Julia Holter – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 674

The Far Side of the Moon, as photographed by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

• “It goes against centuries of traditional belief to accept that the moon is barren, that it is indifferent, that it is innocent of any role in monthly spikes in the crime rate or in the cycles of menstrual unreason. When telescopic observation had found nothing on the near side (Roger Boscovich had established by 1753 that it lacks even an atmosphere), the far side still remained a site for the projection of fantasies of a different, neighbouring world.” Justin EH Smith working his way towards a history of the dark side of the moon.

• “It shocks me that movies still lean in so hard to all these outmoded gay narrative tropes: coming out, coming of age; very identity-oriented representations of gay characters. It’s much easier to represent a gay boy who’s repressed in high school and comes out and makes friends. It’s very mainstream, and kind of played out.” Bruce LaBruce on cinematic trends in relation to his new film, a gay-porn take on Pasolini’s Teorema.

• At Cartoon Brew: Pavel Sannikau explains how he developed his own techniques of digital animation in order to create the ever-expanding Floor796.

• There’s always more Poe: Mysterium, Incubus et Terror, Poe-inspired music by a variety of artists, plus illustrations by John D. Chadwick.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: The results of a themed contest in the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Challenge.

• Mixes of the week: In Praise of the Saddest Chord at Ambientblog, and The Funky Eno Pts 2 & 3 by DJ Food.

• Steven Heller talks to Hungarian artist István Orosz about his Escher-like drawings.

• At Unquiet Things: Caitlin McCormack’s ghostly chains of knotted memory.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Intricate and organic sculptures by ceramicist Eriko Inazaki.

• New music: Illumina by Call Super with Julia Holter.

• Dark Side Of The Mushroom (1967) by The Chocolate Watchband | Dark Side Of The Star (1984) by Haruomi Hosono | On The Dark Side Of The Sun (live) (2003) by Helios Creed

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Mobius Strip II (1963) by MC Escher.

• Old music: Warp Records is reissuing two recent Jon Hassell discs later this year: The Living City (Hassell’s ensemble playing live in NYC, 1989) and Psychogeography (Zones Of Feeling) (remixes from City: Works Of Fiction), which will be available as standalone releases or bundled together as Further Fictions together with Hassell’s Atmospherics book.

• “His library is an immense and enviable wellspring, a demimonde of objects by murky creators who for decades have gnawed away at the inner organs of polite society.” Steven Heller talks to Glenn Bray about Library, an 800-page collection of scans from Bray’s trove of books, comics and print ephemera.

• New music: Tsathoggua, the latest in the Lovecraftian series of Cryo Chamber Collaborations which reminds me that I’m still missing the more recent entries. Also the non-Lovecraftian Coil by Ian Boddy.

• “Music is a way to express yourself beyond words,” says Hildur Gudnadóttir.

• See this year’s winners of the annual Close-up Photographer of the Year competition.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Ishmael Reed The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974).

• A few new photos of Michael Heizer’s City in the Nevada desert.

• City Of Night (1994) by David Toop & Max Eastley | City As Memory (1995) by John Foxx | City Appearing (2013) by Julia Holter

Weekend links 435

An illustration by “Lapthorn” for Little Green Apples: the Chronicle of a Fallen Man (1930) by Geoffrey Moss.

• Jean-Michel Jarre & Michel Granger: how we made Oxygène. “[It] was initially rejected by record company after record company. They all said: ‘You have no singles, no drummer, no singer, the tracks last 10 minutes and it’s French!’ Even my mother said: ‘Why did you name your album after a gas and put a skull on the cover?'”

• “When we ignore or demean consensual BDSM erotica, or stories about female sexual submission, we inadvertently contribute to a cultural legacy that routinely pathologizes, demeans, or erases women’s sexual desires.” Hayley Phelan on why we need erotica.

• “More than a literal reconstruction of an imagined collaboration between Eno and Morricone, Ghost Box opens a door onto a world where ambient music and country-western make for natural bedfellows.” Ghost Box (Expanded) by Suss.

• Peter Bebergal and Janaka Stucky discuss Bebergal’s new book, Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural. There’s more at the Occulture podcast.

• Great Noises That Fill The Air (1988), an album by Bow Gamelan Ensemble, receives its first release on CD next month. Related: the group in 1987 staging one of their pyrotechnic performances.

• Mixes of the week: Bleep Mix #45 by Lawrence English & William Basinski – Casting Voices Mixtape, DJ Food Solid Steel mix by Matt Berry, and The Séance – 13th October 2018.

• “…the social position filled by art and aesthetics is increasingly best understood in terms of magic.” Marina Warner and Eleanor Birne discuss forms of enchantment.

• From 2104: Ten little tales of terror for late of a Halloween night by Levi Stahl.

• Words I Heard by Julia Holter.

• The Cosmodrome Futurists

• Urban Gamelan (Pt. 1) (1984) by 23 Skidoo | Chez Les Futuristes Russes (1984) by Aksak Maboul | Oxygen (1997) by Gas

Weekend links 429

• Julia Holter’s next album, Aviary, will arrive next month with a cover design bearing astrological symbols (a cryptic message?) and what looks like a grimoire page in the background, although I may be reading too much into this. Whatever the esoterics signify, the album is a double, and going by the sound of new song I Shall Love 2 it’s going to be a good one. Aviary will be released on 26th October just in time for the witch season.

• Donna Ferguson talks to Oscar Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, about the manuscript for The Picture of Dorian Gray which includes more openly homoerotic sentences than were included in the printed versions. A facsimile of the manuscript is now available in a limited, numbered edition from SP Books.

• The final single in the excellent Other Voices series from the Ghost Box label is released later this month. Something Out Of Nothing is by Sharron Kraus and Belbury Poly.

…we’re still trying to operate this new, paranoid society on what amounts to a psychedelic substrate—with little or no awareness of how our sets and settings are determining our results. The set and setting of the advertiser yield addictive behavioral design and persuasive technologies. The set and setting of the investor lead to algorithmic trading and winner-takes-all, extractive businesses. The set and setting of the military lead to drone warfare. The set and setting of the politician lead to targeted propaganda and digital fascism.

America is unconsciously living in a psychedelic landscape and having a bad trip. We don’t realize that we are living in a media environment that offers us an unprecedented capacity over reality. The world may have always been a consensual hallucination to some extent, but never before have we built our world so completely.

The internet is acid, and America is having a bad trip, says Douglas Rushkoff

• Photographia Erotica Historica is a tiny leatherbound collection of antique pornography from Goliath Books.

• Why is the Federal Government threatening an indie book publisher with $100,000 in fines?

• Undead, undead: my illustrations for Dracula are featured at Dangerous Minds. Thanks!

• The Vinyl Factory meets Japanese composer and musician Midori Takada.

• Exploring HP Lovecraft’s Gothic roots by Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes.

• From 2013: Dario Argento discussing his films with Alan Jones.

• Aurora Mitchell on Electro pioneer Doris Norton.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 558 by DJ T.

• Aviator (1970) by Michael Chapman | Aviation (2000) by Fluxion | Aviation (2001) by Monolake

Weekend links 277

Sunday by Amanda Elledge.

• Coming from Strange Attractor this November: The Moons at Your Door, an anthology of strange tales selected by David Tibet. “The Moons At Your Door collects over 30 tales, both familiar and unknown from: Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Aleister Crowley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, WW Jacobs, MR James, Vernon Lee, LA Lewis, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Guy de Maupassant, Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, Count Stenbock, Montague Summers, HR Wakefield and Edith Wharton. The volume also includes extracts and translations by the author from Babylonian, Coptic and Biblical texts alongside poems and fairy tales.”

• Gay-rights activists give their verdict on Stonewall: “This film is no credit to the history it purports to portray”. The only surprise about this episode is that anyone expected Roland Emmerich to make a historically accurate film in the first place. Related: Edmund White’s first-hand report written a few days after the riots.

• “If you hate [Boom!], I hate you, and I could never be your friend or your boyfriend. Divine and I had seen Boom! right before we made Pink Flamingos, and it’s about Elizabeth Taylor, retired, writing her memoirs, which is what Pink Flamingos was too, in a way.” John Waters (again) gives Hayley Campbell some dating tips.

• “We moderns may too-often suffer from a mixing up of historical sequences, but better that, surely, than risk raising a population that is entirely not-arsed about its past.” Julian Cope explores the Celts: Art and Identity exhibition at the British Museum, London.

• “But I am talking about psychedelic music, and obviously some of that comes from early psychedelic rituals, which are all about losing yourself…and I did come back into the world in a different way.” Natasha Khan on her new musical project, SEXWITCH.

• At Dangerous Minds: Vincent Price teaches the dark arts on his 1969 album An Adventure in Demonology.

• A trailer for Salthouse Marshes, “a short, landscape obsessed ghost story” by Adam Scovell.

• Rare video of Young Marble Giants playing for 45 minutes in Vancouver, 1980.

• A collection of Ghost Box posters and flyers designed by Julian House.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 163 by Ssleeping desiresS.

• Ministry, a new photo series by Ellen Rogers.

• Julia Holter‘s favourite albums.

• Boom Stix (1962) by Curley & the Jades | Things That Go Boom In The Night (1981) by Bush Tetras | Boom! (1991) by The Grid