Julia Holter – Page 6 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 124

Couple with Clock Tower (2011) by Louise Despont.

Assuming such a thing doesn’t already exist, there’s a micro-thesis to be written about the associations between the musicians of Germany’s Krautrock/Kosmische music scene in the early 1970s and the directors of the New German Cinema. I’d not seen this clip before which shows the mighty Amon Düül II jamming briefly in Fassbinder’s The Niklashausen Journey, a bizarre agitprop TV movie made in 1970. More familiar is the low-budget short that Wim Wenders helped photograph a year earlier showing the Düül performing Phallus Dei. Wenders later commissioned Can to provide music for the final scene of Alice in the Cities. And this is before you get to Werner Herzog’s lengthy relationship with Popol Vuh which includes this memorable moment. Any others out there that I’ve missed?

• Album sleeves in their original locations. And speaking of album sleeves, photo prints of some very famous cover designs by Storm Thorgerson will be on display at the Public Works Gallery, Chicago, throughout September and October.

• Crazy for kittehs: the quest to find the purring heart of cat videos: Gideon Lewis-Kraus goes where few journalists dare to tread. Also at Wired, the same writer explores the Cat Cafés of Tokyo.

• The City of Rotted Names, a “shamelessly Joycian cubist fantasy” by Hal Duncan, available to read in a variety of formats on a pay-as-thou-wilt basis until Monday only.

• Jailhouse rockers: How The Prisoner inspired artists from The Beatles to Richard Hawley.

• How To Survive A Plague, a documentary about HIV/AIDS activism in the US.

• Deborah Harry: hippy girl in 1968, punk in 1976, and Giger-woman in 1981.

• Alan Garner answers readers’ questions about his new novel, Boneland.

• For steampunk aficionados: ‘COG’nitive Dreams by Dana Mattocks.

• David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Madonna & Asparagus: Kraftwerk in 1976.

• New music videos: Goddess Eyes I by Julia Holter | Sulphurdew by Ufomammut | Warm Leatherette by Laibach.

Weekend links 111

The Fox (1968). Design by Bill Gold, art by Leo & Diane Dillon.

Mark Rydell’s The Fox may be regarded unfavourably now for its retrograde idea of a lesbian relationship but that’s still a great poster by the Dillons. Equally retrograde (well it was 1957) is Anders als du und ich, a film about wayward German youth directed by ex-Nazi propagandist Veit Harlan:

Klaus is a young man in post-war Berlin. He is drawn to his friend Manfred and, under the encouragement of their acquaintance, Dr. Winkler, explores the underground world of gay clubs and electronic music. His family begins to learn of his other life and do everything they can to set him straight.

A saving grace is the conspicuous deployment of Oskar Sala’s Trautonium. They’re deviants—of course they like weird electronic music! Sala’s instrument was his own invention which means it has a unique pre-Moog sound, famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in the score for The Birds. YouTube has a collection of the electronica moments from Anders als du und ich. Wait for the wrestling scene…

• Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley by A Gentleman of Hastings. Related: Jimmy Page’s Lucifer Rising sessions part 1 and part 2.

• “This coming 16 June, [BBC] Radio 4 will be a wall-to-wall Joycefest, kicking off at 9am and running until midnight.”

• A World Where Architecture is the Driving Force Behind Society, Core77 on the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten.

• At The Hooded Utilitarian an examination of the thorny problem of adapting Lovecraft for the comics medium.

• Plates from La Plante et ses Applications Ornementales (1897–1900) by Eugene Grasset.

• Coilhouse found a rough copy of Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

• Three Quick Ways to Introduce Yourself to the Work of Harlan Ellison.

• Daniel Buren’s Monumenta 2012 at the Grand Palais, Paris.

• Our Sorrows, a new video from Julia Holter.

• I, Cyclops: Monocularity in a 3-D World.

• JG Ballard: The Concordance.

• RIP Pete Cosey.

• Pete Cosey with Miles Davis et al, November 1973: Ife | Turnaroundphrase

Weekend links 110

Til Eulenspiegel by Urban Janke. From Twenty Postcards of the Wiener Werkstätte at 50 Watts.

• Rorschach Audio by Joe Banks is “essential reading for everyone interested in air-traffic control, anechoic chambers, artificial oxygen carriers, audio art, bell-ringing, cocktail parties, cognitive science, communications interference, compost, the death penalty, Electronic Voice Phenomena, evangelism, evolutionary biology, experimental music, ghosts, the historiography of art, illusions of sound and illusions of language, lip-reading jokes, nuclear blast craters, predictive texting, singing hair, sonic archives, sound design, steam trains, tinnitus, the Turing Test, Victorian blood painting, visual depth and space perception, ultrasonic visual music, ventriloquism, voices and warehouse fires and robberies.”

• “Freud did not understand female sexuality. Klimt did. Klimt’s women please themselves. The realization that women have an independent sexual life was an insight in art.” Eric Kandel discusses his new study The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present.

