Adrian Utley – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 272

No Passing (1954) by Kay Sage.

• More Lovecraftiana: She Walks In Shadows, an illustrated all-woman Lovecraftian anthology, will be published in October. Related: “The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties“, a study that’s been filtering through the press as “Do octopuses have alien DNA?”

• “The right to ‘subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’ is the bedrock of an open, diverse society,” says Kenan Malik in his TB Davie Memorial Lecture.

• Sunn O))) with Attila Csihar at the Berlin Heimathafen. Related: Here’s what you missed at Sunn O)))’s sold out Berlin gig.

Caillois is fascinated by these “beveled buildings,” truly abundant in the Fifteenth, along with an unusually high incidence of blind walls, false façades, and merely ornamental windows, each beloved of his phantoms. In the parts of the arrondissement developed during the postwar period, Caillois’s attention is drawn instead to the ventilator shafts and drainage grates that dot the streets. These structures, built to clear away rainwater or aerate underground garages, have a secret function, according to him. Noting their uncanny similarity to some of the settings in the Weird Tales of HP Lovecraft, he speculates that they may have been constructed to provide the entry points for an extraterrestrial invasion of our planet.

Ryan Ruby on Roger Callois and the phantoms of the Fifteenth Arrondissement

• “I’m really into big moments,” says Julia Holter whose new album, Have You In My Wilderness, is released next month.

• Adrian Utley talks to Peter Zinovieff, co-inventor of the EMS synthesizer. Related: What the Future Sounded Like.

• “Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the anti-2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Marissa Visci.

• Mix of the week: Gizehcast #17 by Rutger Zuydervelt.

• Modernist architecture on film.

• Thaumaturgy at Tumblr

• The Call of Ktulu (1984) by Metallica | Cthulhu Dawn (2000) by Cradle of Filth | Cthulhu: A Cryo Chamber Collaboration (2014) by Various Artists

Stone Tapes and Quatermasses

Quatermass paperbacks from Jovike’s Flickr pages.

This may be another occasional series in the making since there’s already been a post about Roadside Picnic/Stalker music, and one about music inspired by the cosmic horror of William Hope Hodgson. I was going to write something earlier this year about music derived from the works of Nigel Kneale after rewatching all of Kneale’s major works. The reappraisal was prompted by the publication in January of The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, an excellent anthology of essays/speculations (and a China Miéville interview) about Kneale’s film and TV dramas. The delay in writing was a result of having to wait several months after ordering a CD of the Tod Dockstader album (see below) which for some reason the distributors couldn’t manage to get in the post.

In the Twilight Language book there’s a piece by Ken Hollings about electronic music, some of which has material connections with Kneale’s work, notably the Radiophonic Workshop’s creation of sound effects for Quatermass and the Pit. Early copies of the book came with a bonus cassette tape of Kneale-inspired music; more about that below. The men and women of the Radiophonic Workshop are the godparents of the following Kneale soundworks, most of which are British, and inevitably tend towards the grinding, droning and doom-laden end of the electronic spectrum. Given the enduring influence of Kneale’s work, especially the Quatermass serials and their film equivalents, it’s surprising there isn’t more Knealesque music to be found. (I’m avoiding the obvious film soundtracks, and any bands such as Quatermass who may be named after Kneale’s work but whose music doesn’t reflect it.) If anyone can add to this list then please leave a comment.

Quatermass (1964) by Tod Dockstader

The American master of tape manipulation here processes hours of recordings of cymbals, pipes, tone generators, a vacuum hose and rubber balloons to create what he calls “a very dense, massive, even threatening work”. Dockstader hadn’t seen any of the Quatermass films or serials when he chose the name but he said that it sounded right. It certainly does, as does the unnerving, shrieking morass of sound he manages to craft using the most primitive equipment. The Starkland CD containing the Quatermass suite includes two further edits of the source material entitled Two Moons of Quatermass.

The Séance At Hobs Lane (2001) by Mount Vernon Arts Lab

Mount Vernon Arts Lab is Drew Mulholland and various collaborators. The Séance At Hobs Lane is an abstract concept album based on Mulholland’s lifelong obsession with Quatermass and the Pit (an idée fixe he writes about in the Twilight Language book), plus “Victorian skullduggery, outlaws, secret societies and subterranean experiences”. Among the collaborators are Coil, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, Barry 7 of Add N to (X), and Adrian Utley of Portishead. The album was reissued in 2007 on the Ghost Box label.

Ouroborindra (2005) by Eric Zann

And speaking of Ghost Box… This album has been mentioned here on several occasions, a one-off release that’s the most consciously horror-oriented of all the works in the Ghost Box catalogue. The artist “name” and track titles reference Lovecraft and Machen but it’s included here for the dialogue quote in the insert from Kneale’s ghost drama The Stone Tape. In addition to the Mount Vernon reissue other Ghost Box references to Kneale can be found in the samples from Quatermass and the Pit (TV version) on The Bohm Site from We Are All Pan’s People by The Focus Group, and the title of the track which follows: Hob’s Rumble. Continue reading “Stone Tapes and Quatermasses”

Weekend links 127

M15, The Whirlpool Galaxy photographed by Martin Pugh. The overall and deep space winner of Astronomy Photographer of the Year, 2012.

• The Final Academy, the series of William Burroughs-themed events that took place in London and Manchester in 1982, will be celebrated at the Horse Hospital, London, on 27th October. Academy 23, a publication edited by Matthew Levi Stevens, will include my report on the Manchester Haçienda performances.

• “Architects are the last people who should shape our cities,” says the thrillingly pugnacious Jonathan Meades in a piece from his new writing collection Museums Without Walls. Andy Beckett reviews the book here.

• Ex-Minimal Compact singer/bassist Malka Spigel talks about her new album, Every Day Is Like The First Day, which can be streamed in full here.

What’s new about the current acknowledgments page is that it’s unsolicited—it appears like an online pop-up ad, benefiting no one but the author and his comrades. This is surely why these afterwords are often so garrulously narcissistic and strewn with clichés. The most radical experimentalist adheres to the most mindless acknowledgments-page formula; the most stinging social critic suddenly becomes Sally Field winning an Oscar.

Sam Sacks at the New Yorker on the blight of novelists’ acknowledgments pages. DG Myers at Commentary Magazine piles on.

• Another streaming album: Composed by Jherek Bischoff. Try Insomnia, Death & The Sea featuring Dawn McCarthy.

• Film of Lindsay Kemp being interviewed in 1977 about his production of Salomé.

• Electronic Performers (2004): a video by Machine Molle for the song by Air.

One of a series of Beardsley-like drawings by Djuna Barnes posted at Strange Flowers. The resurgent Ms. Barnes is mentioned three times in this Terry Castle review of All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen.

• Fictitious Dishes, meals from novels photographed by Dinah Fried.

• Life, the Dinosaurs & Everything: Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.

• The Baby Died: Morbid Curiosities found in Old Newspapers.

• Portishead’s Adrian Utley gives a tour of his synth collection.

• Minimal Compact: Babylonian Tower (1982) | Not Knowing (1984) | When I Go (1985) | Nil Nil (1987).