{psychedelia} – Page 9 – { feuilleton }

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 646

It’s that lethal book again. A sample of wallpaper impregnated with arsenic, one of many such pages in Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers (1874) by RC Kedzie.

• “I like to spend time in the now because there I can create something new but in the past I cannot.” Damo Suzuki, former vocalist in Can, on creativity and his resilience in the face of long-term illness. Related: a trailer for Energy: A Documentary about Damo Suzuki.

• “I enjoy Carnival of Souls, but it is a dark form of enjoyment, with high stakes, because the enjoyment is predicated on me being able to shake myself free of the film after it is over, and that can be a struggle.” Colin Fleming on fear as entertainment.

• “Some people like fantasy epics or Regency romance or Sudoku or science-fiction world-building or the gentle challenge of cozy mysteries; I like the undead.” Sadie Stein on encounters with ghosts.

• “You’re now standing on the blocks of the Great Pyramid at Giza. For the first time ever you can explore the entire pyramid interior.” The Giza Project.

• “What do we think about when we watch films set in vanished decades that many of us experienced at first hand?” asks Anne Billson.

• At Bandcamp: Touch celebrates forty years of not being a record label.

• “Why scientists are sending radio signals to the Moon and Jupiter.”

• At DJ Food’s: Retinal Circus gig posters 1966–68.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Feneon.

• The Pyramid Spell (1978) by Nik Turner | I Am Damo Suzuki (1985) by The Fall | Carnival Of Souls Goes To Rio (2001) by Pram

Abe Gurvin album covers

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968 (1972).

Reading this article last week about Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation I realised I’d never looked up the album’s cover artist, Abe Gurvin (1937–2012); this despite owning two copies of Kaye’s compilation, one of which, an expanded box of four CDs, includes additional Gurvin art (see below). Nuggets was released in 1972 on Elektra, a label for whom Gurvin worked regularly as a designer as well as an artist. The only other cover of his I definitely recall seeing before is for one of Mort Garson’s electronic novelty albums, Cosmic Sounds (credited to The Zodiac), although some of the classical recordings on Elektra’s Nonesuch imprint look vaguely familiar. Nonesuch were using vivid art and graphics on the covers of their classical albums from the mid-60s on, years in advance of rival labels; Gurvin, along with Bob Pepper, Gene Szafran and others, provided the cover paintings. In the 1980s many of these albums turned up cheap in British remainder shops, hence the familiarity, although I can’t say whether it was Gurvin’s art I remember seeing.

Disc art from the four-CD Nuggets box (1998).

The subtitle of the Nuggets album—”Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968″—always promised more than it delivered when only a quarter of the songs could be called psychedelic. Without Gurvin’s artwork providing a contextualising frame it’s hard to imagine the compilation sustaining its reputation as a psych classic, whatever the subtitle might suggest. Gurvin’s florid aesthetics were put to similar use elsewhere, not only on classical recordings. Some of the examples below are a result of attempts by art directors to give artists like Gene Pitney a trendy spin.

Cosmic Sounds (1967) by The Zodiac. “Must be played in the dark” says a note on the back cover.

Nuggets, incidentally, was beneficial in its influence even if its psychedelic quotient is lacking. Without its success there might not have been the 28 psych/garage compilations known as Pebbles, a bootleg series that retrieved from obscurity many minor bands and one-off singles; and without Pebbles we wouldn’t have had further imitations like Boulders (11 discs) and all the many series that followed, including my personal favourite, Rubble, a 20-disc collection of British psychedelic singles.

The Dove Descending: Choral Music (1966) by The Canby Singers.

Haydn: Symphony No. 21 In A Major / Symphony No. 48 In C Major (“Maria Theresia”) / Symphony No. 82 In C Major (“L’Ours”); Chamber Orchestra Of The Saar, Karl Ristenpart / Gürzenich Symphony Orchestra Of Cologne, Günter Wand (1966).

Sweet, Sweet Lovin’ (1968) by The Platters.

Gurvin’s contribution to this one is the hand-drawn title design.

Continue reading “Abe Gurvin album covers”

Weekend links 642

A light wheel. Via.

• “Part of the instrument’s draw is its fallibility. Famously, or perhaps infamously, every Rhodes is different: some freakishly responsive, some with keys that stick like glue, and all with uneven registers, darker corners, and sweet spots.” Hugh Morris on the delicate art of reinventing the Fender Rhodes.

• Rambalac’s YouTube channel of first-person walks through Japanese locations is a vicarious pleasure, especially on a big screen. It’s not all city streets but if you like urban meandering then Tokyo walk from day to rainy night – Higashi-Ikebukuro, Mejiro, Ikebukuro is a good place to start.

• At Igloomag: Chang Terhune interviews Stephen Mallinder in a gratifyingly lengthy piece which covers Mallinder’s recent solo recordings and collaborations, his work with students on his sound-art course, and (unavoidably) the late Richard H. Kirk and Cabaret Voltaire.

What I think might be a useful approach—perhaps impractical, but bear me out—I think that if we were to reconnect magic and art as a starting point, because they’re practically the same thing anyway, make art the product of your magical experiments, the way that Austin Spare did for example, then that would give magic an enormous sense of purpose and I think it would also lend art the vision that it seems to be lacking at present. A lot of modern art seems rather empty and hollow conceptualism that lacks any real vision or substance or power. A linking of magic and art would help both of those fields. Then, once you’ve done that, maybe linking art and science. There’s plenty of work already done in that regard.

Alan Moore talking to Miles Ellingham about the usual concerns plus his new story collection, Illuminations

• Wheels of Light: Designs for British Light Shows 1970–1990 is a book by Kevin Foakes (aka DJ Food) which will be published later this month by Four Corners Books. The author talks about his book here.

• “The Sandjak of Novi Pazar always sounded as if it were a title, like the Sultan of Zanzibar or the Dame of Sark…” Mark Valentine on discovering outdated maps in forgotten books.

• “My brief was to find tracks that had been left by the wayside or disregarded.” Lenny Kaye on 50 years of his influential garage-rock compilation Nuggets.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R Podcast 768 by Lawrence English, and King Scratch (Musical Masterpieces from the Upsetter Ark-ive) by Aquarium Drunkard.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House (1959).

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Slag.

• This Wheel’s On Fire (1968) by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity | Cosmic Wheels (1973) by Donovan | Wheels On Fire (1985) by Haruomi Hosono

OM I, a film by Myron Ort

As should be evident from the stills, OM I is yet another example of psychedelic cinema, and a very good one at that. Myron Ort’s 20-minute silent film (add your own soundtrack) originates with experiments the director made in the late 60s and early 70s using hand-painted stock combined with optical printing.

The film isn’t wholly abstract—the raw material includes shots of people and animals, together with heavily processed military footage—but the processing creates a kaleidoscopic feel by mirroring many of the shots, one of those simple tricks that’s always effective. (For a more recent example of mirrored psychedelia, see the monochrome mushroom freakout in A Field in England.) There’s a lot more like this at Myron Ort’s Vimeo page including two sequels to OM I, and a related film Ommo, which runs hand-painted raw material through the optical printer to delirious effect.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive