Cover art by Domenico Gnoli, 1959.
• After decades of ignoring the output of Tangerine Dream it feels strange to be interested in the group once again; musicians you’re compelled to dismiss seldom manage to recapture your attention later on. Stranger still when the group itself is now completely detached from its origins following the death of founder Edgar Froese in 2015. But it was Froese’s departure, and with it the disappearance of many years of poor aesthetic choices, that helped renew my interest. At FACT the group take up the against-the-clock challenge in which musicians are given 10 minutes to create a new piece of music.
• “We were both working at Sounds at the time and we thought that instead of listening to these terrible ’80s records like Haircut 100 we’d go off and look for Montague Summers books, so off we went!” Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) on his enthusiasm for Summers, Austin Spare and Louis Wain.
• At the Paris Review: Valerie Stivers bakes pies for Italo Calvino. I’d like to see someone create a series of dishes based on every location from Invisible Cities. Elsewhere there’s William N. Copley on Joseph Cornell: “No art historian ever prophesied the coming of the box.”
• On the experimental realism of an eccentric Russian Anglophile: “For Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, strangeness was a matter of perspective,” says Caryl Emerson.
• Nova Reperta: John Boardley on a series of 16th-century prints showing new inventions.
• RIP David Graeber. From 2014: “What’s the point if we can’t have fun?”
• “Damn your blood”: John Spurr on swearing in early modern English.
• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine maps the esoteric in Britain, 1920.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Seijun Suzuki Day.
• Big Fun/Holly-wuud (Take 3) (1972) by Miles Davis | Funtime (1977) by Iggy Pop | Funny Time Of Year (2002) by Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man