible.

I’m predisposed to enjoy this kind of thing when I’ve always liked art that involves coloured light and mirrors—I’ve a lot of time for the creations of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson—but I’ve been wondering for a while now when we’d start to see the emergence of art that feels like it belongs in this century instead of yet more expensive (and inert) novelties sitting in blank-walled galleries. teamLab aren’t the only people using technology in this way, there’s an increasing overlap between art and sound among electronic musicians like Robert Henke and Ryoji Ikeda, while Brian Eno has been evolving his own abstract sound-and-light environments for many years. More like this, please.

* Borderless in Odaiba permanently closed in August but teamLab will be opening a similar venue in Toyko next year.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Light Leaks
• Eno’s Luminous Opera House panorama
• Infinite reflections
• Yayoi Kusama
• Maximum Silence by Giancarlo Neri

Weekend links 647

A local dispute on the planet Mars. Art by Kevin O’Neill from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

• “…this image has puzzled enthusiasts of the scientific mystic’s works, both for its obscure provenance and cryptic symbolism. With its pastiche of Renaissance visual style and medieval caption — “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch” — the illustration was once thought to have originated centuries before Flammarion published his text.” Hunter Dukes on the enduring mystery of the “Flammarion Engraving”.

• “For Spare, radio, and the waves that carried the music he loved to listen to, were more than just a metaphor for the spirit world. They were an active mode of conveyance for occult energies and vibrations – the swirling, ectoplasmic tendrils from which odd figures emerge in some of his most dense and haunting work.” Mark Pilkington explores Austin Osman Spare’s influence on the world of music.

• At Spine: Design studio Milk & Bone’s designer Alicia Raitt re-imagines all 14 of Kurt Vonnegut’s book covers to celebrate his 100th birthday.

• Farewell to Kevin O’Neill and Nik Turner, both of whom headed to the Western Lands this week.

• Mean, moody and magnificent: film noir studio portraits – in pictures.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 773 by Roméo Poirier.

• New music: Evergreen by Patrick Shiroishi.

• Brainstorm (1972) by Hawkwind | Hurricane Fighter Plane (1985) by Inner City Unit | Brainstorm (1993) by Monster Magnet

A theme for maniacs

The theme in question.

When did the first few bars of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565 become a signifier of an unhinged personality, and thereby a horror cliché? The question was raised by my film viewing in the run-up to Halloween following a return visit to The Black Cat, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Universal oddity. Ulmer’s film is the best of a trio of Universal horrors packaged by Eureka in a double-disc set, part of the company’s ongoing programme to reissue obscure films starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The three films in the set—Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935)—all star Lugosi, with Karloff co-starring in The Black Cat and The Raven. The Bach piece was impossible to ignore after watching all three films together. In The Black Cat we see a villainous Karloff regaling a potential victim with a performance of Toccata and Fugue on his home organ. Bela Lugosi does the same in The Raven, where he portrays an equally villainous but much more demented doctor obsessed with the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The Universal horror films have been the source of many cinematic clichés of which this is a further example, even if the use of Toccata and Fugue to signify villainy or madness predates The Black Cat.

Wikipedia’s incomplete list of the composition’s cinematic appearances states that Toccata and Fugue was already a theatrical cliché by the early 1930s but offers no evidence for the claim. It’s likely there were silent films using the piece for their scores when so much silent orchestration borrows from pre-existing classical music. But silent films, today as in the past, can be scored in many different ways, the score isn’t always permanently attached to the film. The one silent film that you might expect to use the Bach piece, the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera, has a fine score by Carl Davis in its restored form, but no Toccata and Fugue. A brief history of the cinematic life of the piece would go something like this…

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)
Rouben Mamoulian’s excellent adaptation opens with a view through the eyes of Dr Jekyll (Frederic March) playing another Bach piece on the organ; prior to this the film’s titles had been scored with an orchestral arrangement of Toccata and Fugue. An hour later the composition returns when Jekyll plays an extract from the fugue section, an ominous sign despite his joy at his impending marriage.

The Black Cat (1934)
Despite the title, this one has nothing at all to do with Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of another spurious adaptation we get Boris Karloff as Hjalmar Poelzig, cinema’s only Satanist architect. The character is a bizarre amalgam of Aleister Crowley and Hans Poelzig, a German architect who designed the sets for Paul Wegener’s third and best Golem film.

The Raven (1935)
This one does at least contain a number of Poe references. Lugosi is a brilliant doctor who also happens to be a homicidal maniac, his Poe obsession having led him to fill the secret rooms in his house with torture devices.

