Ryuichi Sakamoto – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 703

Njommelsaska i Lappland (1856) by Carl Svantje Hallbeck.

• 101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen. Not another clickbait listicle of Hollywood fare that you really have seen, this is 101 films from Sight & Sound‘s annual poll of critics and directors, each of which only received a single vote. Cinema from the silent era to the present day, “from every continent but Antarctica”, all presented on a single page, and with accompanying notes from the voters. I’ve only seen four of these so it’s a list to mine for the future.

• 2024 will see the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Surrealist manifestos, so the following new books are making their presences known before the celebratory rush. At Colossal: extracts from New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting by Robert Zeller; at AnotherMag: photos by Coco Capítan of Salvador Dalí’s home at Port Lligat.

• “Cocteau was like one of those magicians who, having announced that they are going to reveal the secret of one trick, immediately perform another.” Pierre Caizergues introducing extracts from The Secrets of Beauty, a small book of aphorisms by Jean Cocteau, newly translated into English by Juliet Powys.

• More Michael Powell: “Scorsese says The Red Shoes is in his DNA”: Thelma Schoonmaker on her life and work with Michael Powell and his friend Marty.

• Dennis Cooper’s favourite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2023. Thanks again for the link here!

• At The Daily Heller: Book covers by Iris Alba (1935–1993), art director, illustrator and graphic designer.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See the newest underwater sculptures residing on the floor of the Caribbean.

• At Wormwoodiana: Douglas A. Anderson goes looking for the fantasy fiction of Raymond Chandler.

• At Public Domain Review: Paige Hirschey on Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes.

• Entries for the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year 2023.

• At Bibliothèque Gay: Der Mann in der Photographie, 1954.

• Aurora (1971) by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band | Aurora (2005) by Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto | Aurora Liminalis (2013) by William Basinski + Richard Chartier

Weekend links 669

Love (1973), a poster by Nicole Claveloux.

• “Warner Brothers had been keen on a Rolling Stones movie. Jagger was keen on being a movie star. But Donald Cammell’s script was no Beatles’ jolly japes musical comedy…” Des Barry examines the ninth minute of Cammell & Roeg’s Performance.

• “…part of what made his 1970s work so original was the degree to which his band cross-pollinated guitar with synthesizer.” Aquarium Drunkard explores the esoteric jazz-rock of Steve Hillage.

• Magma, the cosmic jazz-rock group from France, have been around for 50 years without making a music video. Hakëhn Deïs is their first.

There was half-Tarkovsky embedded in async, “Solari” and “Stakra” and “Walker”, a hand outstretched to those great poems of living and light that we call films. “I had a strange dream last night,” Andrey Tarkovsky wrote in one of the diary entries collected in Instant Light, “I was looking up at the sky and it was very, very light and soft; and high, high above me it seemed to be slowly boiling, like light that had materialised like the fibres of a sunlit fabric, like silken living stitches in a piece of Japanese embroidery.”

David Toop remembers Ryuichi Sakamoto

• “Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station…”

• The Electrifying Dreamworld of The Green Hand: Dan Clowes on the comic-art of Nicole Claveloux.

• At Bandcamp: Andy Thomas on the post-punk pop subversion of David Cunningham.

• At Unquiet Things: An enigmatic baroness and her collection of skulls.

• New music: River Of Dreams by Romance & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ray Gun.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – April 2023.

• RIP Al Jaffee.

• Skulls Of Broken Hill (1996) by Bill Laswell | The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (2008) by Earth | Black Skulls (2018) by Jóhann Jóhannsson

B-2 Unit by Ryuichi Sakamoto

RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto. I bought quite a few of his albums over the years but these are only a small fraction of his huge and diverse discography; Discogs lists 116 albums recorded solo or in collaboration with other artists. B-2 Unit, released in 1980, was the first one I discovered, and it’s still a great favourite. The CD shown here was a replacement for a secondhand vinyl copy I bought circa 1982, at a time when albums by Japanese artists were often hard to find unless you could afford expensive imports. As with albums on German labels such as Brain and Sky, if you saw anything like this secondhand you grabbed it, even if the artists were a complete mystery.

Design (after El Lissitzky) by Takeo Aizawa and Tsuguya Inoue.

Sakamoto wasn’t a mystery—I was already listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra and some of the other people he’d worked with—but I wasn’t sure what to expect from a solo release, especially one with such an enigmatic title. B-2 Unit turned out to be closer to the more experimental post-punk albums than anything by YMO: jerky rhythms, scratchy guitar, atonal electronics, distorted vocals, offbeat songs, plus that staple of post-punk music, dialogue samples from TV and radio. Subsequent interviews revealed that Sakamoto had arrived in London with the intention of making a dub (or dub-style) album like the one Andy Partridge released as Take Away/The Lure Of Salvage, hence the credits on B-2 Unit for both dub producer Dennis Bovell, who engineered some of the recording, and Partridge himself, the presence of the latter seeming very unusual at the time, as well as being hard to locate in the music when two guitarists are credited. (YMO ally Kenji Omura is the other guitarist. Andy Partridge apparently gave Sakamoto a tape of those scratchy guitar lines which were then dropped into the recordings.) The dub influence is most evident on E3-A, and the album’s stand-out track and only single, Riot In Lagos, a piece which sounds like an electronic composition deconstructing itself while it plays. The minimal documentation means it can be hard to tell who did what on the album but I’d be surprised if Hideki Matsutake hadn’t helped with the programming, if not the deconstruction, of Riot In Lagos. Matsutake was the synth programmer for YMO, he’s often referred to as the fourth member of the group, yet you never see his name mentioned in discussion of B-2 Unit. As for Sakamoto, he never did anything like this again. His experimental side still came to the fore now and then, especially the superb run of albums and EPs he recorded with Alva Noto, but his solo work during the 1980s and 90s was increasingly commercial, on albums over-burdened with international guests. For a taste of his less commercial side, here’s an improvisation with Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) in Philip Johnson’s Glass House, recorded one evening while the daylight was fading.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zen-Gun and The Zen Gun
• El Lissitzky record covers

Zen-Gun and The Zen Gun

Japanese edition, 1984. Cover artist unknown.

At last, kosho Hako Ikematsu permitted himself to exult, at last he held the zen gun in his hands.

Zen in the art of electronics…

He knew its age: more than three Earth centuries. He knew its provenance: the zen master who made it had been a member of the order from which his own had originally sprung. The external appearance of the gun was a testament to certain cultural concepts: it seemed improvised, unfinished, crude, yet in its lack of polish was a feeling of supreme skill…in the Nipponese language of the time it had wabi, the quality of artless simplicity, the rustic quality of leaves strewn on a path, of a gate mended roughly with a nailed-on piece of wood and yet whose repair was a quiet triumph of adequacy and conscious balance. It had shibusa, the merit of imperfection. Only incompleteness could express the infinite, could convey the essence of reality. Hence, the unvarnished wood bore the marks of the carver’s chisel…

These qualities were themselves but superficial excrescences of the principles on which the gun acted, principles so abstruse in character that one dictum alone succeeded in hinting at them: Nothing moves. Where would it go? Pout the chimera had succeeded in using the gun as an electric beam to hurt or kill, without regard to location. But that was the most trivial of its capabilities. Only a kosho could unlock its real, dreadful purpose…

I read a novel recently that was unapologetic space opera. This isn’t something I do very often. Ryuichi Sakamoto is to blame, strange as this may seem, as a result of my spending a day or two listening to my old Sakamoto CDs. One of these, Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, contains a short instrumental titled Zen-Gun, a piece which almost shares a title with the space opera in question, The Zen Gun by Barrington J. Bayley. I bought the Sakamoto disc in 1990, and I’ve known about the novel, which was published in 1983, for almost as long as I’ve been listening to the album. Every now and then I’ve wondered whether the two works might be connected, or at least whether Sakamoto borrowed Bayley’s title, but I’d never considered reading the novel until now.

US edition, 1983. Cover art by Kelly Freas.

Barrington Bayley (1937–2008) is a writer whose works I’d mostly avoided while he was alive. This despite the continual praise he received from Michael Moorcock, and the acknowledgement by William Burroughs in Nova Express for an idea borrowed from a Bayley story with a Burroughs-like title, The Star Virus. (Samples of Burroughs’ voice happen to turn up on an album that Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded after Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, the Bill Laswell-produced Neo Geo. Make of this what you will.) Bayley was the odd man out among the British writers of science fiction’s New Wave for persevering with hard SF, a sub-genre I don’t enjoy reading very much unless it’s by a trustworthy writer. All genres have their share of bad writers but science fiction, especially the variety concerned with space-faring and futuristic technology, has historically been home to more than most. I already knew that Bayley could write a decent story—he appeared regularly in the pages of New Worlds magazine—but I feel I’ve been doing him a disservice by ignoring his novels for so long.

The thing that really pushed me towards The Zen Gun was reading the Wikipedia entry for the novel which includes the following praise from Bruce Sterling:

Yet Bayley’s elemental energy, his mastery of the sense of wonder, cannot be denied. His work is the very antithesis of tired hackdom. To invent an entire self-consistent cosmology and physics for a $2.50 DAW paperback…is one of those noble acts of selfless altruism that keep SF alive.

Then there’s this comment about the mysterious Zen Gun itself, a piece of wood carved into the shape of a pistol which is capable of destroying entire suns: “Powerful as the weapon is, its existence is a paradox, as only those who have attained inner peace can use it.” After reading this I knew I had to read the novel.

Continue reading “Zen-Gun and The Zen Gun”

Weekend links 658

Also Sprach Zarathustra (1972), a blacklight poster by Asher Ein Dor.

• “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) is a reasonably informative, if rather dry, look at a subject with much more potential for exploration,” says Dan Shindel, reviewing Anton Corbijn’s feature-length documentary about the album-cover design team. Sounds like a missed opportunity, on the whole, although the history of Hipgnosis has been so thoroughly explored over the course of several books (including a very recent one by Aubrey Powell) that any documentary seems almost superfluous. What I’d most like to see is something we’ll never have, a film about the company directed by the late Storm Thorgerson. And on that note, Thorgerson’s two-part documentary about art and drugs, The Art of Tripping (previously), has resurfaced on YouTube here and here.

• “LunaNet consists of a set of rules that would enable all lunar satellite navigation, communication and computing systems to form a single network similar to the Internet, regardless of which nation installs them. Setting lunar time is part of a much bigger picture. ‘The idea is to produce a Solar System internet,” says Gramling. ‘And the first part would be at the Moon.'” Elizabeth Gibney reports on plans to create a consistent time zone for the Moon.

• “Listening to 12, one cannot help but be struck by this deep expression of Sakamoto’s pain, of his human frailty, strength, and uncertainty about the future.” Geeta Dayal on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest album.

• At Public Domain Review: Illusory Wealth: Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies by Dorinda Evans.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Journey to inner space with The Groundhogs.

• DJ Food investigates the High Meadows psychedelic poster site.

• New music: Sub-Photic Scenario by Runar Magnusson.

• At Wyrd Daze: Disco Rd: 23 pages 23 minutes.

• The Strange World of…Chris Watson.

• Lunar Musick Suite (1976) by Steve Hillage | Lunar Cruise (1990) by Midori Takada & Masahiko Satoh | Luna Park (2006) by Pet Shop Boys