{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 650

A detail from Tom Phillips’ cover design for Starless And Bible Black (1974) by King Crimson.

• RIP Tom Phillips. The term “polymath” is often used by monomaths to describe people who are proficient in two areas instead of just one. Tom Phillips was a model polymath, an artist whose work ranged wherever his curiosity took him, from conventionally realist portraiture to abstract painting and computer art, from collage, sculpture and stage design to 20 Sites n Years, a long-term photographic work. When Phillips decided to illustrate Dante’s Inferno he first translated the book himself; the Dante project subsequently evolved into a TV/film production made in collaboration with Peter Greenaway and Raúl Ruiz. As for A Humument, this is the artist’s book by which all others should be judged, a unique reworking of a Victorian novel which now exists in multiple editions and sub-works. Humument extracts became a kind of Phillips signature (you can see one at the top of this post), a series of often cryptic fragments and pronouncements that appeared in prints and paintings while also supplying the libretto for Phillips’ first opera, Irma, one of his many musical compositions. Some years ago I posted a quote by Brian Eno about his former art teacher; those words (from A Year With Swollen Appendices) are worth repeating:

It’s a sign of the awfulness of the English art world that he isn’t better known. Tom has committed the worst of all crimes in England. He’s risen above his station. You can sell chemical weapons to doubtful regimes and still get a knighthood, but don’t be too clever, don’t go rising above your station.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another. It’s the same in pop—once you’ve got your brand identity, carry on doing that for the rest of your days and you’ll make a lot of money. Because Tom’s lifetime project ranges over books, music and painting, it looks diffuse, but he is a most coherent artist. I like his work more and more.

• “The most radical thing about Ever So Lonely is the instrumental when it breaks down and for eight glorious bars you’re dancing to a classical raga and loving it, whoever you are.” Sheila Chandra again on the fleeting pop career of Monsoon.

• Something to look forward to for next summer: Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, a book by Adam Rowe, curator of 70s Sci-fi Art at Tumblr.

• Mix of the week: Groove Orient: South Asian Elements in Psychedelic Jazz at Aquarium Drunkard.

• “Physicists create a wormhole using a quantum computer.” Natalie Wolchover explains.

• Pattern Collider is a tool for generating and exploring quasiperiodic tiling patterns.

• “Infernal Affairs is still Hong Kong’s greatest crime saga,” says James Balmont.

• Secret Satan, 2022, the essential end-of-year book list from Strange Flowers.

• Also no longer with us as of this week, comic artist Aline Kominsky–Crumb.

• New music: Violet Echoes by Subtle Energy.

• Il Trio Infernale (1974) by Ennio Morricone | Firebird Suite: Infernal Dance Of King Kastchei (Stravinsky) (1975) by Tomita | Infernal Devices (2011) by Moon Wiring Club

The Art Teacher from Drohobycz: Bruno Schulz by the Quay Brothers

How’s this for a coincidence? While re-reading Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass I thought I’d see whether anything new by the Quay Brothers had been posted to YouTube. I should evidently keep a closer watch on the channel maintained by the Polish Cultural Institute who posted this latest short by the Quays just over a week ago, an 18-minute biographical introduction to the very same Bruno Schulz. Any time is a good time to be informed about the works of the author/artist but it was 80 years ago this month that Schulz was shot dead in the street by a Gestapo officer, an act of casual brutality that throws an indelible shadow over the stories collected in The Cinnamon Shops (aka The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.

The Quays’ video sketches the details of Schulz’s life as well as the events that led to his death in 1942. The town of Drohobycz where he lived and worked was formerly a part of the Galicia region of Poland, but since the upheavals of the Second World War has been situated in Western Ukraine. This is the place we find transformed in Schulz’s fiction, in a cycle of narratives that aren’t so much stories as reports from a dreamworld of shifting perspectives and fluid metamorphosis, where even the boundary between life and death is made tenuous and debatable. Wojciech Has did a superb job of conveying the mutable quality of Schulz’s fiction in The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), and the Quay Brothers are currently adapting the same material, a small fragment of which may be seen in this memorial.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Quay Brothers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has

Third Eye by Monsoon

You know an album is a cult item when you find yourself buying it for the fourth time. I’ve owned Third Eye in most of its previous incarnations—original vinyl, UK CD, US CD with bonus tracks—but this latest reissue from Cherry Red is the first to summarise the career of the group that recorded it. Monsoon were an Anglo-Indian pop ensemble who released just one album and a handful of singles in the early 1980s before disbanding:

Monsoon led by singer Sheila Chandra (best known for her role in the BBC’S Grange Hill) along with record producer Steve Coe and bass guitarist Martin Smith was a brave and pioneering pop trio that blended traditional music from the Indian sub-continent with 80s British pop. Additionally, they drew on the best musicians they could find from both East and West.

The band originated in 1980 when keyboard player and producer Steve Coe developed an interest in Indian music. Hoping to form a band to pursue this direction, he discovered Sheila via some demo tapes which she had recorded for Hansa Records when she was 14. Sheila joined Monsoon in March 1981, three months before she left school. Monsoon’s first EP Ever So Lonely/Sunset Over The Ganges/Mirror Of Your Mind/Shout Till You’re Heard had been distributed by Rough Trade. Their fresh Asian Fusion sound attracted the attention of label owner David Claridge, and Phonogram A&R man Dave Bates who signed the outfit to the Mobile Suit Corporation (Phonogram).

In December 1981, the band re-arranged and re-recorded Ever So Lonely at Rockfield Studios with co-producer Hugh Jones, released by Mobile Suit Corporation (Phonogram) in 1982 and, though surrounded by synth-pop singles, and predating the term “World Music” by a full five years, was a smash hit around the world, reaching No.12 in the UK singles chart.

Two further singles followed; Shakti (The Meaning Of Within) and a cover of The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows along with the debut album Third Eye but due to differences with their label, Phonogram, Monsoon dissolved later in 1982.

John Peel apparently played Ever So Lonely on his late-night radio show but I missed it there, hearing it for the first time on the Radio 1 chart countdown one Sunday afternoon. Surrounded by synth-pop hits, the song was strikingly exceptional, while the album that followed still sounds out of time, an infectious blend of sitar, tabla, pop hooks, the occasional drum machine and Bill Nelson’s E-bow guitar. The group’s cover of Tomorrow Never Knows gestures towards the sitar’s entanglement with the psychedelic 60s although you can’t read too much into this when it was Phonogram executives who insisted on a Beatles song. If you’ve never heard this version you may suspect Monsoon of creating a novelty confection like those that fill Sitar Beat (1967), Big Jim Sullivan’s collection of Indian-flavoured psychedelic pop. Monsoon’s cover is much better than Sullivan’s instrumentals, an arrangement that sits so easily among the rest of the songs on Third Eye that it sounds like something they might have written themselves.

One of several Indipop compilations.

Monsoon didn’t last long but this was only the beginning for Sheila Chandra and Steve Coe who combined forces by getting married and following new musical directions with Coe’s Indipop record label. Indipop developed Monsoon’s fusion sound in a variety of guises centred around Sheila Chandra’s solo releases and The Ganges Orchestra, a Steve Coe studio creation. The label also established links with artists pursuing similar ends, groups like Manchester’s Suns of Arqa, and West India Company, a Blancmange spin-off who brought Asha Bhosle’s voice to European dancefloors. Some of Sheila Chandra’s early albums are a little uneven compared to Third Eye but the best of them, especially Quiet! (1984) and Nada Brahma (1985) are highly recommended. The expanded CD release of Quiet! is another cult disc of mine, a near-beatless suite of raga-like vocalisations. Quiet! foreshadows the paring back of instrumentation that took place on Chandra’s subsequent albums for the Real World label, one of which, Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices (1992) featured an a cappella reprise of Ever So Lonely a decade after the song had reached the Top Twenty. Four years after this, the writers at The Wire magazine voted her third Real World release, ABoneCroneDrone, one of their albums of the year. An interview in the same magazine showed how far Sheila Chandra had travelled in her evolution as a singer and musical artist, from the Top of the Pops studio to this:

The initial recordings for ABoneCroneDrone were made in a deconsecrated church in Bristol: tamburas, harmoniums and vocal tracks were laquered on top of one another, and her voice was also played into the body of a piano via a speaker underneath, to get the strings resonating. Further devices were added to bring character to different tracks, such as didgeridoos, bagpipes, ocean swells and birdsong.

“There was a very fine line to draw between how loud the vocals should be, so that people who weren’t tuned into harmonics could actually hear the subtle things going on, and how far we were drowning out natural harmonics that occurred. And the other kind of balance to be reached was that when I hear a drone as it’s played, unmagnified, untreated, and I hear all these harmonic dances in it and then play it five minutes later, I’ll hear a different dance. I’ll hear South Indian carnatic violins, I’ll even hear rhythm. This performance is going on, and I’ll hear it clear as a bell, very quietly, and it’s in this drone. So, to freeze what I was hearing magnified was also a dilemma, because I didn’t want to make it a static, dead experience. So what we’ve done is layer so many things that you’ll only hear some on different systems and some at different volumes or in different acoustic spaces. There are some things you’ll only hear on the twelfth listen. And it’s like a living experience then.”

