A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
As the gilded panel proclaims, this book is a collaboration between Edith Wharton and Maxfield Parrish. Italian Villas and their Gardens was published in 1904, and includes many photos of the houses and their grounds in addition to Parrish’s illustrations. The Parrish pictures look at times like unpopulated scenes from his illustrations for children’s books.
The particularly British sub-genre of folk horror receives a substantial examination in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, a 500-page collection of essays, interviews and artwork edited by Andy Paciorek.
Featuring essays and interviews by many great cinematic, musical, artistic and literary talents, Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies is the most comprehensive and engaging exploration to date of the sub-genre of Folk Horror and associated fields in cinema, television, music, art, culture and folklore.
Includes contributions by Kim Newman, Robin Hardy, Thomas Ligotti, Philip Pullman, Gary Lachman and many many more.
100% of all profits from sales of the book will be charitably donated to environmental, wildlife and community projects undertaken by The Wildlife Trusts.
Nuada rising, 1973 & 1976.
Among the contents there’s my 4000-word essay Sacred Demons: The Dramatic Art of David Rudkin, parts of which will be familiar to readers of my previous posts about Rudkin’s work. I’m not sure Rudkin would appreciate being subjected to such a narrow focus when his plays and TV films are much more personal and cerebral than most generic entertainments. But there is an intersection in a number of them with folk horror at its widest reach, and Rudkin did happen to adapt The Ash-Tree (1975) by MR James for the BBC’s series of ghost stories at Christmas. My piece covers this along with other TV films such as Penda’s Fen (1974) and Artemis 81 (1981), and many of the stage plays including Afore Night Come (1962), The Sons of Light (1965/76) and The Saxon Shore (1983). The stage plays I only know from their scripts which makes them difficult to appraise; maybe the renewed interest in Rudkin’s work will spur some revivals.
Sight and Sound, August 2010. Illustration by Becca Thorne.
Paciorek’s book isn’t solely concerned with British subjects, other essays include studies of Weird Americana, the music of The Cremator and Morgiana, and Czech folk horror. The Lulu page apparently didn’t allow the listing of a full table of contents so I’m posting the details below.
Some of the art from my collage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray appears on the cover of The Graphic Canon: Volume 2, published this month in a German edition by Verlag Galiani. Out next month (although possibly available now) is the same book in a Brazilian edition from Boitempo Editorial. One of the disappointments this year was having to abandon plans to contribute to Russ Kick’s forthcoming graphic canon of crime fiction. I was overstretched during the summer, and what with projects slipping their deadlines and the trip to Providence there wasn’t any time left for other things.
• For those who missed the first edition, a second and final expanded edition of the Penda’s Fen study/celebration The Edge Is Where The Centre Is.
• Whipping up a storm: how Robert Mapplethorpe shocked America; Kevin Moore on the photographer’s Perfect Moment exhibition.
In the best scenario, metaphysical art distributes the work of understanding among cultural traditions and symbolic systems, and it is along these lines that Carrington’s work has been described as a productive combination of Mexican, Egyptian, Hebrew, Celtic, Greek, and Mesopotamian elements. Her paintings, plays, and stories mix the symbols of alchemy, astrology, Tarot, herbalism, magic, witchcraft, and a personal iconography.
Leif Schenstead-Harris on the life, art and fiction of Leonora Carrington
• Mixes of the week: Hieroglyphic Being collects favourite cosmic jazz of the 1970s; NTS Radio presents an hour of Annette Peacock.
• At Kill Your Darlings: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas enthuses about Dario Argento’s delirious masterwork, Suspiria.
• Pye Corner Audio releases a new album (only limited vinyl at the moment—boooo!) and remixes Stealing Sheep.
• The Trip Planners: Emily Witt meets the founders behind Erowid, the online drug encyclopedia.
• Woven Processional (1985), music on the Long String Instrument by Ellen Fullman.
• “The Paris attacks prove Charlie Hebdo’s critics wrong,” says Dorian Lynskey.
• Photographs by Danila Tkachenko of abandoned Soviet technology.
• Come Wander With Me / Deliverance by Anna von Hausswolff.
• The collages of Guy Maddin.
• Let’s Take A Trip (1965) by Godfrey | Trip On An Orange Bicycle (1968) by The Orange Bicycle | Last Trip (1968) by We Who Are
More rubble from Rubble. This isn’t as revelatory as In The Past but I like the evolution. Two of these versions of Hold On are featured on the Rubble series while the original by Rupert’s People may be heard on other psych compilations.
Rupert’s People was the name that freakbeat group The Fleur De Lys adopted for a handful of psychedelic releases in 1967; the name Rupert probably refers to the Daily Express‘s Rupert Bear, a comic-strip character who famously lost his innocence three later in the Schoolkids’ Issue of Oz magazine. Fleur De Lys appear on Rubble 13 playing Gong With The Luminous Nose, their musical setting (with inevitable retitling) of Edward Lear’s poem The Dong with a Luminous Nose. Hold On was the B-side of Reflections Of Charles Brown, and is very much a hangover from the beat period: a good song but it doesn’t stand out the way the next version does.
Sharon Tandy left South Africa for London where she recorded a number of songs with The Fleur De Lys as her backing group. Her ace version of Hold On was also the B-side of Stay With Me in the UK but the French and US releases flipped the songs. This version and another Tandy/Fleur De Lys collaboration, the tremendous Daughter Of The Sun, leap out of Rubble 8. There’s a great clip of Tandy performing Hold On for Beat Club. The searing guitar solo is by Bryn Haworth.
The third version appears on Rubble 3, and may also be heard on another excellent psych collection, Insane Times: 25 British Psychedelic Artefacts From The EMI Vaults. Rock music was getting heavier by 1969 so this version subjects the song to high-pitched vocals, wah-wah pedal, incipient riffing and what might be a synth drone. Despite a band name indicative of magickal accomplishment Ipsissimus didn’t record anything else.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Digging the Rubble
• Out Of Limits
• In The Past
1: The Psychedelic Snarl.
A few words in praise of Rubble, the 20-disc collection of (mostly) British psychedelic singles released by the Bam Caruso label from 1984 to 1991. A reader of Rob Chapman’s Psychedelia and Other Colours would find the Rubble series an indispensable companion to the second half of the book which explores the unique styles of British psych. Ideally you’d read the book while having these and other compilations close at hand, something I didn’t manage so I’ve been going through the discs myself this week, listening out for some of the many singles that Chapman discusses. The Rubble title is a nod to Lenny Kaye’s 1972 collection Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968, the first reappraisal of the garage/psych era whose success spawned Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964-1969, a not-so-good attempt to do the same for the UK, and Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976-1995. The original Nuggets was followed by the long-running Pebbles series which sprawls over 28 discs collecting obscure garage singles.
2: Pop-Sike Pipe Dreams.
What I like about the Rubble series, apart from its covering a favourite zone of musical history, is the way that each volume is titled in a suitable manner beyond a mere number: the title of volume 8, All The Colours Of Darkness could have been used by Coil during their LSD period. Then there’s the sleeve designs by the great Phil Smee, one of the founders of Bam Caruso, the collector of many of the featured singles, and a first-rate artisan of psychedelic graphics: there’s a Louis Wain cat on volume 2, and more of those letterforms by Roman Cieslewicz on volume 10. Smee deserves a post of his own but covering such a lengthy career would be a daunting task: Discogs lists 784 separate releases, and that’s only his design work. The design on the first run of Rubble albums was credited to “Harvey S. Williams”, a Smee pseudonym playing on the name of Elektra Records art director William S. Harvey. Harvey S. Williams was also the designer of the short-lived and rather wonderful Bam Caruso magazine, Strange Things Are Happening, issues of which are advertised in the inner sleeves of the early Rubble albums. (The magazine borrowed its title from a 1968 single by Rings and Things which is featured on Rubble 4.)
3: Nightmares In Wonderland.
The Rubble series has been reissued on CD many times, and is currently available as The Rubble Collection, a glossy cube containing all 20 discs in card sleeves together with two booklets that reprint Phil Smee’s original sleeve notes and band photos. The Rubble albums sound a little rough today when many of the songs which were taken directly from old singles have been resurrected and can be heard elsewhere in better quality. Subsequent compilations have also cherry-picked many of the better selections but this is still the ideal place to start if you want to immerse yourself in the toyshop/kitchen sink surrealism that is British psychedelia.
• See also: Richard Norris reminiscing about working at Bam Caruso, and choosing 20 favourite British psych records.
4: The 49 Minute Technicolour Dream.