• Three new books already mentioned here receive further attention: Stan Persky on Christopher Bram’s Eminent Outlaws : The Gay Writers Who Changed America. | Matthew Aquilone on Paul Russell’s The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov. | Karin L. Kross on the new translation of the Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic.

The creative writing moment/movement baffles me and it intrigues me. What does it signify, all this creative longing? And why through language? Specifically fiction, poetry, memoir? […] The crazy part of it is that we are breeding professional, competent, homogenised writers who will go on to teach writing that is professional, competent and homogenised. The intriguing part of it is whether this movement towards creativity and self-expression is really the start of a kind of Occupy – that it could be dangerous and confrontational, not homogenised at all.

Dangerous? But then they won’t get published and win awards and get film deals and… Jeanette Winterson prepares to teach creative writing at Manchester University.

• The Underground New York Public Library is a visual library featuring the Reading-Riders of the NYC subways.

• Hob by No Man: “Constructed from soundtrack noises from both version of Quatermass and the Pit.”

• Stephen Thrower talks about his soundtrack music for The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome.

• John Waters surprises everyone by hitchhiking across the US.

• Sounds & the City: An interview with Julia Holter.

• The Dead Dream of the Dirigible.

• Meditation (1979) by Edward Artemyev.

Weekend links 106

Gold Head 2 (2011) by Kouji Oshiro.

• Josef Hartwig’s 1922 Bauhaus chess set. Contemporary copies can be bought from Naef Spiele but they’re not cheap. Related: Bauhaus: Art as Life, a major exhibition at the Barbican, London. Related, related: Art as life by Fiona MacCarthy.

• Rattera is a new font by Barnbrook Design for Fuse 1–20, Taschen’s collection of the experimental typography publication. Related: The Fuse poster explained.

• Genesis (1981), video feedback and computer animation by Ron Hays with an electronic score by Ragnar Grippe.

• Deadly Doris, a recording by Malcolm Mooney-era Can from the forthcoming Lost Tapes collection.

• “How did a pop band end up in a museum” Sasha Frere-Jones on Kraftwerk.

• Philip Glass & Robert Wilson on how they made Einstein on the Beach.

• An astonishing aerial photo of post-quake San Francisco in 1906.

• More electronic music: Buddha Machine’s SoundCloud page.

• My Baby, music and video from Julia Holter & Jib Kidder.

• Homotography‘s photos can now be browsed at Pinterest.

• Deviates, Inc., a Tumblr.

• Raoul Björkenheim live: Apocalypso pt. 1 | Apocalypso pt. 2 | 1-2-11 DMG, NYC

Weekend links 103

Robert Fripp photographed by Chris Stein. Video posterization by Michael Schiess.

Scans of Synapse, “The electronic music magazine”, are posted here. Issues range from 1976 to 1979, and include interviews with the more notable synthesists of the period, Kraftwerk included. Brian Eno was regularly interviewed by synth mags despite always being reluctant to talk about what equipment he might be using; sure enough he’s featured here. Far more interesting is a longer interview with Robert Fripp that catches the guitarist as he emerged from his self-imposed retirement in the mid-70s with the extraordinary Exposure album. (See a 1979 promo video for that here.) Related: TR-808 drum sequences in poster form by Rob Ricketts.

• More electronic music from the 1970s: “[Don Buchla] showed me that the idea of playing a black-and-white keyboard with one of these instruments was completely ridiculous. It was inappropriate and had nothing to do with the way you would use an electronic instrument.” Suzanne Ciani talks to John Doran about electronic music composition. A collection of her early recordings, Lixiviation, is released by Finders Keepers. Related: The Attack of the Radiophonic Women: How synthesizers cracked music’s glass ceiling.

• “Her writing—full of immigrants, circus animals, freaks, socialists, hipsters, servants, and suffragettes—revels in the atmosphere of the ‘Yellow Nineties,’ a period characterized by Wildean decadence and art for art’s sake.” Jenny Hendrix on Djuna Barnes.

More etchings by Albin Brunovsky at But Does It Float.

• More scanned magazines: the Fuck You Press archive at Reality Studio. A trove of rare publications produced by Ed Sanders in the 1960s with contributions from world-class writers, William Burroughs included.

• “[My parents] were horrified by what I did, but they encouraged me to keep doing it because I was obsessed, and what else could I do?” John Waters writing in (of all places) the Wall Street Journal.

• A time-lapse assembly of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) by Jeff Desom who explains how he did it here.

• The Occult Experience: a 95-minute documentary on the international occult scene, filmed in 1984–85.

• Compost and Height re-post A Gold Thunder, a song by Julia Holter first sent to them in 2010.

• Drawings by Bette Burgoyne.

• Schroeter’s Salomés

• Cats are liquids

• Fade Away And Radiate (1978) by Blondie (featuring Robert Fripp) | Exposure (1978) by Peter Gabriel (produced by and featuring Robert Fripp) | Exposure (1979) by Robert Fripp | Babs And Babs (1980) by Daryl Hall (produced by and featuring Robert Fripp) | Losing True (1982) by The Roches (produced by and featuring Robert Fripp).