Ghost Box – Page 14 – { feuilleton }

A playlist for Halloween: Hauntology

Flyers by Julian House for tonight’s Ghost Box event at Mono Cafe Bar, Glasgow.

It’s a tradition here to post some recommended listening each Halloween. This year there’s an embarrassment of riches with five listings chosen from the multitudes at Mixcloud. Hauntology is the theme, not Jacques Derrida’s spectral musings but Simon Reynolds‘ deployment of the term to define the music produced by artists on the UK’s Ghost Box label—Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, The Advisory Circle, Pye Corner Audio et al—and their allies delving into similar areas: “folklore, vintage electronics, library music and haunted television soundtracks”. I’ve been plugging the Ghost Box people for years but going by Mark Pilkington’s recent introduction to the sub-genre some still find this information to be news.

All the following mixes feature Ghost Box tracks, with the Ghost Radio mix being almost solely derived from the label’s releases. All the mixes are a year or so old apart from the Samhain Seance which was posted at the weekend. I’ve been playing these round the clock for the past couple of days, enjoying the way one playlist bleeds into another. Given the choice of only one I’d pick Samhain Seance, a great selection and very adeptly sequenced. Among the highlights there’s a lengthy extract from the occult-themed TV serial I mentioned yesterday, Children of the Stones, which had a superb vocal score by contemporary classical composer Sidney Sager. The Aethereus Mix also features Sager’s score, and opens with a warning from The Stone Tape which has even greater resonance today: “It’s in the computer!”

(Note: I corrected some of the track credits.)

The Aethereus Mix by Soulless Central Radio

The Box Of Delights by Roger Limb
Ecneuqes Rorrim by Pye Corner Audio
The Unseeing Eye by Malcolm Clarke
Cheyne Walk by Jon Brooks
Manège by Jaques Lasry
Children Of The Stones by Sidney Sager
Chocky by John Hyde
A Year And A Day by Belbury Poly
Willow’s Song by Paul Giovanni
Saturn by Neu! [What? This isn’t Neu! It’s a piece by an American artist, Neue.]
Variation 19 by Andrew Lloyd Webber
House Among The Laurels by Jon Brooks
The Ghost Of John by Kristen Lawrence
Double Trouble by John Williams
Windfall by Dead Can Dance

Fantasmagories by Timewriter

Funerailles Des Vampires by Acanthus
Hypnosis by Atrium Carceri
The Moonlawn by Belbury Poly
The Giving Of The Grape by Blood Stereo
Enferissimo by Camille Sauvage
Dream Music by Jonathan Elias
Evaparizione by Ennio Morricone
Spellbound by Creed Taylor
Sequenza Psichedelica by Piero Umiliani
Fantasm by Bernard Fevre
Funeral Organ by Fred Myrow
Uomini Al Bando by Bruno Nicolai
Lucifer Rising by Jimmy Page
Black Mass by Mort Garson
Spookies by James Calabrees
Forest Of Evil by Frank Reidy & Eric Allen
Hell House by Brian Hodgson & Delia Derbyshire
Raven’s Lament by The Haxan Cloak
Voodoo by The Natural Yoghurt Band
Lost World by Moran Russell
Falling by Delia Derbyshire
Sang Pourpre by Igor Wakhévitch
Untitled by Vladimir Ussachevsky

Ghost Radio by elevatoresque

Activate The Poacher by Moon Wiring Club
The Willows by Belbury Poly
Sundial by The Advisory Circle
The Third Eye Centre by Mount Vernon Arts Lab
Hey Let Loose Your Love by The Focus Group
Mind How You Go by The Advisory Circle
Ghost Radio by Moon Wiring Club
Owls And Flowers by Belbury Poly
Civil Defence Is Common Sense by The Advisory Circle
Inside Shoebox Garden by Moon Wiring Club
Albion Festival Report by The Focus Group
Erosion Of Time by The Advisory Circle
Opening Leaves by Moon Wiring Club
Meditation On Nothingness by Roj
Feldspar by Mount Vernon Arts Lab
Nuclear Substation by The Advisory Circle
Far Off Things by Belbury Poly
Plant Room by Mordant Music
Jam Jar Carnival by The Focus Group
Everyday Electronics by The Advisory Circle
They Are In The Room With Us Right Now by Roj
Wool Book by Moon Wiring Club
Post Apocalypse Listings by Mordant Music
From An Ancient Star by Belbury Poly
Fire, Damp And Air by The Advisory Circle

The Insomniacs Almanac by Melmoth The Wanderer

While London Sleeps by Mount Vernon Arts Lab
So Run Down by The Caretaker
Moondial (Theme) by Unknown
The Bane Tree (intro) by (Episodes From) The Field Bazaar
Sorcerer by Ataraxia
The Black Drop by Mount Vernon Arts Lab
In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country by Boards Of Canada
Of Grace And Providence (Remixed) by The Caretaker
The Voice by Brian Hodgson & Delia Derbyshire
The Wicker Man by Paul Giovanni
Children Of The Stones Theme by Sidney Sager
Legend Of Hell House by Brian Hodgson & Delia Derbyshire