Essential listening.

The only drones on Third Eye are the resonating strings of the Indian instruments, but this is a pop album, after all, not an avant-garde composition. The new reissue is a 34-track double-disc set that contains enough versions of Ever So Lonely to satisfy the most ardent fan, including the Hindi version and a dub mix. In addition to the original album you get all the other singles with their B-sides, a handful of later remixes and six previously unreleased songs, four of which are sessions recorded for Capital Radio in March 1982.

This would be pretty much definitive if it wasn’t for one of those inexplicable alterations that often bedevil reissues. The final track on the album, Watchers Of The Night, is missing ten seconds or so of the drum-machine intro that you hear on the earlier CD releases. I no longer have my vinyl copy but I’m fairly sure this was the same; Discogs gives the original vinyl duration as 3:47, whereas the new reissue runs for 3:38. Anomalies aside, the mastering is much better than before, something that really benefits the bass and the percussive details. The album has been unavailable in any form since 1995 so this attention is long overdue. Now that Cherry Red have found their way to Indipop’s neglected archives I’m hoping further reissues may follow.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ravi Shankar’s metempsychosis
• Tomorrow Never Knows

Weekend links 649

Niijima Floats: Mottled Blue Black Float with Silver Leaf (1991) by Dale Chihuly.

• “Blue whale songs fall below the range of human hearing. If you want to listen to one, to actually hear its ethereal patterns of wobbly pulses and haunting moans, you have to speed it up by at least two-fold. But according to Hildebrand and McDonald’s instruments, the tonal frequencies of the songs had been sinking to even greater depths for three straight years. ‘This is weird,’ Hildebrand thought. To figure out if it was just an anomaly or something more, Hildebrand and McDonald embarked on a quest to find some really old songs. Eventually they got their hands on some of the earliest known recordings, created by the Navy in the 1960s and stored on analog cassettes. They were floored. The frequencies had declined by 30 percent over 40 years.” Kristen French on a mysterious development in blue whale songs.

• “She didn’t see it as a game, or for divination, but as a model of the universe.” Joanna Moorhead on the Tarot designs of Leonora Carrington.

• “A collection of blogs about every topic”: ooh.directory. (Ta to whoever added this place to the list.)

• New music: Pop Ambient 2023 by Various Artists, and Aeolian Mixtape by Quinta.

• At Public Domain Review: The Tanzmasken of Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on mazes and labyrinths. (Previously)

• At Spoon & Tamago: Paper-cut cityscapes by kirie artist Hiroki Saito.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: The Unrivaled Legacy of Dale Chihuly.

• Mix of the week: Neo-Medieval Mix by Moon Wiring Club.

• Old music: Back To The Woodlands by Ernest Hood.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jacques Rivette Day.

• Weyes Blood’s favourite music.

• (Gorgeous Curves Lovely Fragments Labyrinthed On Occasions Entwined Charms, A Few Stories At Any Longer Sworn To Gathered From A Guileless Angel And The Hilt Edges Of Old Hearts, If They Do In The Guilt Of Deep Despondency.) (2004) by Akira Rabelais | The Private Labyrinth (2008) by The Wounded Kings | Labyrinths (2018) by Jonathan Fitoussi & Clemens Hourrière

The World of John Whitney

John Whitney’s abstract films haven’t always been easy to see on YouTube, and when they do turn up they’re often poor quality, so this was a welcome discovery, a 38-minute compilation of Whitney shorts taken from a Japanese laserdisc. A couple of the items mentioned in the on-screen contents list are absent from the video. The actual contents are as follows:

• Arabesque (1976)
• Matrix III (1972)
• Matrix I (1971)
• Permutation (1968)
• Catalog (1961)

Catalog is a showreel of Whitney’s earliest film experiments, a compilation within the compilation. Many of Whitney’s films are among the earliest examples of computer animation, made in the days when creating any kind of computer graphics meant laboriously plotting co-ordinates into a program which would then be fed into a machine the size of a wardrobe; the resulting video output was captured on film by a camera pointed at a monitor, a process you can see in operation in a short demonstration of Whitney’s working methods, Experiments in Motion Graphics (1967). Colour overlays and superimposition transform these simple cathode-ray shapes into things of beauty, with Whitney’s soundtracks being the icing on the cake: Arabesque is accompanied by the santur playing of Manoochehr Sadeghi, while Matrix III features an extract from Terry Riley’s Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive