{conjuring} – { feuilleton }

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 682

La Voie Lactée (1921) by George Barbier.

• Fun news of the week: “The Taylor Swift vinyl haunted by Britain’s weirdest musicians.” The “weirdness” is tracks from Happy Land: A Compendium of Electronic Music from the British Isles 1992–1996 which have been mispressed onto Swift’s latest, the re-recorded Speak Now. One of the offending pieces is Soul Vine (70 Billion People) by Cabaret Voltaire, a relatively understated instrumental from the Plasticity album which features samples from the Demon with a Glass Hand episode of The Outer Limits. “It’s possibly the most subversive thing we’ve ever done,” says Stephen Mallinder. Adventurous Swifties looking to broaden their horizons are advised to try The Crackdown next.

• “For McCarthy, violence is the signature of God: God, who cannot be seen, who is only indicated by an absence, who no amount of experimenting or observing will reveal, but whose existence is in evidence all around us, every day, through the apocalyptic and apophatic violence that makes up the very stuff of the world.” JC Scharl on the violent faith of Cormac McCarthy.

• Strange news of the week: Reclusive guitarist Master Wilburn Burchette (age 84) was found dead in a house with the body of his younger brother (age 76) after decades spent avoiding anyone showing an interest in his music. Numero Group, the label behind the recent reissues of Burchette’s albums, posted an interview from 2018.

• Takrar by Waref Abu Quba is “an experimental film that celebrates the timeless and intricate beauty of ancient craftsmanship. Filmed in Istanbul, the film takes us on a mesmerizing journey into the past, paying homage to Islamic, Ottoman, Greek, and Byzantine art forms.”

• “Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?” Probably not, but if it was in the deep past how would we know? Joel Froelich investigates.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Visual evidence from almost every museum devoted to prestidigitation in the world (for Derek McCormack).

• At Spoon & Tamago: Osaka celebrates Star Festival with river of 40,000 LED lights evoking the Milky Way.

• At Unquiet Things: Even more sneak peeks from The Art of Fantasy.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – July 2023 at Ambientblog.

• At The Daily Heller: Sign writing and glass engraving.

• Out Of Limits (1963) by The Marketts | Trip Through The Milky Way–An Electronic Panorama (1969) by Raymond Moore | Milky Way (1971) by Weather Report

Weekend links 664

Caduceus: Tarot Card Study – Love by Holly Warburton.

• The week in stage magic: Ken Carbone, writing about playing cards and graphic design, points the way to an hour of Ricky Jay demonstrating his miraculous abilities with a pack of cards. Elsewhere, Erik Ofgang asks “Who was Mr. Electrico, the sideshow magician who inspired Ray Bradbury—then vanished?”

• The 1980 Floor Show – Uncut / Unedited: 8 Hours of David Bowie in Ziggy Stardust guise performing for American TV cameras at The Marquee, London, in October 1973. That’s more Bowie than most people would want—there’s a lot of repetition—but it’s good to know things like this can still surface.

• “A supernova has gone out,” says David Grundy about the late Wayne Shorter. Also this: “Sci-fi fan Shorter suggested the title to [Weather Report’s] second album I Sing The Body Electric, taken from Walt Whitman via Ray Bradbury.”

• “We need to get away from thinking of ourselves as machines… That metaphor is getting in the way of understanding living, wild cognition.” A long read by Amanda Gefter about the secret life of plants, and “4E” cognitive science.

• “…why take a soft approach to safety when you can scare the sensible into the next generation with some of the most effective horror shorts of all time?” Ryan Finnegan on the notorious PIFs (public information films) of the 1970s.

• “I am increasingly of the Lynchian mindset of ‘never explain’…” Lynda E. Rucker talking to Steven Duffy about her latest story collection, Now It’s Dark.

• James Balmont presents a brief introduction to the mind-altering cinema of Sogo Ishii.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hidari: An epic wooden puppet samurai stop-motion film.

• Old music: Musique De Notre Temps (1976) by Éliane Radigue.

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

• Body Electric (1982) by The Sisters Of Mercy | Super-Electric (1991) by Stereolab | Electric Garden (Deep Jazz In The Garden Mix) (2013) by Juan Atkins & Moritz von Oswald

Weekend links 640

Aquarius (1910–1914) by Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald.

• “…they created a unique Afro-Caribbean soundscape—Battiste’s exceptional skills saw him use the studio as an instrument, voices flutter in and out, instruments shiver and shriek, over which Rebennack mutters and chants, a shaman of sorts.” Garth Cartwright on the life and works of Mac Rebennack, better known to the world as Dr John.

• Issue 3 of Man Is The Animal: A Coil Zine is now available for pre-order. I contributed to this one with a piece entitled “Singularities of Art and Nature”, an examination of the Coil discography via the Wunderkammer concept and the Musaeum Clausum of Thomas Browne.

• Among the recent arrivals at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts, is Arthur Machen’s episodic and influential horror novel The Three Imposters (1895).

• Media History Digital Library: “A free online resource, featuring millions of pages of books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.”

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Shall I, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, conjurer, introduce myself to you, viewer? And why not?

• At Public Domain Review: The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60).

• Mix of the week: Endymion, an autumnal ambient mix by The Ephemeral Man.

• “New Webb image captures clearest view of Neptune’s rings in decades.”

• New music: Of Endless Light by Cleared.

• RIP jazz giant Pharoah Sanders.

• Conjuration (1977) by Tangerine Dream | Necronomicon—Conjurations (2004) by John Zorn | A Boy Called Conjuror (2020) by Teleplasmiste

Georges Méliès, Mage

Georges Méliès: magician. Yes, indeed. I was watching Martin Scorsese’s Hugo again recently, a film I found more enjoyable the second time around mostly for the Méliès side of the story. The flashback to the Star Films studio offers in miniature a history that this book delivers in detail. Georges Méliès, Mage (1945) by Maurice Bessy and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca is a copiously illustrated guide to Méliès’ entire career, beginning with his early years as a conjuror and a creator of the kinds of theatrical fantasies that formed the basis for his first films. The text is in French throughout but there’s a wealth of pictorial material, with many production sketches and drawings that show how some of his more complex effects were achieved.

One of the things I’ve always found attractive about Méliès’ films is the way they resemble 19th-century illustrations brought to life. The same can be said about some of the later Hollywood productions, especially the Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad, but they lack the overt theatricality of Méliès. For a taste of those hand-tinted marvels, go here.

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