Samhain Seance by The Ephemeral Man

Twins Of Evil (extract)
Forest Of Evil (Dawn) by Demdike Stare
Blackthorn Winter by Sproatly Smith
The Harmony Programme by The Focus Group
Sulphur by Cyclobe
The Power Of The Witch (extract) Rare BBC Documentary
Another Witch Is Dead by The Eccentronic Research Council
Blood On Satan’s Claw (intro)
Disorder by The Haxan Cloak
Black Blind Light by Moonstone
Denned Earth (Decay And Rebirth) by Ruhr Hunter
Children Of The Stones — Episode 3 (extract), soundtrack by Sidney Sager
Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps by Godspeed You Black Emperor
Grim Reaper by Teen Suicide
The Globe Inn by The Future Kings Of England
Halloween 3 (ending)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
• A playlist for Halloween: Drones and atmospheres
• A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Another playlist for Halloween
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box

Weekend links 130

Sarah and Writhing Octopus (New Wave Series, 1992) by Masami Teraoka.

Strange Flowers continues to push all my buttons. For a while now I’d been intent on writing something about the strange (unbuilt) temples designed by German artist/obsessive naturist Fidus (Hugo Höppener) but I reckon James has done a better job than I would have managed. Also last week he wrote about Schloss Schleißheim, a palatial estate outside Munich with connections to Last Year in Marienbad and another eccentric, pseudonymous German artist: Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• The circus poster that inspired John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper song Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! has been reproduced as a limited edition letterpress print. Related: Wikipedia’s page about Pablo Fanque (1796–1871), “the first black circus proprietor in Britain”.

• The first two volumes of The Graphic Canon, both edited by Russ Kick, are reviewed at Literary Kicks. I’ve not seen either of these yet but volume 2 contains my interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Related: the second book previewed at Brain Pickings.

You only have to read [Alan Bennett’s] diaries to see that, underneath the wit and humour and sandwich-filled pottering around old churches, there is a deep resentment at what has happened to England in his lifetime and an instinctive distrust, sometimes amounting to deep loathing, of most politicians. Listening, for instance, to Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke talking on the radio about the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998, he writes: “Both have that built-in shrug characteristic of 80s Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake.”

Michael Billington on Alan Bennett: a quiet radical

• Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future: Mark Pilkington draws a Venn diagram encompassing Coil, Broadcast, the Ghost Box label, Arthur Machen, MR James, Nigel Kneale, Iain Sinclair and others.

• Hell Is a City: the making of a cult classic – in pictures. The mean streets of Manchester given the thriller treatment by Hammer Films in 1959. The film is released on DVD this month.

• The Function Room: The Kollection, Matt Leyshon’s debut volume of horror stories, has just been published. The cover painting is one of my pieces from the 1990s.

• New Worlds magazine (now apparently known as “Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds“) has been relaunched online.

A drawing from Anatomy (part 1), a series by Alex Konahin.

• The forthcoming Scott Walker album, Bish Bosch, will be released on December 3rd. 4AD has a trailer.

• Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone: Noah Gallagher Shannon on the early drafts of Blood Meridian.

• The Velvet Underground of English Letters: Simon Sellars Discusses JG Ballard.

• Michelle Dean on The Comfort of Bad Books.

• The typewriter repairers of Los Angeles

• Cats With Famous People

• Marienbad (1987) by Sonoko | Komm Nach Marienbad (2011) by Marienbad | Marienbad (2012) by Julia Holter.

(Thanks to Ian and Pedro for this week’s picture links!)

Weekend links 86

Salammbô by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt) from Harry Crosby‘s Red Skeletons (1927). Dover published a new collection of Alastair’s drawings in September.

“A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype.” RIP Shelagh Delaney. Related: Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960), directed by Ken Russell, and all 47 minutes (!) of The White Bus (1967), Lindsay Anderson’s strange, pre-If…. short, written by Shelagh Delaney, filmed in and around Manchester.

Since birth I’ve craved all things psychedelic, the energy and beauty of it. The pleasure… […] But in the US the exploration of consciousness and its powers—or really any curiosity about anything at all—is actively discouraged, because the system is so corrupt that it depends on people being virtually unconscious all the time. Burroughs cracked that code long ago. Spirituality here equals money; no one seems to be able to think, never mind explore their own consciousness.

Laurie Weeks: Making Magic Out of the Real

• Ian Albinson shows us The Title Design of Saul Bass while Ace Jet 170 has a copy of the new Bass monograph.

• Kris Kool (1970) at 50 Watts, Philip Caza’s lurid, erotic, psychedelic comic strip.

Götz Krafft by EM Lilien from a collection at Flickr.

• Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil.

• The Octopus Chronicles, a new blog at Scientific American.

• We now live in a world where there are Ghost Box badges.

• Kilian Eng interviewed at Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

• Dalí Planet

• Bedabbled!

