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The art of Kato Teruhide, 1936–2015

Feeling of Autumn.

I’m still a little obsessed with ukiyo-e prints old and new, and with good reason when you find examples like these. Kato Teruhide was one of a number of 20th-century printmakers who subjected the traditional form to modern refinements, which in this case means vertical views of architectural structures or spaces, some of whose close-ups and unusual angles show how photography has helped expand the visual possibilties of the medium. Ishibi Koji Street is a winter scene that presents a view directly above the street, something I’ve never seen before in this medium. Other scenes constrain their narrow viewpoints even further by the framing of walls or, in the case of the print of Fushimi Inari, the path through the thousand torii gates that lead visitors to the famous shrine. Teruhide pushed his medium close to abstraction without ever being as stylised as some of his contemporaries. Kyoto Romance, a book of his prints, was published in 1992.

Ishibe Koji Street.

Bright Moonlight at Ryoan-ji Temple.

Nisonin Temple.

Harvest Moon.

Continue reading “The art of Kato Teruhide, 1936–2015”

Imaginary Landscapes: A film on Brian Eno

The landscapes are those that may come to mind when listening to one of Brian Eno’s instrumentals, as Eno himself explains in this 40-minute portrait by Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo. I linked to a streaming copy of this several years ago but Flash streams are no use today so it’s good to find again on YouTube. Imaginary Landscapes was made in 1989, and the relatively short running time isn’t really enough to do justice to Eno as either composer or indefatigable theorist. The brevity is also a little surprising when the whole thing was shot on film in the UK, USA and Italy. Maybe expense was an issue? Whatever the answer, we get to see many actual landscapes—California, the rivers and shoreline of Suffolk, the urban landscape of New York City—while Eno explains some of the ideas behind his art and his music. He discusses his time in New York, which he’d recently left to return to his home town of Woodbridge, and his intention to develop his art installations to a greater degree than he’d done in the past. We know now that he did exactly this, I got to see one of his “Quiet Club” installations at the Hayward Gallery’s Sonic Boom group show in 2000. The quietness was rather compromised by sound leakage from other noisier exhibits but it was one of the show’s more memorable pieces.

I’ve a lot of time for Eno’s approach to art installation and the instrumental music he creates for these works, less so for his recent songs. Imaginary Landscapes was made shortly before the release of the song-based Nerve Net, an album I’ve never liked very much, plus another release, The Shutov Assembly, a collection of instrumentals that I’ve listened to more than most of his albums, with the possible exception of Thursday Afternoon. Many of the posts here were written to the accompaniment of The Shutov Assembly, I find it an ideal album of “thinking music”, more so than the later Neroli which is actually titled “thinking music” but which takes the Eno systems approach to a minimal extreme. The Shutov Assembly could be regarded as another collection of imaginary landscapes, with each piece having a nine-letter title that refers to a real location (all of which hosted one of Eno’s artworks) without being in any way illustrative. The Shutov pieces were recorded around the time Imaginary Landscapes was being made, and we see Eno demonstrating synthesizer sounds that are close to some of those you hear on the album. I’d have been happy with a lot more of this, 40 minutes more in fact, but the film-makers had other ideas.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harold Budd, 1936–2020
• Synapse: The Electronic Music Magazine, 1976–1979
• Fourth Worlds: A Jon Hassell Mix
• Mistaken Memories Of Medieval Manhattan
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• Moonlight in Glory
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• Generative culture
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Weekend links 698

Contained Maze (1966) by Michael Ayrton.

• At Public Domain Review: Skeletons (1692) by Ikkyu, a Japanese monk, whose book is “a mixture of poetry and prose that comes down to us in printed editions supposedly replicating a manuscript, now lost, by the monk’s own hand. The text describes a series of visions of animated skeletons that Ikkyu had when he visited an abandoned temple. The lively illustrations testify to their maker’s sardonic sense of humour: he images skeletons dancing, drumming, drinking sake, having sex.”

• At The Daily Heller: Victor Moscoso’s Psychedelic Valedictory Exhibit. The exhibition will be at the Instituto Cervantes in New York City which has an accompanying 224-page catalogue of Moscoso’s posters and other designs.

• More Moscoso: Color (1971) and Moscoso Comix (1989), free to download at the Internet Archive. Moscoso’s underground comics experimented with the form in a manner that still looks radical today.

Drone and ambient metal is often invoked in elemental terms. There is something antediluvian and beyond about it. Pierce the earth’s crust, and there is liquid fire, ever so slowly shifting the tectonic plates we inhabit. Such music is envisaged as massive and totally beyond our control. It infuses the foundations of civilization. As Attila Csihar intones on Sunn O))) track ‘Aghartha’, named for a legendary subterranean kingdom: “Into the memories of the consciousness of ancient rocks/ Nature’s answer to eternal question”.

Stripped of the trappings of modern pop and rock, ambient metal invites a search for answers to the bigger questions. Ancient musical modes are resurfaced to get us closer to a putative godhead.

Dan Franklin on Earth 2, the deceptively-titled debut album by Earth. The album’s 30th anniversary has prompted a collection of remixes, Earth 2.23, by various artists

• At Spoon & Tamago: Download over 30 butterfly designs by Meiji-era artist Yuho Tanaka.

• New music: HYbr:ID II by Alva Noto, and The View From Vega by Benge.

• The winners of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2023.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Guy Maddin Day (restored/expanded).

• A happy 20th birthday to Swan River Press.