A Canterbury Tale (1944)
Not a horror film but included here because Powell & Pressburger’s war-time drama is about the last time you find the Bach piece being used in an unironic manner, intended to evoke religious awe rather than madness or doom. Prior to this the piece had also been used to soundtrack an abstract animation by Mary Ellen Bute, Synchromy No. 4: Escape (1938), two years before Disney did something very similar in Fantasia. In A Canterbury Tale Dennis Price is a conscripted cinema organist finally arrived at Canterbury Cathedral prior to being shipped to the front. Before he leaves, the cathedral organist allows him to play the music for the departure service which in turn allows us to hear Bach’s piece illustrating views of genuine Gothic grandeur.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Its fitting that the self-conscious use of Toccata and Fugue begins with a supremely self-conscious film. Billy Wilder’s masterpiece isn’t a horror film either but it is a full-blown Gothic drama, being narrated by a dead man whose first encounter with the mentally fragile Norma Desmond sees him being mistaken for an undertaker. The Bach piece is played by Desmond’s butler, Max, a washed-up film director portrayed by a genuine (and genuinely great) washed-up film director, Erich von Stroheim. Max may not be a maniac but his employer (and ex-wife) is certainly unhinged, while Stroheim himself was notorious in his directing days for his megalomania, overspending lavishly and refusing to compromise with the studios over the editing of his films. (The first cut of his mutilated epic, Greed, ran over nine hours.) Since the 1925 Phantom of the Opera was mentioned earlier, it’s worth noting that Norma Desmond’s boat-shaped bed is the same prop that appears in the silent Phantom’s underground lair.

Continue reading “A theme for maniacs”

Twinkle, twinkle little stars

Xitintoday (1978) by Nik Turner’s Sphynx.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a reason to write about Barney Bubbles but I’ve finally worked out why one of his more mysterious album covers looks the way it does.

When Nik Turner was unceremoniously kicked out of Hawkwind in 1976 he headed to Cairo to consider his next move. While there he recorded an hour or two of flute improvisations inside the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The resulting tapes provided the basis for his first solo album, Xitintoday, which was released in 1978 on the Charisma label, and credited to Nik Turner’s Sphynx. Steve Hillage produced the album, helping to craft the meandering solos into a suite of songs based on passages from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Xitintoday is one of the more unusual concept albums from a decade filled with such things. I’ve always liked it, in many ways it’s closer to Hillage’s oeuvre than Turner’s, as well as being very different to anything else in the Hawk-sphere.

A faded promo badge. The ballpoint scrawl is Mr Turner’s autograph.

Barney Bubbles’ design for the album is also very different to anything else in the Hawk-sphere, an example of what might be called his High Modernist period, when the hippy motifs and decorative pastiches of his earlier work were replaced with bold, flat colours and playful graphic designs. Xitintoday was released with a square booklet containing lyrics, notes about the mythological theme, and a series of pictures which combine diagrams and Ancient Egyptian reliefs with calligram-like wordplay. The back cover of the album exemplifies the latter, with the word “Day” spelled out in much smaller words reading “Night”; inside the booklet there’s a page for Isis the Moon Goddess where the words “Isis is is is is…” form a curve around a photograph of the Moon. The cover design continues the cosmic theme with a field of star shapes in which each star is created by the word “Twinkle”. The star field makes sense in the context of the booklet but I’ve wondered for a long time why Barney Bubbles thought it was a suitable cover design rather than simply being another booklet page.

The solution arrived last week when work-related research had me looking through old design books for examples of Ancient Egyptian ornamentation. One of these, The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by Owen Jones, contains several pages of full-colour plates filled with Egyptian pattern samples.

And on one of those pages there are these two squares which made me think immediately of the Xitintoday cover. This might seem tenuous when the cover design doesn’t feature any red dots but Barney Bubbles was an avid Egyptophile, avid enough to name his son after one of the Egyptian gods. A quick search revealed many more examples of this pattern which are closer matches for the cover design.

It turns out that the yellow star on a blue background was a common way of representing the night sky in Egyptian art, you’ll find the same stars in wall paintings and on the ceilings inside royal tombs.

For years I’ve regarded the Xitintoday cover as being uncharacteristically random and abstract, surprisingly so when Bubbles designs from the same period are all so smart and well-considered. This discovery puts the Sphynx album in the same category, a design which avoids many more obvious solutions for a combination of the very old and the very new. Another feature of Barney Bubbles design is a kind of “Aha!” moment, when your appreciation of the design catches up with the thinking behind it. The appreciation this time has taken an outrageously long time to arrive but I’m pleased to have got there in the end.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Led Zeppelin IV: Jimmy Page versus Little Bo-Peep
• The Grammar of Ornament revisited
• On the pyramid