{ feuilleton }

Music for people with three ears

Cherry Red Records this month reissues the first three albums by the unique and wonderful Third Ear Band. I like CDs, and I especially like having them collected into boxes with Japanese-style facsimile sleeves, so this collection is irresistible. The group’s first two albums, Alchemy (1969) and Third Ear Band (1970), still sound timeless despite being products of their time, with the track you’d most expect to sound dated, Ghetto Raga, being free of sitars or Indian pastiche. Third Ear Band music is a kind of improvised folk, predominantly the product of oboe, violin and percussion, which sounds like something the group might have tuned into when they were playing for Druids at ancient sites (Stone Circle and Druid One are further track titles). The first two albums also have the additional attraction for this listener of a heavy emphasis on medieval mysticism, from the Atalanta Fugiens illustration by Matthäus Merian on the cover of Alchemy, and the symbols and astrological diagrams that fill out the inside cover of the second album, to the titles of that album which continue the alchemical theme: Air, Earth, Fire and Water. The group also borrowed some graphics from Aubrey Beardsley when they issued their musical manifesto in 1969.

Music From Macbeth (1972) is constrained in comparison to the albums that precede it, being subservient to Roman Polanski’s feature film, although there’s more music here than was used in the film. It’s also closer to rock music in places, with occasional fuzzed guitar, a Mellotron, and rumbles from a VCS 3 synthesizer played by a future member of Hawkwind, Simon House. The cover painting by Roger Dean isn’t one of his best. In Views Dean complains that Polanski “got the imagery wrong” for the scenes with the witches, a comment I’ve never understood. Polanski’s film is a naturalistic interpretation of the play which is well-served by the Third Ear Band’s drones and medievalisms. Incidentally, I’m sure the phrase “music for people with three ears” was used on a Harvest records press ad but if it was I’ve been unable to find any evidence of it. Anyone out there know the source?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Night’s black agents
• Atalanta Fugiens

Weekend links 580

The Collective Lie We All Live By, a cut-paper collage by Allan Kausch from Maintenant 15, A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art.

• “It’s unusual that an album manages to be at once so much of its moment, yet so much outside it. Time was unmistakably a response to the electronic and synth waves that rose in the wake of punk. It was also a concept album about time travel, which couldn’t have been more pre-punk had it been focus-grouped that way.” David Bennun on Time (1981), ELO’s masterwork of science-fiction pop. The first song on the album, Twilight, is a thundering piece of synth bombast that prefigures Trevor Horn’s equally bombastic productions, and was used to memorable effect in the copyright-infringing animation made in 1983 for the opening of Daicon IV.

• New music: Disciples Of The Scorpion by The Rowan Amber Mill, and Shade by Grouper.

• “Psychedelic spirituality: Inside a growing Bay Area religious movement“.

• “It’s time to farewell this project,” says Ballardian.

• At Wormwoodiana: the seven greek vowels.

• A playlist for The Wire by Douglas Benford.

• Norman Blake‘s favourite albums.

• Astronomia Playing Cards.

• RIP Dusty Hill.

• Time (1973) by David Bowie | Time (1976) by La Düsseldorf | Time (1992) by Lull

Man is the Animal: A Coil Zine

Death is centrifugal / Solar and logical / Decadent and symmetrical / Angels are mathematical / Angels are bestial / Man is the animal —Fire Of The Mind by Coil

In the post this week from Temporal Boundary Press, issue 1 of Man is the Animal: A Coil Zine. A timely publication, given the persistent and increasing interest in Coil, and one whose essays are all of a quality belied by the “zine” label which usually suggests something more fannish and trivial. This is a pleasing object even before you look inside, a perfect-bound A5 booklet with full-colour printing throughout, and a cover painting by Val Denham, an artist with Coil associations that reach back through the Some Bizzare period to art for Marc Almond and Throbbing Gristle. Denham also contributes one of the written pieces, Jhonn is Unbalanced, a touching memoir of Geoff Rushton/John (Jhonn) Balance. Among the other entries is a piece by Benjamin Noys, a writer whose previous studies have included an examination of the connections between my own art for the Reverbstorm comic series and the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft. Noys takes a similar approach here, finding reflections of Coil obsessions in the symbolism of alchemical magic and the weird fiction of Arthur Machen.

Epigraph from Outside the Circles of Time by Kenneth Grant.

The weird fiction of HP Lovecraft was a Coil obsession, and Lovecraft receives the most attention in a great piece by Andy Sharp which takes its cue from the appearance in Titan Arch of lines from the epigraph for Outside the Circles of Time, an occult study by magus and scholar Kenneth Grant. The latter was another Lovecraft obsessive—no doubt one of the first, given his age—whose books are littered with references to both Lovecraft and Machen. I spotted the Coil/Grant connection many years ago (although quite some time after Love’s Secret Domain was released), and acknowledged the link in two pages in The Haunter of the Dark, one of which reprints Grant’s epigraph, while the other is a picture with the title In Spaces Between, a line from Titan Arch which is also a reference to the Necronomicon extract in The Dunwich Horror: “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.” Sharp does more than merely acknowledge this web of connections, he delves into Grant’s dense treatise in search of further correspondences. I’ve not read Grant’s book for many years but this essay makes me think I ought to look at it again. By coincidence (or is it? etc), both Love’s Secret Domain and Outside the Circles of Time have been reissued this year, the Grant book by Starfire Publishing.

Contents:
The Vision and the Voice: Esoteric Dimensions of Coil’s Vocals by Hayes Hampton
A Hauntology of Coil by Sean Oscar
Are You Loathsome Tonight?: Coil’s Transformations by Benjamin Noys
The Horseman Betrays His Steed by Cormac Pentecost
The Spaces Between: Outside the Circles of Time and Love’s Secret Domain by Andy Sharp
Jhonn is Unbalanced by Val Denham

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreaming Out of Space: Kenneth Grant on HP Lovecraft
• Peter Christopherson Photography & The Art of John Balance Collected
• The White People by Arthur Machen
• Val Denham album covers
• Kenneth Grant, 1924–2011
• Peter Christopherson, 1955–2010
• The Angelic Conversation

Jorgen Boberg’s Teresas

The Teresa Egg.

Danish artist Jorgen Boberg (1940–2009) described these early artworks as Surrealist, but if they have to be pigeonholed then Fantastic Realism may be as good a description. Everything here is from a feature in issue 12 of Avant Garde magazine for May 1970, and at first glance I thought the paintings and etchings might be the work of Ernst Fuchs, co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. (Fuchs’ art did appear in issue 9 of the same magazine.) Boberg at this stage in his career shared with Fuchs a preoccupation with bodily metamorphosis, jewelled forms and religious iconography. All the pictures in this feature have “Teresa” in their titles, although whether the name refers to Teresa of Ávila or to a private fixation of the artist isn’t clear.

Teresa’s Dream of Birth.

The Metamorphosis of Teresa.

Teresa’s Dream of the Temple.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ernst Fuchs, 1930–2015

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive
• The fantastic art archive

Weekend links 579

Untitled painting by Larry Kresek.

• “A good comparison might be Broken English-era Marianne Faithfull, Appalachian folk singer Hedy West, or the early-70s home recordings of German actress Sibylle Baier; spellbound female voices possessed of an uncanny emotional honesty.” Andrew Male on the songs of Karen Black. In 1989, the first issue of Psychotronic Video profiled Black’s remarkable acting career which was cultish enough for the magazine to give her the “psychotronic” label.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor Press, In A Sound World by Victor Segalen, “a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space”.

• At Messynessychic: Inside the Imaginarium of a Solarpunk Architect, or architectural designs by Luc Schuiten, brother of comic artist and illustrator François Schuiten.

• De Strijd der Werelden, 1899. The first illustrated book version of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds was a Dutch edition with drawings by JH Speenhoff.

• New/old music: Words Disobey Me (Dennis Bovell Dub Version) by The Pop Group, part of a forthcoming Bovell remix of the group’s debut album, Y.

• Mixes of the week: A mix for The Wire by Sunik Kim, FACT Mix 817 by Malibu, and Rhythmic Asymmetrical Wyrd by The Ephemeral Man.

• “Whatever we call them, and whatever else they might be, they are, in fact, printed paintings.” Joseph Visconi on William Blake’s monoprints.

• Curious Music announces Moebius Strips, an audio installation by Tim Story from the sounds and music of Dieter Moebius.

• At Dangerous Minds: Richard Metzger‘s confessions of an analogue vinyl snob.

• Strange Flowers departs from tradition by offering a summer reading list.

• Moebius 256 (1977) by Zanov | Moebius (1981) by Cyrille Verdeaux | Elena’s Sound-World (2014) by Sinoia Caves