• Industrial Landscape (1980) by Marc Barreca | Desolate Landscape (2012) by John Zorn | Primordial Landscape (2013) by Patrick Cowley

More Aubrey fakery

It’s surprising to find such blatant examples of fraudulence on a major museum website yet here we are with 13 poor attempts at the Beardsley style credited by the Art Institute of Chicago to “Imitator of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley”. Imitators usually sign their work with their own names, not with the name of the artist being imitated, the description required here is “faker”. As Beardsley imitations go, these examples aren’t as clumsy as some of the Nichols fakes; they’re also not as widely disseminated but then Nichols published a book of his attempts. Chicago just happens to be the home of a group of Beardsley’s contemporaries led by Will Bradley who championed the Beardsley style in The Chap-Book. There’s the vague possibility that these drawings may have been the work of a Chap-Book artist (the Art Institute site offers no information) although Bradley himself can be ruled out, he was a much better artist than this.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Aubrey Beardsley archive

The Great Drone Ones

Cover by Simon Heath with Nicolas Crombez.

October, as I’ve noted before, is drone month, and this year I finally decided to catch up with the most recent instalments in the series of Lovecraft-themed albums that Cryo Chamber have been releasing each year since 2014. I’m still waiting for the discs to arrive—the Shoggoth Mail has been taking its time to slither here from Kracow—but Bandcamp happily assuages any impatience by offering immediate downloads. All of these albums are a collaborative effort between a varying roster of Cryo Chamber artists, with the contributions being blended together to create disc-long tracks (usually two discs to an album) that offer audio portraits of the gods or beings of the Cthulhu Mythos. The contributors do their best to maintain a consistent mood (and, where necessary, the same key) so there aren’t any of the abrupt exchanges you often get in music mixes. As to the identity of the groups or individuals involved, I could name names but as I’m not familiar with their work outside these releases there’s not much I can say about them.

Covers by Simon Heath.

Lovecraftian music used to be little more than one-off tracks on rock albums but, as with Lovecraftian illustration, there’s a lot more fully-realised material to be found today. One of the things I like about the Cryo Chamber albums is that they’re wholly instrumental (the “Cthulhu fhtagn” intonation on Cthulhu is a rare exception), and with each piece being an hour or more in length I find them very amenable as soundtracks for illustration sessions. Cryo Chamber specialises in a variety of dark ambient music that’s more evocative than the abstract equivalents produced by artists like Thomas Köner: Gothic doom and apocalyptic science fiction are recurrent themes. Since cosmic horror tends to be a blend of Gothic doom and apocalyptic science fiction it was almost inevitable that one or more of HP Lovecraft’s monstrous extraterrestrials would eventually raise its tentacles somewhere in the Cryo Chamber discography. This type of music is a better match for weird fiction than most of the rock music derived from Lovecraft’s stories, in part because it resembles the kinds of atmospheric timbres that you find on the better horror soundtracks. There’s more substance here than Köner’s “grey noise” but rhythm is minimised or omitted altogether, and there’s a general avoidance of overt musicality. One of the precursors of the Cryo Chamber sound, Lustmord, established the form in 1992 with The Monstrous Soul, an album that quotes liberally from Jacques Tourneur’s The Night of the Demon while borrowing track titles (IXAXAAR, The Daathian Doorway) from Kenneth Grant’s eldritch occult philosophies.

Covers by Simon Heath.

The Cryo Chamber Collaborations began with Cthulhu, the only single-disc release, and one which I seem to play the most. Subsequent releases have dealt with Lovecraft’s other Mythos gods—Azathoth (2015), Nyarlathotep (2016), the only three-disc release), Yog-Sothoth (2017) and Shub-Niggurath (2018)—before working through the extended Mythos with albums devoted to Hastur (2019), Yig (2020), Dagon (2021) and Tsathoggua (2022). Some of the albums are more sonically illustrational than others: Cthulhu and Dagon evoke the oppressive chasms of the oceanic deep, while Nyarlathotep, Hastur and Yig offer intimations of the Middle East, justified in the case of Nyarlathotep’s pharaonic aspect, less so for the others. Yog-Sothoth, meanwhile, features a succession of chiming tones like those produced by Tibetan bowl gongs. Lovecraft’s fiction tells us little about the actual nature of Yog-Sothoth aside from vague references like the one in The Horror in the Museum, a story co-written by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, in which we read of “a congeries of iridescent globes…stupendous in its malign suggestiveness.” Not an easy thing to represent in music yet the Yog-Sothoth album has its own mood and character which sets it apart from the others in the series. The most recent release, Tsathoggua, honours Clark Ashton Smith’s loathsome toad god with swathes of abrasive noise and repeated eruptions of a cthonic bass tone like those used by Deathprod on the baleful Treetop Drive.

Now that the Cryo Chamber series has made use of all the primary deities of the Mythos cycle, plus some of the secondary ones, I’ve been wondering where it may go next. There are many minor deities (or entities) created by the generations of writers that followed Lovecraft’s lead (see this list for details) but few of the names of these beings have the authority of Lovecraft’s nomenclature. They also lack the textual reinforcement that the Mythos gives to entities that would otherwise have been limited to mentions in only one or two stories. I suppose we’ll find out whether the label will be continuing the series soon enough. The albums as they currently stand run for over 18 hours in total. That’s almost enough to soundtrack the entirety of Halloween.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Daikan by Thomas Köner
• Cosmic music and cosmic horror
• Drone month
• Hodgsonian vibrations