David Britton – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

New things for July

In Spaces Between from The Great Old Ones (1999).

Some noteworthy pieces of news as the month draws to a rain-sodden and dismal conclusion.

• Frank Woodward was in touch this week to let me know that his excellent HP Lovecraft documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, will at last be appearing on DVD in October. This is a feature-length appraisal of Lovecraft’s life, work and influence, and includes contributions from Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Caitlin R Kiernan, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell and Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi. A number of my artworks are included throughout and they’ll probably also be featured in a gallery section on the disc. The film was shot in HD so it’s being released on Blu-ray as well as regular DVD.

• Also Lovecraft-related, and also due out shortly, is DM Mitchell’s follow-up to the landmark Starry Wisdom anthology of Lovecraft-inspired texts and graphics. That volume was acclaimed in some quarters and condemned in others; I don’t doubt that this new work, Songs of the Black Wurm Gism, will manage the same. Contributors include David Britton, Grant Morrison and yours truly. The cover is Alan Moore’s splendid portrait of Asmodeus.

• Last but not least, Paul Schütze was also in touch this week with news that two more audio works have been added to his online catalogue. Soundworks 01 is his atmospherics created with with Andrew Hulme from the recent TV drama series Red Riding, while Tokyo/Osaka Live is two pieces of improvisation with Simon Hopkins. Both releases are available through iTunes.

Passage 11

Ed Jansen writes to let me know that the latest edition of his web magazine, Passage, is now online. Once again, most of the features listed below are in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. David Britton has been recommending Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones to me so I guess I’ll be reading that soon.

• Sylvia Plath, a biography.
• Ingrid Jonker, poet from South-Africa, essay on her life and work.
• Jack Kerouac & William Burroughs, a review of And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks.
• William Burroughs in Texas, a review of Rob Johnson’s, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs.
• Aleister Crowley, an article about Crowley’s possible involvement with the Secret Service.
• Rudolf Hess, double agent? A view on his flight to Britain.
• Jonathan Littell, an in-depth review of his work The Kindly Ones. War as hallucination.
• Enrique Marty & Maurizio Cattelan, a review of the work from two conceptual artists.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage 10

Readouts

The HAL Project.

January flew by in a blizzard of work so posting here tended to rely more on pictures than words. As usual the things I’ve been designing will be unveiled when they’re closer to being published or released but for now here’s some new or not-so-new items worthy of note.

• The HAL Project screensaver. I’ve never had much time for gaudy screensavers, I prefer something which doesn’t get annoying when I’m otherwise engaged. For a while now I’ve been using the Mac-only Lotsawater which turns your monitor into a vertical water tank with slow motion ripples. I replaced that this week with Joe Mackenzie’s HAL Project screensaver (for Mac and Windows) which throws up random samplings of the HAL 9000 monitor animations from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sounds a bit dull until you see it in action, very crisp and detailed graphics, many of which mimic the animations of those in the film. I’ve belatedly realised how similar these fields of colour and their lines of white type are to the opening titles of A Clockwork Orange, yet another connection between the two films. Now I can sit trying to figure out some of the less obvious 3-letter codes for the spacecraft’s systems; Stanley Kubrick was so thorough you just know they all mean something.

Via the Kubrick obsessives at Coudal.

• A pair of new blogs. Designer Barney Bubbles should need little introduction here but if you require one then read this. Paul Gorman has been in touch to inform me of a new online companion to his BB book, Reasons To Be Cheerful, which already looks like a treat with displays of Bubbles creations that didn’t make the book.

Writer Russ Kick was also in touch this week with news of his books and book culture blog, Books Are People, Too. Russ is the author of several books for Disinformation and his Memory Hole website notoriously caused a headache for the Bush regime when he forced photos of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq onto the front pages of American newspapers.

• Songs of the Black Würm Gism. And speaking of books, the much delayed sequel to DM Mitchell’s landmark Lovecraft anthology, The Starry Wisdom comes shambling into the light of day at last. The Creation Oneiros website describes it thus:

The Black Würm Gism Cult – oceanic insect porn – a vortex of cosmic mayhem stalked by ravening lysergic entities – a post-human psychedelic seizure of Lovecraftian text, art and fragments. SONGS OF THE BLACK WÜRM GISM picks up where the acclaimed anthology THE STARRY WISDOM left off and goes beyond – way beyond! – what H.P. Lovecraft dared to show. Editor D.M. Mitchell presents an illustrated brainstorm of visceral deep-sea dream currents, aberrant trans-species sex visions, and frenzied ophidian entropy.

Contributors include: alan moore (cover illustration), john coulthart (introduction), grant morrison, david britton, ian miller, john beal, david conway, kenji siratori, herzan chimera, james havoc, reza negarestani, & many others

Yes, the rather pompous introduction for this volume is mine and the cover is Alan Moore’s psychedelic arachnoid rendering of the demon Asmodeus, the same picture I used to create my little hidden film on the Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD. The Starry Wisdom roused a vaporous fury among the more staid Lovecraft readers so I look forward to seeing what squeaks of outrage this new book inspires. Publication is set for September 2009 but you can order it now from Amazon and other outlets.

• Ghost Box haunts again. And if anything was going to provide a suitable soundtrack to “aberrant trans-species sex visions, and frenzied ophidian entropy” you could do worse than some of the works of the Ghost Box collective, especially the spooky and abrasive Ouroborindra by Eric Zann. Ritual and Education is a new download-only sampler of Ghost Box tracks and probably an ideal place to start if your curiosity is piqued by my recurrent raves about these releases. From An Ancient Star is the latest CD from Belbury Poly which swaps the Pelican Books graphics of earlier works for a convincing piece of crank lit. cover art which wouldn’t look out of place in the RT Gault archives.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Demon Regent Asmodeus
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• Ghost Box
• 2001: A Space Odyssey program

New things for December

Lord Horror (1997).

Time for an end of year news round up.

• As mentioned earlier, issue 11 of US horror magazine Penny Blood features a look at Savoy Books and David Britton’s Lord Horror mythos. The magazine is now on sale and includes comments from Savoy’s Michael Butterworth and myself.

• I was interviewed last month by Creative Review, the UK’s leading design mag, as their January 2009 issue includes a feature on Barney Bubbles. This is also now on sale although I’ve yet to see a copy so I don’t know how much of what I was saying made the cut. I did finish by calling Barney B a “true pop artist” and I see they’ve used those words as their sub-heading so that may be one contribution.

• Back in the USA, book chain Barnes & Noble have licensed my 2004 Cthulhu Rising picture for an HP Lovecraft reprint. Not sure when that’s appearing yet. The same picture (which is also my most popular print) was licensed earlier by a Romanian publisher for (surprise) a Lovecraft collection. I’m told that volume will be published in May 2009.

• Finally, the recent Steampunk design which Modofly are now selling on their laser-etched Moleskin books will be appearing shortly in a surprise location. More about that later. I’ll probably be doing some prints and CafePress stuff with this picture eventually but for now Modofly has the monopoly.

Posting here may be rather sparse over the next couple of weeks since I’m very busy work-wise just now. So don’t be surprised if there’s a long run of picture-only posts. December and early January are often slack and moneyless so it’s good to be busy.

Steampunk Horror Shortcuts

Time again for some work updates and other news. I mentioned in August that this Steampunk design—created to illustrate a formula definition of the genre by Jeff VanderMeer—was originally going to be a T-shirt. That idea fell by the wayside when an opportunity arose to submit it to Modofly who were asking for Steampunk-related work for a new line of their laser-etched Molekin books.

I’m pleased to announce that the books are now done and on sale at the Modofly store. These are available in two sizes, large (5.25ins x 8.25ins; 13.3cm x 20.9cm) and small (3.5ins x 5.5ins; 8.9cm x 13.9cm), $36 USD and $22 USD respectively.

Next up is issue 11 of Penny Blood, an American horror magazine due out shortly which includes a feature on David Britton’s Lord Horror character and runs through the often tormented history of Savoy Books. Savoy’s Mike Butterworth and I were both interviewed and the piece should also include some comments from Keith Seward whose Savoy title, Horror Panegyric, examines the Lord Horror mythos. They don’t say yet when the magazine is out but it’s available for pre-order now.

While we’re on the subject of his lordship, I recently updated my pages for the Reverbstorm comics with a lot more samples taken from the re-scanned and re-lettered artwork. Work is still progressing on assembling the definitive single-volume edition of Reverbstorm as time permits. I’ve finished work on all seven published issues and am now engaged with the eighth and final section. More about that, and Reverbstorm itself, at a later date.

Finally, there’s another new CD design out, my fourth this year and there are more on the way; I’m starting to feel prolific. As can be seen from the cover, this was a very minimal job. A Made Up Sound is a pseudonym of Dave Huismans, aka 2562, whose excellent Aerial album I also designed. Shorctuts is a collection of electronic sketches and Dave took the moodily anonymous photographs himself.