{music} – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 730

Cover Design for ‘The Yellow Book’ Vol.I (1894) by Aubrey Beardsley.

• “[Dorian Gray’s] version of Decadence filled the popular imagination when Decadence became an ostentatiously stylish zeitgeist—stylish being the operative word. For Decadent style encapsulated the attitude of being hellbent on thrilling experiences.” The danger of Decadence is also its value. We need more of it, says Kate Hext.

• At Swan River Press: Of Wraiths, Spooks and Spectres. Robert Lloyd Parry, in an interview with John Kenny, talks about the researches that led to the compiling of his latest ghost-story collection, Friends and Spectres.

• The latest pictorial accumulation from DJ Food is a collection of late-60s concert posters by Jim Michaelson, an artist whose designs look like Mad magazine going fully psychedelic.

• Old music: Future Travel by David Rosenboom; new music: Taking Shasta Mountain (By Strategy) by John Von Seggern & Dean DeBenedictis.

• At Public Domain Review: Hunter Dukes on Rückenfiguren, views of the human back as a subject in the history of art.

• In a week when Adobe has been in the news for pissing off its users, a list of alternatives for Adobe software.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hokusai-inspired erasers reveal Mt. Fuji the more they get used.

• At Unquiet Things: A celebration of Annie Stegg Gerard’s enchanting worlds.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2024 by Ambientblog.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Diamanda Galás.

• Wraith (2002) by Redshift | El Wraith (2002) by Amon Tobin | Wraith (2015) by John Carpenter

Weekend links 729

Phosphorus and Hesperus (1881) by Evelyn De Morgan.

• Mix of the week, or possibly the entire year: The Deep Ark, 167 tracks (over 8 hours of music), most of which are from the electronic deluge of the early 1990s. The download link may not work for all browsers—it didn’t for one of mine—but it is active. Via Simon Reynolds who has more about the Deep Ark project.

• At Nautilus: Betsy Mason on the use of stage magic to investigate animal behaviour. “By performing tricks for birds, monkeys, and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world.”

• At The Daily Heller: Mad and the Usual Gang of Idiots. Meanwhile, Mr Heller’s font of the month may prove useful for this election season, a Jonathan Barnbrook design named Moron.

Looking back, you can see a pattern in those eras in which interest in telepathy boomed. Coined by Myers and his fellow psychical researchers in the 1880s, telepathy gained traction because it was formulated inside a moment of scientific and technological revolution, where uncanny transmissions proliferated across the visible and invisible spectrum, seeming to collapse the natural and the supernatural together. In the 1970s, telepathy returned, if under different names, as part of another moment of crisis. The Cold War arms race was an essential part of this, feeding a strange supplemental world of fantasy technologies, from mind control to brainwashing, and playing on an all-too-widespread psychological paranoia around being seen, infiltrated and manipulated by invisible agents.

Roger Luckhurst looks back at a century of psychic research

• New music: Portable Reality Generator by Field Lines Cartographer, and Sublime Eternal Love by Chrystabell and David Lynch.

• Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars: Robert Fripp interviewing John McLaughlin in July, 1982.

• Paintings by Ithell Colquhoun currently showing at the Ben Hunter gallery, London.

• At Public Domain Review: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810).

• ESP (1965) by Miles Davis | ESP (1990) by Deee-lite | ESP (2002) by Comets On Fire

Weekend links 728

Composition: Cones and Spirals (1929) by Edward Alexander Wadsworth.

• “Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know.” John Seamon on the vicissitudes of memory, and how actors remember their lines.

• “Mary McCarthy described it as ‘Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, and do-it-yourself novel’, among other things.” Mary Gaitskill on the pleasures and difficulties of Nabokov’s greatest novel, Pale Fire. Also a reminder that I ought to read it again.

• New music: Movement, Before All Flowers by Max Richter; A Thread, Silvered And Trembling by Drew McDowall; Unspeakable Visions by Michel Banabila.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Ulysses by James Joyce.

• The latest cartographical design from Herb Lester Associates is Facts Concerning HP Lovecraft and His Environs.

• At the Daily Heller: A look back at the craze for poster stamps.

• Mix of the week: A tuning mix for The Wire by Tashi Wada.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Michael Lonsdale Day.

• Annie Hogan’s favourite music.

• Clockworks (1975) by Laurie Spiegel | Tin Toy Clockwork Train (1985) by The Dukes Of Stratosphear | Clockwork Horoscope (2008) by Belbury Poly

Weekend links 727

Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934) by Dora Maar.

• “The Secret Public…reads like the book he was born to write…and speaks to the taboo around homosexuality which the bravest pop stars did their best to dispel.” Alex Needham reviewing The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) by Jon Savage. Anyone buying the book should also find themselves a copy of Savage’s Queer Noises compilation.

• At Dangerous Minds: Richard Metzger advises everyone to seek out Sion Sono’s 237-minute Love Exposure (2008), “Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”.

• Prince – Sign O’ The Times (Live at Paisley Park 12/31/87). Pro-shot video of the last performance of the Sign O’ The Times tour, with a unique contribution from Miles Davis.

• Old music: Camembert Electrique by Gong. A rocking riposte to the stereotype of the group as a bunch of whimsical hippies.

• New music: Lambda by ZULI. This is another release on the Subtext label which I designed.

• The Devil in the Flesh: Patrick Clarke on David Sylvian’s Red Guitar at 40.

• Milky Way photographer of the year 2024.

• The Strange World of…Gastr del Sol.

• Jungle Guitar (1961) by The Palatons | Lunatic Guitar (1980) by Ippu-Do | Naive Guitar (1982) by Adrian Belew

Pin culture

In the mail this week, a pair of new pins from the pin-maker and seller who made the exquisite Future Days pin. (eBay shop | Etsy shop) The Ege Bamyasi pin isn’t as effective as the earlier Can design but I feel compelled to encourage the effort, especially when most of the designs from this maker are for punk or post-punk bands. I also enjoy the novelty of seeing things like this at all. The years when I was discovering German music via secondhand releases (late 70s, early 80s) coincided with a period when I spent a lot of time scouring local shops for unusual badges. Growing up in a holiday resort gave me access to a greater quantity of cultural ephemera than you’d find in nearby towns, yet during this time I never saw any badges related to the German groups, not even Kraftwerk. As for prestige enamel items, you seldom saw these outside concert merchandise stalls where hardcore fans could be relied upon to pay more for their memorabilia.

Official pins from Hawkwind, Magma and Ghost Box Records.

The recent emergence of a cottage industry devoted to enamel pins means that these aren’t the only such items you’ll find on eBay or Etsy, but most of the others I’ve seen are either substandard (like another attempt to rework the Future Days cover) or are from North American sellers who want you to pay £25 or more for postage. Nein danke. But wherever the pin makers are located they all face the problem of how to create something related to groups who didn’t have a graphic identity that can easily be converted to metal and enamel. Where Can are concerned you could at least do this with their name as it appears on the Tago Mago cover. (Maybe such a thing exists already?) And I was amused to see that one pin maker has managed to reduce Manuel Göttsching’s chessboard cover for E2–E4 to pin size. What I’d really like now is a Neu! pin in black and white like the design on the cover of Neu! 75. Here’s hoping…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Can pin
• Rock shirts