Subtext Recordings – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 620

varo

Premonition (1953) by Remedios Varo.

• “Classical mythology, Arcadian idylls, occult speculation, and an interest in cultural curiosities coexisted in the grotto, allowing for the playful exploration of a new tension emerging between Nature and Artifice.” Laura Tradii explores the artificial grottoes of the Renaissance and beyond.

• “Some of the symbols and signs seem like bridges to nowhere, and perhaps Nabokov was lovingly teasing our endless quest to find patterns and generate meaning.” David M. Rubin on writing a response to a Nabokov short story.

• New music: “KMRU & Aho Ssan erupt in post-apocalyptic extremity with Resurgence“. I did the layout for this latest release on the Subtext label but I still haven’t got round to updating my web pages so you’ll have to take my word for it.

• Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus “unleashes a level of eroticism that’s surprising for 1940s British cinema,” says Adam Scovell.

• “Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time.” Fiona Sturges reviews The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight.

• Between Hell and Paradise: paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and his followers at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

• At The Collector: Olivia Barrett on the Voodoo Queens of New Orleans.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Astronef Super.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 118 by Pan American.

• TMP-01 Vintage Synth TV Series from Benge.

• Vale, A Year In The Country.

• Premonition (1979) by Simple Minds | Premonition (1980) by Cabaret Voltaire | Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel) (1987) by David Sylvian & Holger Czukay

A mix for Halloween: Subtexts

Presenting the thirteenth Halloween playlist, and another mix of my own. This year I thought I’d try a mix of material wholly taken from Subtext Recordings, an excellent label for whom I still provide design work now and then. Subtext releases have featured on some of the previous mixes in this series, and while the music (or sounds) on these albums isn’t necessarily horror-oriented much of it would work well as soundscapes in a David Lynch scenario. The material ranges from tracks with an acknowledged source—a telegraph pole north of the Arctic circle (Eric Holm), recordings made deep underwater (Eric Holm again), sounds recorded in a building with a reputation for being haunted (Emptyset)—to music whose origin is a complete mystery. See the Subtext Soundcloud page for more of the label’s output.

This is the running order (some of the symbols in the title of Paul Jebanasam’s piece are missing due to encoding issues; the full track titles are here):

Roly Porter—Atar (2011)
Eric Holm—Andøya (2014)
Emptyset—Divide (2012)
Eric Holm—Surface Detail (2016)
Blessed Initiative—Out With The Old, In With The New Flesh (2016)
FIS—Treat Inner Eris (2016)
FIS And Rob Thorne—Wooden Lung (2017)
Paul Jebanasam—depart as | air dx stop ??/? /dt somewhere = +??(? sigma*(y waiting -x) v)=0 ??/dy/dt for = you x dim (2016)
Joshua Sabin—Eki (2017)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Macabre mixes
• A mix for Halloween: Analogue Spectres
• A mix for Halloween: Teatro Grottesco
• A mix for Halloween: Unheimlich Manoeuvres
• A mix for Halloween: Ectoplasm Forming
• A playlist for Halloween: Hauntology
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
• A playlist for Halloween: Drones and atmospheres
• A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Another playlist for Halloween
• A playlist for Halloween

Subtextual

Études (2015) by Yair Elazar Glotman.

The work section of this website is still lacking the addition of some recent commissions but I have managed this week to get the albums section up to date. If I don’t talk about my work in the music world very much that’s because it’s been scaled down in recent years. I am still working regularly for the Subtext label, however, and the releases shown here are all the recent designs bar the latest one which will be out in February.

Almost all my work for Subtext involves preparing artwork I’ve been sent, and applying the relevant text information (or “label copy” as the big record companies prefer to call it). That’s generally easy work but the minimal style of Subtext means that some designs go through several iterations before everyone is happy with the results. The Signal album by Emptyset required the careful cropping and adjusting of James Ginzburg’s photos to get something that sat well in the square of the album sleeve. Almost all the artwork here was selected by the artists; if it wasn’t then it was prepared with their approval. The individual web pages show the full layouts, and also have all the necessary artwork credits.

As to the audio content, Subtext releases operate in the nebulous intersection between noise, drones, sound design and ambient music. The albums by Paul Jebanasam and FIS were featured this month on a list of the Top 30 Drone Records of 2016. See the label’s Soundcloud page for samples.

I’ll be posting another work update—if I get round to it!—next week.

Emptyset (2015 reissue) by Emptyset.

Signal (2015) by Emptyset.

Continuum (2016) by Paul Jebanasam.

Frenzy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2016) by Cevdet Erek.

Barotrauma (2016) by Eric Holm.

From Patterns To Details (2016) by FIS.

Blessed Initiative (2016) by Blessed Initiative.

Weekend links 314

Avebury Kite (2006) by David Alderslade.

• “Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, author of Mephisto, was one of the first in Germany to write gay novels and plays.” Walter Holland reviews Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann by Frederic Spotts.

• The Pale Brown Thing, a shorter/alternate version of Fritz Leiber’s supernatural masterwork, Our Lady of Darkness, is given a limited reprinting by Swan River Press next month.

• “Not only is metal not directly harmful to adolescent minds, as the thinking goes, it may actually be helpful.” Christine Ro on the reappraisal of a once-suspect musical genre.

Something of that tension between past and future is visible in Beardsley’s work. It is the art of a dying era peering, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, into the next. For all the prancing and bravado, Beardsley’s art was really about finding something in which to believe—and if Beardsley came to believe in anything it was the deep black line. Shading held little interest for Beardsley, and color fascinated him not at all. The black line and white space were all he needed.

Morgan Meis on Aubrey Beardsley

• More of my art for Bruce Sterling’s forthcoming Dieselpunk novella, Pirate Utopia, has been revealed. Tachyon will be publishing the book in November.

• “Secretly, though, I frequent junk shops because I am wishing for some kind of transcendence,” says Luc Sante.

• Mixes of the week: Gizehcast #28 by Christine Ott, and a mix for The Wire by Asher Levitas.

• “It took centuries, but we now know the size of the Universe.” Chris Baraniuk explains.

• Barnbrook Studios creates identity for Kubrick exhibition at Somerset House.

• Watch a haunting video from Subtext Recordings and Eric Holm.

• Folklore Tapes: A Rum Music Special by Joseph Burnett.

• Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine is on sale again.

• Rhys Chatham’s favourite albums.

• A Guide to Occult London

• Skulls and Bones

• Zero Time (1979) by Chrome | Zero-Gravity (1996) by Sidewinder | Zero Moment (2016) by Contact