• A Taste of Honey (1962) by Acker Bilk | A Taste of Honey (1965) by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass | A Taste of Honey (Moog version) (1969) by Martin Denny.

Weekend links 62

A plate from Tales of the Amur by Dmitry Nagishkin, a 1975 edition illustrated by Gennady Pavlishin.

• The week in Surrealism: Opera of the surreal gives Dalí an encore: Yo, Dalí, a previously unperformed work by Xavier Benguerel, receives its premier in Madrid. Meanwhile Tate Liverpool’s summer exhibition, René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, is profiled here. “René Magritte has inspired more book covers than any other visual artist,” says James Hall.

If Rimbaud anticipated the Surrealists by decades, Ashbery is said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yet though nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines.

Lydia Davis on Rimbaud’s Wise Music.

• Umberto Eco’s glimpse into the art of the novel | Return to Wonderland: an essay on Lewis Carroll’s world by Alberto Manguel | Heavy sentences by Joseph Epstein: On How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish.

And then there’s the mystery of what happened to him for those four months in London when we have no trace of him. Rimbaud mentions Scarborough in “Promontory” and talks about “Hotels, the circular façades of the Royal and the Grand in Scarborough or Brooklyn.” Since there’s that missing period in England, people say he must have gone to Scarborough, and have even checked hotel registers for that period, but as far as I know nobody has ever found anything. Someone even checked railway and train schedules in order to pin him to this real place. I seem to remember a French writer admitting that Rimbaud was never in Brooklyn, but kind of wishfully thinking that he might have been. Which is very funny. “Rimbaud in Brooklyn”: there’s a project for someone.

A Refutation of Common Sense, John Ashberry on translating Rimbaud.

• Robert Jeffrey posts a video of his nine-year-old self giving Madge a run for her money in 1991. As Boy Culture puts it: “Anyone who feebly clings to the belief that gay can be prayed away should take a look at this and give up already…” Amen.

• The mathematics of Yog-Sothoth: Richard Elwes on Exotic spheres, or why 4-dimensional space is a crazy place.

• For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry by Christopher Smart (1722–1771).

• Lesbian pulp fiction, 1935–1978 and Faber 20th century classics.

• As The Crow Flies, a new album from The Advisory Circle.

• New World Transparent Specimens by Iori Tomita.

• 79 versions of Gershon Kingley’s Popcorn.

• Minor Man (1981) by The League of Gentlemen.

Weekend links: New Year edition

Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter.

• “Many of Moorcock’s editorials are published here, and they still make exhilarating reading. Then, as now, Moorcock set his face against a besetting English sin: a snobbish parochial weariness, an ironic superiority to the frightful oiks who have started filling up the streets. You can almost hear, behind the languorous flutter of the pages, Sir Whatsits sniggering to Lady Doo-Dah. It still goes on, and it’s usually the same flummery in different clothes. Moorcock not only would not go to the party: he threw the literary equivalent of explosive devices into the Hampstead living rooms.” Michael Moorcock’s Into the Media Web reviewed. And also here.

• “Beefheart channeled a secret history of America, the underbelly of a continent and a culture that has now all but vanished along with one of its greatest poets.” Jon Savage on the life and work of the late Captain.

• Miniatures Blog, in which musician Morgan Fisher works his way through each of the fifty one-minute tracks on his extraordinary Miniatures compilation album, with details and anecdotes about the artists and the recording of each piece.

• Look at Life: IN gear (1967). A Rank Organisation newsreel about Swinging London. Sardonic commentary and some great colour photography showing how the often shabby reality differs from the caricature. Many of the shots are familiar from documentaries about the era but this is the first time I’ve seen them all in one place.

Predator (Self-portrait) by Linn Olofsdotter.

• Lewis Carroll’s new story: The Guardian‘s review of Through the Looking-Glass from December, 1871. Related: My Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass 2011 calendar is now reduced in price.

• The United Kingdom and Ireland as seen from the International Space Station, December, 2010. Related: Spacelog, the stories of early space exploration from the original NASA transcripts.

• The “Big Basket” Fraud, 1958: “…there seems to be a limited segment with a one-track mind interested in seeing an exaggerated masculine appendage.”

• “Ancient arena of discord”: a billboard for King’s Cross by Jonathan Barnbrook. Related: Vale Royal by Aidan Andrew Dun.

• The inevitable Ghost Box link, Jim Jupp is interviewed at Cardboard Cutout Sundown.

• Amazon is still playing the random moral guardian at the Kindle store.

• Antwerpian Expressionists at A Journey Round My Skull.

• Salami CD and vacuum packaging by Mother Eleganza.

• Paris 1900: L’Architecture Art Nouveau à Paris.

• Bill Sienkiewicz speaks about Big Numbers #3.

• Philippe Druillet illustrates Dracula, 1968.

• Aesthetic Peacocks at the V&A.

• Well Did You Evah! (1990), Deborah Harry & Iggy Pop directed by Alex Cox.