Stephen Prince – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 681

All Cats are Grey At Night (2009) by Kenny Hunter.

• “They found ways to do the impossible”: Hipgnosis, the designers who changed the record sleeve for ever. Lee Campbell talks to Anton Corbijn about Squaring the Circle, Corbijn’s documentary about the Hipgnosis design team. Peter Christopherson is shown in the accompanying photo but Campbell doesn’t mention him at all, despite his having been an equal partner with Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell from the mid-70s on. Many of those famous covers were photographed by Christopherson’s camera.

• A new book by Stephen Prince at A Year In The Country: “Lost Transmissions weaves amongst brambled pathways to take in the haunted soundscapes of electronica, the rise of the occult in the 1970s, cinema and television’s dystopian dreamscapes and hauntological work which creates and gives a glimpse into parallel worlds…”

• New music: Ambient Bass Guitar by John von Seggern, and Sturgeon Moon/Beaver Moon by Missing Scenes.

• How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City.

• Mix of the week: Tranquility by A Strangely Isolated Place.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Snow Globalists.

• The Strange World of…African Head Charge.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Baudot.

• Nights on Earth.

• Transmission (1979) by Joy Division | Clandestine Transmission (1994) by Richard H. Kirk | Transmission (1996) by Low

Weekend links 582

Illustration by Gustave Doré from L’Espagne (1874) by Jean Charles Davillier.

• Warp Records has announced the forthcoming publication of Atmospherics by Jon Hassell, a short book collecting the diary extracts, composition notes and other ephemera that Jon compiled as an evolving appendix for his website. I was involved with the first iteration of the Atmospherics when we were working on his site in 2004, and for me this section was always the most interesting part of the project, comprising unique, personal material. The book will be published in October.

• “Almost everything in his book would be dismissed by today’s streaming behemoths as ‘too quirky, too local, too slow, too dry, too difficult, too weird’.” Sukhdev Sandhu reviewing The Magic Box, a history of British TV from the 1950s to the 1980s by Rob Young.

• New music: Cobalt Desert Oasis by Marco Shuttle, Angel’s Flight (AD 93) by Biosphere, and The Shildam Hall Tapes: The Falling Reverse by Stephen Prince, a sequel to an earlier release by A Year In The Country which includes an accompanying novella.

• Mix of the week, month and year: Sentimental Ornament: A Broadcast Rarities Mix by Aquarium Drunkard. First posted almost a year ago, I only discovered it last week; Aquarium Drunkard is now added to my RSS feed to avoid further neglect.

• I didn’t post anything for Bloomsday this year but if I’d seen these caricatures by Craig Morriss back in June I would have linked to them at the time.

• At Unquiet Things: The Eerie Moods and Pulpy Frights of Henri Lievens.

• Whole lotta rarities: the strangest Led Zeppelin artwork.

• Old music: A Willow Swept By Train by Janet Beat.

• Instant Lettering Database

• Atmospheres (1967) by Wimple Winch | Atmospheric Lightness (2018) by Brian Eno | Ligeti: Atmosphères (2019) by Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; Alan Gilbert

A Year In The Country: the book

I kept intending to mention this before but the workload has been off the scale this year: all very stimulating but it’s been eating into my spare time. More about all of that later, for now there’s the new book from A Year In The Country’s Stephen Prince which was launched earlier this month in ebook form, and which will be available in print next month.

The book is a reworking of the Year In The Country website in printed form, hence the subtitle—”Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology”—and as such is very useful as a guide to the byways which the site has been exploring for the past few years. The folk-horror subgenre isn’t exactly unexplored today—the Folk Horror Revival book to which I contributed ran to 500 pages—but A Year In The Country has always had a broader reach, taking in related works in the music world, in science-fiction film and television, and in offshoots of science fact such as Cold War paranoia and nostalgia for the Space Race. I regard myself as being reasonably au fait with most of this material but there’s still a lot on the website (and now in the book) which I hadn’t come across before. There are no illustrations, unfortunately, but the website has recently been posting the missing pictorial content. A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields will be published on April 10th, and is available for pre-order here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• All The Merry Year Round
• The Quietened Cosmologists
• Undercurrents
• From The Furthest Signals
• The Restless Field
• The Marks Upon The Land
• The Forest / The Wald
• The Quietened Bunker
• Fractures
• Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies