{ feuilleton }

Moser’s Allegories

Kopfleisten.

A few plates by Koloman Moser from Allegorien: Neue Folge (1896), a collection of allegorical drawings, graphics and emblems by a number of artists in Moser’s circle, including Gustav Klimt, Franz Stuck and Carl Otto Czeschka. I keep hoping someone might upload a complete set of these plates but this doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Publisher and editor Martin Gerlach later commissioned Die Quelle (1901), a book of patterns and designs by Moser, several of which prefigure the tessellations of MC Escher.

Frühlingsmorgen.

Jagd.

Continue reading “Moser’s Allegories”

Master musicians

This year I’m seeing out December with (among other things) several albums by the Master Musicians of Bukkake, a Seattle group led by producer Randall Dunn. MMOB’s name started as a joke (and no doubt still catches unawares anyone unfamiliar with Japanese pornography) but now positions the ensemble as indigenous performers from an imaginary country, a persona reflected in the masks and robes the musicians wear, and in their music which blends chants, non-Western instruments, synthesizers and extended wah-wah guitar drones that wouldn’t be out-of-place on a German album from the 1970s. The music alone would be enough for me but there’s the added bonus of songs based on Borges texts, Tibetan references (Dunn is a Buddhist) and outfits borrowed from Jodorowsky films. Dunn and some of the other group members have connections with Seattle groups Earth and Sunn O))), and it’s possible to detect trace elements of both those bands in the MMOB sound, especially on live recordings.

As usual I’ll be taking my winter break over the next few days so I’ll activate the blog archive and leave you with a tremendous 75-minute performance by the Master Musicians of Bukkake at Leoncavallo, Milan, in 2013. The stage is rather cramped for the group’s theatrics, and there’s only the one camera, but the band raise a considerable cone of power performing extended variations on numbers from their recent Far West album. Far West and its follow-up, the synth-oriented Further West Quad Cult, can be listened to on their own or played together in a mix of your own choosing. MMOB aren’t the first band to do this but I don’t know of any album or (albums) that sound so different in isolation. Perfect listening for the darkest weeks of the year.

Merlin

Merlin building Stonehenge (14th century) from Folio 30r of British Library, Egerton 3028.

The Arthurian magus in art and illustration. Despite the antiquity of the Arthur legend there doesn’t seem to be much early representation of Merlin outside a few drawings in old manuscripts. The British Library’s folio showing the raising of Stonehenge is the oldest known depiction of the ancient structure.

Most of the pictures here are illustrations for the Merlin and Vivien section of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the first book of which was published in 1859. Vivien (or Viviane, Nimue, etc) is the sorcerous Lady in the Lake who either imprisons Merlin underground or in a tree depending on whose account you read. Edward Burne-Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin has long been my favourite of that artist’s paintings. This is only a very small selection of possible pictures, of course. A more complete catalogue would include Nicol Williamson in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), a performance that some find overly mannered but one that I’ve always enjoyed.

Merlin and Vivien (1867) by Gustave Doré.

The Beguiling of Merlin (1874) by Edward Burne-Jones.

Continue reading “Merlin”

Solstice sky

Tyrrhenian Sea and Solstice Sky by Danilo Pivato.

Danilo Pivato’s marvellous photograph of the December sun was NASA’s winter solstice photo of the day for 2014, although it actually dates from 2005. (And they’d also posted it twice before.)

The multiplicity of heavenly bodies makes me think of the Hipgnosis cover for Harmony of the Spheres (1979), an excellent album by Neil Ardley. I think that’s the moon rather than the sun but the robed figure suits the solstice moment. This wasn’t the first time that Hipgnosis had a mysterious figure contemplating the landscape although by 1979 it was probably the last.

Balance, a film by Wolfgang & Christopher Lauenstein

Balance (1989) is a short and wordless animation in which five men stand on a square platform floating in space. When one of the men fishes up a box from the void the additional weight, and the ensuing struggle for possession, causes problems. Watch it here.