Robert Henke – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 742

Thunderstorm (1959) by Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton.

• “To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence,” says SF writer Ted Chiang. A New Yorker essay which has received a fair amount of attention over the past week, with good reason. As someone who found his name on the list of artists whose work was allegedly being fed into Midjourney, I suppose I have a vested interest in the arguments. (Good luck to any machine trying to imitate my “style”. I don’t have one.) Too much of the discussion, however, has been very poor which is why this is the first time I’ve linked to such a piece here.

• “After going their own way for much of the 20th century, mathematicians are increasingly turning to the laws and patterns of the natural world for inspiration. Fields stuck for decades are being unstuck. And even philosophers have started to delve into the mystery of why physics is proving ‘unreasonably effective’ in mathematics, as one has boldly declared.” Ananyo Bhattacharya on why physics is good at creating new mathematics. Having recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, Stella Maris, this was all very timely.

• “…our films obey musical laws. Of course, you can never tell people how they should watch a film. But the musical element provides a narrative of its own.” Thus the Quay Brothers, in the news again with their forthcoming feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The quote is from a recent interview with Xan Brooks. Meanwhile, Alex Dudok de Wit posted another interview from 2019, originally published in French, now made available in English for the first time.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine announces a new book of his essays, The Thunderstorm Collectors.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 28 books that either faked ingesting LSD or did.

• At Public Domain Review: Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48).

• At Print mag: Kelly Thorn’s Tarot of Oxalia.

• USC Optical Sound Effects Library

• Strange Thunder (1987) by Harold Budd | Sweet Thunder (1991) by Yello | Studies For Thunder (2004) by Robert Henke

Weekend links 739

New Moon and Evening Star (c.1932) by George Elbert Burr.

• If you’re eager to see a physical copy of the forthcoming Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic then Alan Moore World has screengrabs from a teaser video posted by US distributors Penguin/Random House to the social-media pit formerly known as Twitter. I’ve yet to receive a copy myself so I’m pleased to see the foil overlay on the cover looking as eye-catching as I’d hoped. Library Journal gave the book a starred review earlier this month.

• At Bandcamp: George Grella profiles Material, Bill Laswell’s long-running polycultural ensemble. Two of the albums on this list are all-time favourites of mine.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – August 2024 at AmbientBlog.

• The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges: A Hypertext.

• At Unquiet Things: Owls, Bats, and Moths in Art.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Varvara Stepanova Day.

• Jon Hopkins’ favourite music.

• RIP Gena Rowlands.

• Desert Sands (1958) by Eugene LaMarr and His Magic Accordion | Grains Of Sand (1989) by Opal | Infinite Sands (1997) by Robert Henke

Weekend links 203

A Dune-inspired piece by Joshua Budich for In Dreams: an art show tribute to David Lynch at Spoke Art.

• “[Montague] Summers was a friend of Aleister Crowley and, like [Jacques d’Adelswärd] Fersen, conducted homoerotic black masses; whatever eldritch divinity received their entreaties was evidently propitiated by nude youths.” Strange Flowers goes in search of the Reverend Summers.

• More Jarmania: Veronica Horwell on the theatrical life of Derek Jarman, Paul Gallagher on When Derek Jarman met William Burroughs, and Scott Treleaven on Derek Jarman’s Advice to a Young Queer Artist.

• Robert Henke of Monolake talks to Secret Thirteen about his electronic music. More electronica: analogue-synth group Node have recorded a new album, their first since their debut in 1995.

This hypertrophied response to decay and dilapidation is what drives the “ruin gaze”, a kind of steroidal sublime that enables us to enlarge the past because we cannot enlarge the present. When ruin-meister Giovanni Piranesi introduced human figures into his “Views of Rome”, they were always disproportionately small in relation to his colossal (and colossally inaccurate) wrecks of empire. It’s not that Piranesi, an architect, couldn’t do the maths: he wasn’t trying to document the remains so much as translate them into a grand melancholic view. As Marguerite Yourcenar put it, Piranesi was not only the interpreter but “virtually the inventor of Rome’s tragic beauty”. His “sublime dreams”, Horace Walpole said, had conjured “visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour”.

Frances Stonor Saunders on How ruins reveal our deepest fears and desires.

• Gustave Doré. L’imaginaire au pouvoir: Four short films from the Musée d’Orsay to accompany their current exhibition, Gustave Doré (1832–1883): Master of Imagination.

• At Dangerous Minds: Remembering Cathy Berberian, the hippest—and funniest—lady of avant-garde classical music.

• “Merely a Man of Letters”: Jorge Luis Borges interviewed in 1977 by Denis Dutton & Michael Palencia-Roth.

• Luke Epplin on Big as Life (1966), a science-fiction novel by EL Doctorow which the author has since disowned.

• The Psychomagical Realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky: Eric Benson talks to the tireless polymath.

• A video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz for the 10th anniversary of David Milch’s Deadwood.

• Eugene Brennan on Scott Walker’s The Climate of Hunter (1984).

• Dune at Pinterest.

• Prophecy Theme from Dune (1984) by Brian Eno | Olivine (1995) by Node | Gobi 110 35′ south 45 58′ (1999) by Monolake

Ceramic Buddha Machines

The experimentalists at Fm3 continue to impress with their commitment to unorthodox music delivery when the trend remains digital and ephemeral. Back in April they announced a new line of ceramic-bodied players for their series of Buddha Machines, that essential collection of ambient loops in a case the size of a box of matches. The new players will be available at the end of the year. Being ceramic they’re probably a little less portable than the plastic versions, and might also be more fragile. For durability and retro cachet I would have opted for Bakelite if that material is still being manufactured anywhere. (It seems it is, thanks Wikipedia.)

Back in the digital and ephemeral world, Fm3 also have a Buddha Machine app for iPhones and iPads. If that seems to defeat the object of the loops being encased in a box of their own you do at least have the option of mixing six of the machines at once. For an idea of how far the mixing and extrapolation of these sounds can be taken, Robert Henke’s two ambient mixes of Buddha Machine samples from 2007 and 2008 are still available as free downloads on his website.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gristleism
• Uncopyable
• Buddha Machine Wall
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke

Passage 13

Ed Jansen writes again with news that no. 13 of his Dutch-language web magazine Passage is now online:

Number 13 of Passage contains stories about the Buddha Machine, a strange little box that emits music, then there is ‘Escape from the dollhouse?’, which is about the art of Hans Bellmer, surreal and strangely erotic, ‘The Skeleton that Climbed in Through the Window’ tells the equally strange and sad story of the life of Unica Zürn, companion of Bellmer and ‘Nomads of the Timestream’ is of course about the work of Michael Moorcock. This collection begins and ends with two sides of a story about the version of the visit of Odysseus to the Underworld, by Ezra Pound.

The customary eclectic mix, in other words. The Buddha Machine section is a nice overview of recent ambient music machines. I love the ad art for Zhang Jian’s Short-Wave of Bengal Bay.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passage 12
• Gristleism
• Passage 11
• Buddha Machine Wall
• Passage 10
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke