Rob Young – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 410

William Hope Hodgson’s final Carnacki mystery, The Hog, received its first magazine publication in January 1947. The cover art by AR Tilburne may not have been originally created for Hodgson’s tale but it complements the story’s atmosphere of febrile dread.

• It’s still April so that means it’s still the month that saw the 100th anniversary of the death of William Hope Hodgson, bodybuilder, manacler of Harry Houdini, and the author of several novels of weird fiction that continue to entrance new generations of readers. The edition of Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland that I illustrated for Swan River Press would have been on sale this month but print problems have caused delays with the run as a whole; anyone interested is advised to contact the publisher for news. • Meanwhile, Jon Mueller (composer of the book’s accompanying soundtrack CD) and myself talked to Swan River Press about the attractions of Hodgson’s novel. • More Hodgsoniana: Greydogtales acknowledged the Hodgson centenary via a discussion with Hodgson scholar Sam Gafford, while Michael Dirda reviewed the new edition of The House on the Borderland and another SRP title, The Scarlet Soul (whose cover I also designed), for The Washington Post.

• “From the ashes of countless decayed Modernities comes Neo-Decadence, a profaned cathedral whose broken stained glass windows still glitter irregularly in the harsh light of a Symbolist sun. Behind this marvellously vandalised edifice, a motley band of revellers picnic in the graveyard of the Real, leaving behind all manner of rotting delicacies and toxic baubles in their wake.” Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology edited by Daniel Corrick & Justin Isis is published this month by Snuggly Books, an imprint whose catalogue of new books and first-time translations will be of interest to anyone who comes here for Decadence, Symbolism or anything related. Related to the above: A Neo-Decadence Day at Dennis Cooper’s.

• “Witches are change-makers. They’re transgressive beings who dwell on the fringes of society, and so they’re the perfect icon for rebels, outsiders, and rabble-rousers, especially those of the female persuasion.” Pam Grossman talks to Grimoire about witchcraft and related arts.

• Mixes of the week: Resident Advisor Podcast 621 by Grouper, and Bacchus Beltane 5: The Owl Service by The Ephemeral Man.

• Back in black: Publisher/translator James Conway and designer Cara Schwartz on the cover designs of Rixdorf Editions.

• I was talking again this week at The Writer’s Corner where JKA Short asked me about working as an illustrator.

• All Gates Open: The Story of Can by Rob Young is published next week. The Wire has an extract.

• Delusional Albion: Brad Stevens on how foreign directors saw Britain in the Swinging Sixties.

• “There’s no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature,” says Olivia Laing.

• Eden Tizard on Soliloquy For Lilith, the drone album by Nurse With Wound.

• Owls (1969) by Ruth White | Decadent & Symmetrical (1995) by ELpH vs Coil | The Owls (2013) by Félicia Atkinson

Weekend links 398

Untitled art by Felix D’Eon. Via Dangerous Minds.

• “The music inside lived up to the cover’s challenge: a collage of pop-culture nostalgia, hard-rock guitar, piano-driven melodies, stylised high vocals, strange musical structures and experimental sound pictures. Roxy Music’s eponymous album sounded like nothing else in 1971 and 1972—and like nothing else the group would ever attempt again.” Jon Savage on the creation of Roxy Music’s debut album.

• Behind the scenes of the BFI’s forthcoming Derek Jarman box-sets. Jarman appears in a rare acting role (not one of his strengths) in Dead Cat (1989) a short film by David Lewis which is only now being released on DVD.

• Rob Young’s long-awaited book about Cologne’s finest, Can, has finally been given a publication date. All Gates Open: The Story of Can will be published by Faber in May.

• At the Lever Gallery, London: UNCOVERED: Illustrating the Sixties and Seventies. Wallpaper magazine has a related feature about the exhibition.

• Trim Tabroid [sic]: Yui Takada’s Instagram showing Japanese tabloid pages reduced to abstraction by careful pruning.

• On Fairy Tales: Carol Mavor and Marina Warner in discussion for the London Review Bookshop podcast.

• Mixes of the week: XLR8R podcast 527 by Peter Van Hoesen, and Secret Thirteen Mix 245 by Chikiss.

• Dubbing is a Must: Oli Warwick on the modern sound of leftfield dub.

• This Book Is Bound in Lab-Grown Jellyfish Leather.

• Cornelius’s Favourite Albums

• Dubism (1976) by The Upsetters | Dub Fi Gwan (1979) by King Tubby | Dub Yalil (1995) by Natacha Atlas

Weekend links 355

Quería ser pájaro (1960) by Leonora Carrington.

• Artist and author Leonora Carrington was born 100 years ago this week. Marina Warner, an advocate of Carrington’s work in the years when the artist was “forgotten” (ie: ignored by those who should have known better), remembered her friend as someone adept at making “visible the invisible”. Elsewhere, Carrington’s centenary was noted by Phantasmaphile (with many links), Strange Flowers and the LRB, the latter being a Leonora Carrington A-Z by Chloe Aridjis.

• Geeta Dayal on Ikutaro Kakehashi who died this week. The synthesizers, drum machines, effects units and other gear produced by Kakehashi’s Roland Corporation are inextricably entwined with the development of electronic music in the 1970s and 80s.

• Do we really need a compilation of singles by Can? Not when all the music has been available for years on albums and compilations. Of more interest is Rob Young‘s forthcoming (well…not until next year) biography of the band, All Gates Open.

• Out from Thames & Hudson this week: Vinyl . Album . Cover . Art: The Complete Hipgnosis Catalogue by Aubrey Powell.

• At Dangerous Minds: The Master of Moorcock: The psychedelic sci-fi book covers and art of Bob Haberfield.

• Abigail Ward on Queer Noise: the history of LGB music & club culture in Manchester.

• FullFathom5, home of “something rich and strange” makes a welcome return.

• At Flickr: Occult Beliefs and Themes in British Popular Culture (1875–1947)

• At I Love Typography: Jamie Clarke on the evolution of chromatic fonts.

• Mix of the week: a mix for The Wire by Patterned Air Recordings.

• Invisible Cities (1990) by Invaders Of The Heart | Invisible Architecture (1997) by John Foxx | Invisible (2005) by Monolake

The Forest / The Wald

November brings another compilation from the masters of monochromatic packaging, A Year In The Country. The Forest / The Wald takes woods and their folklore as its theme, so the autumn months would seem an ideal time for such a release. Trees make their presence most apparent during the leaf-shedding months of October and November, and one of the pieces on this new collection, The Hand of Auctumnus by Richard Moult, refers directly to the season.

The album takes as one of its initial reference points Electric Eden author Rob Young’s observations of the roots of the word folk as being “…the music of the ‘Volk’, a word born of the Teutonic Wald, the wild wood where society was organised ad hoc, bottom-up and frequently savage…”; places where rituals endured and perplexed their heirs.

In amongst The Forest / The Wald can be found expressions of greenwood rituals performed in the modern-day, echoes of fantastical childhood rhymes, sylvan siren calls that tremble through tangles of branches, electronics pressed into the summoning of otherworldly arboreal creations unearthed amidst the creeping thickets and elegies to woodland intrusions, solitudes and seasons.

Track list:
1) The Abney Ritual – Bare Bones
2) Hawthorn Heart – Magpahi
3) Deep Undergrowth – Polypores
4) Fantastic Mass – Time Attendant
5) Waldeinsamkeit – David Colohan
6) The Hand Of Auctumnus – Richard Moult
7) Tomo’s Tale – Sproatly Smith
8) A Whisper In The Woods – The Hare And The Moon ft Alaska
9) Ocarina Procession – The Rowan Amber Mill
10) Trees Grew All Around Her – The Séance with Lutine
11) Equinox – Cosmic Neighbourhood
12) Where Once We Wandered Free – A Year In The Country

Not everything here is folk-oriented, some of the contributions, such as those by Polypores and Time Attendant, are electronic pieces. David Colohan, Sproatly Smith, The Rowan Amber Mill, Richard Moult and others follow more familiar paths through the trees. Compared to Fractures and The Quietened Bunker, two of the earlier releases in this series, The Forest / The Wald is much closer to the territory mapped out by Xenis Emputae Travelling Band (or their present incarnation, Hawthonn), a response to British folk traditions that acknowledges the history without seeming beholden to it.

The Forest / The Wald will be released on 14th November.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Quietened Bunker
• Fractures

Can esoterics

As usual, one thing leads to another. Most people who listen to Tago Mago (1971), the third album by Can, won’t be aware of the Aleister Crowley reference in the long improvisation that fills side three (track 5 on the CD). Aumgn was a spontaneous creation that includes one member of the band intoning an OM-like mantra while the other musicians clatter their way around the studio. The Crowley connection is in the unusual spelling of the title which is Crowley’s own amendment of the more familiar AUM. He explains the reasoning over several pages in Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), some of which involves the numerical values of the five letters. Not that this marks Can as Crowleyans but anyone unacquainted with Crowley’s augmented word would simply have used OM or AUM instead.

Update: I’ve been re-reading the book that came with the Can Box (1999), and came across this forgotten passage in Michael Karoli’s interview:

At the time I was very interested in magic spells, and Irmin knew of the spell “Aumgn” through me. But I had a completely different concept of what one could do with it, than to irreverently quote it in a piece of music. At the age of 21, I wouldn’t have dared to put this recklessly on an album. For me it was black magic. It was Aleister Crowley and all of that, and it gave me the creeps. I told Irmin to stop pronouncing magic spells in the room, but Irmin naturally overrode that with his arrogant grin.

Design by Ingo Trauer & Richard J. Rudow.

The fifth studio album, Future Days (1973) has another esoteric detail on the front and back of its elegant Art Nouveau sleeve: Hexagram 50 from the I Ching, translated in the Richard Wilhelm edition as Ting / The Cauldron. The same text has the judgement for Ting as “great good success”, and the album happens to be considered one of their best musically, although it was also the end of an era when vocalist Damo Suzuki left after its release. On a more mundane level, a cauldron is a container, as is a can.

There’s also the unexplained Greek letter in the centre of the sleeve: Psi is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet, and is commonly used as a symbol for psychology although it’s also used as a symbol in quantum mechanics. This last reference might be relevant given that the piece that ends their next album, Soon Over Babaluma (1974), is entitled Quantum Physics.

Design by Wagner Design Unit. Cover photos by Michael Karoli & Peter Hehner.

There are more I Ching hexagrams on the back of Flow Motion (1976), the group’s eighth album. Hexagram 29 is K’an / The Abysmal (Water) also known as “gorge” or “abyss”. Hexagram 59 is Huan / Dispersal (Dissolution). Taken together these could be interpreted as “flow motion” (and may well be the origin of the title—interviews with the group have seldom discussed these things) although they might also be seen as ominous signs for Can’s future. Flow Motion gave them a hit single in the UK (I Want More) but it’s also the last album that’s musically satisfying throughout. Can persevered for another two years (minus Holger Czukay) before disbanding in 1978. As to the esoterics, Rob Young is apparently writing a biography of the band so we may learn more about all of this when his book is published.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Can soundtracks
• Can’s Lost Tapes