Gil Mellé – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 747

Eden Flag with Solar-Anal Emblems and Hexes (2017) by Elijah Burgher.

• A note for regular readers that I’ll be in London for a couple of days next week, so the weekend post may be delayed by a day, if it arrives at all. I’ll be attending this event at The Century Club, Shaftsbury Avenue, a talk about The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which will be published here and in the USA a few days from now. I’m told that copies of the book will be on sale if anyone wishes me to sign a copy.

• “Published two years before André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), which delineated the contours of the capital-S Surrealism movement, Les Malheurs represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence.” Daisy Sainsbury on Les Malheurs des immortels (1922) by Paul Éluard and Max Ernst.

• “It has been two decades since Japan’s tidying boom began, and the nation remains as cluttered as ever. I know this because I live here.” Matt Alt in a long read exploring the Japanese cultivation of clutter. Don’t be shamed by minimalist interiors.

…with the Bumper Book, we wanted to present what we hope are lucid, coherent and joined-up ideas on how and why the concept of magic originated and developed over the millennia, a theoretical basis for how it might conceivably work along with suggestions as to how it might practically be employed—and, perhaps most radically, a social reason for magic’s existence as a means of transforming and improving both our individual worlds, and the greater human world of which we are components. And we wanted to deliver this in a way that reflected the colourful, psychedelic, profound and sometimes very funny nature of the magical experience itself. That, we felt, would be the biggest and most useful rabbit to pull out of the near-infinite top hat that we believe magic to be.

Alan Moore talking to Rob Salkowitz about the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

• “When it comes to pure cinematic terror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has no equal,” says Mat Colegate. I’d avoid being quite so definitive but it’s a film I’d put in a list of my favourite cinematic horrors.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See 15 winning images from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest.

• At The Quietus: Lara Rix-Martin on the heavy existentialism of Soviet science fiction. Previously: Zone music.

• New music: Decimation Of I by Meemo Comma.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Exentrica.

• Hex (1971) by Gil Mellé | Hex (1978) by Jon Hassell | Hexden Channel (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

OffOn by Scott Bartlett

Another gem of experimental filmmaking, Scott Bartlett’s short from 1967 hits all the buttons of psychedelic imagery: disembodied eyes, moiré patterns, solarisation, dancing figures, naked women, oil effects, oversatured hues, and superimposition. The difference between this film and others of the period is that OffOn is largely a product of video techniques, some of which—video feedback, for example—are unique to the medium. As a bonus there’s that standard feature of so much experimental film from the period, the electronic score. The soundtrack for OffOn is by Manny Meyer, and sounds in places like a precursor to Gil Mellé’s buzzing and shrieking music for The Andromeda Strain (1971).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Creel Pone

One of the many surprises for me about Enter the Void was finding recordings by electronic composer Jean-Claude Eloy mixed into its droning soundscape, namely extracts from his 1979 album, Shànti. I’d been listening to this a week or so before watching the film after having downloaded a large quantity of obscure electronic releases on the bootleg Creel Pone label.

Flowers Of Evil (1969) by Ruth White.

The Creel Pone project by Keith Fullerton Whitman began with the intention of reissuing in a limited form 100 albums of electronic or electro-acoustic music dating from the period 1947 to 1983 (or 1952 to 1984 according to the label seal); The Analogue Age, in other words. Most of the albums were long out of print, and few had ever been available on CD when the project began although some have since had official reissues. The recordings were transferred from vinyl then burned to 50 CD-Rs per album, each release coming in a CD-sized facsimile of the original cover. Simon Reynolds wrote a piece about the label for The Wire in 2010 but I first encountered the releases a couple of years earlier via an acquaintance who was one of the collectors trying to accumulate the entire run. The run finished some time ago so the reissues themselves will soon be as difficult to find as the releases they made available, hence the recourse to mp3, and this cache of almost the entire catalogue. I haven’t listened to everything there yet (iTunes tells me this would take 2.2 days, non-stop)—and I find my patience often runs out with tape-collage electro-acoustic compositions unless I’m in the mood—but some of these albums are so good, the Thomas Köner-like Shànti among them, you have to wonder why they were overlooked for so long. A few of the uploads have tracks missing, and they’re all variable quality, but you won’t find this amount of Creel Pone material anywhere else in a hurry. (There’s also no guarantee they’ll be there for long so don’t complain to me if you’re visiting this post after they’ve all been deleted.)

Musique Pour Le Futur (1970) by Nino Nardini.

Discogs has an incomplete catalogue listing. Several of Jean-Claude Eloy’s albums are now available on CD. Gil Mellé’s excellent soundtrack for The Andromeda Strain was given a limited CD release two years ago but is out of print again. For some recordings it seems, the struggle to reach an audience is a continual one.

The Andromeda Strain: Original Electronic Soundtrack (1971) by Gil Mellé.

Pythagoron (1977) by Pythagoron™

Reflecting On The First Watch, We Uncover Treasure Buried For The Blind (1978) by Cellutron & The Invisible.

Shànti (1979) by Jean-Claude Eloy.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Enter the Void
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• The Avant Garde Project