Suzanne Ciani – { feuilleton }

Mystical prints by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

The Central Spiritual Sun.

This picture appears on the cover of an album of electronic music, The Golden Apples Of The Sun by Suzanne Ciani and Jonathan Fitoussi, which was released last Friday. Being already partial to the music of both Ms Ciani and Monsieur Fitoussi I’ve been enjoying this one (although there’s no CD…bah), and was curious about the cover art which I took at first for a contemporary creation. The artist, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) was born in the Netherlands but spent most of her life in Zurich where she was friends with Carl Jung, Richard Wilhelm and other mystically-inclined intellectuals, and where she formed Eranos (later the Eranos Foundation), a conference/institute for the exchange of ideas between West and East.

Eternal Energy.

Fröbe-Kapteyn wasn’t a full-time artist, the screenprints she made in the 1930s appear to be an offshoot of her researches into archetypal symbolism, but she had an evident flair for this kind of image making. The Central Spiritual Sun is one of a series of 14 prints which are described as “Theosophist” although I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this. At least one of them (Kether, The Crown) refers to the Kabbalah, while several others have obvious Christian qualities. For those who like the Ciani/Fitoussi cover art, there’s an edition of the vinyl release of The Golden Apples Of The Sun that comes with a poster reproduction.

Kether, The Crown.

Reincarnation.

The Divine Breath.

Continue reading “Mystical prints by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn”

Weekend links 692

Illustration by Alfred Pearse for The Horror of Studley Grange by Clifford Halifax & LT Meade. Via.

• The Haunting at 60: Guy Lodge asks “Is it still one of the scariest films ever made?” I say yes but then it’s always been a favourite. Also, Robert Wise is something of a cult figure in this house, not for his big-budget directing jobs on The Sound of Music and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but for his RKO horror entries (The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher), his film noir (Born To Kill, The Set-Up, Odds Against Tomorrow), and two smaller science-fiction films from different decades, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain. All this and he also edited Citizen Kane.

• “This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.” Jeremy Lybarger reviewing Science Fictions, the retrospective devoted to the art of Remedios Varo.

• New music: Improvisation On Four Sequences by Suzanne Ciani; Incorporeal by Hidden Horse; Atlas by Laurel Halo; Infinito (Version) by Moritz von Oswald.

While Ballard’s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present…is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or “found” pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it’s all—culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard’s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.

Tom McCarthy: JG Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing

• At Public Domain Review: Behold the Nebulous Smear: ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Illustrated Book of Fixed Stars (ca. 1430).

• At Unquiet Things: Shake, Shiver, and Shriek: The Haunted Gothic Nightmares of George Ziel.

• Winners of Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2023.

• The Strange World of…Gavin Bryars

• Watch The Stars (1968) by Pentangle | Stars (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno | Kelly Watch The Stars (1997) by Air

Weekend links 678

Interior of a Cathedral (1921) by Wenzel Hablik.

• The inevitable Cormac McCarthy features: “Cormac McCarthy took us beneath the surface,” says Kevin Berger at Nautilus magazine, publishers of McCarthy’s essay about the origins of language. At The Paris Review, three writers reminisce about reading McCarthy’s fiction.

• At Bajo el Signo de Libra: Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003). “Su obra examina las implicaciones políticas y socioculturales de la homosexualidad en la India.”

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

• New music: Telepathic Heights by Hawksmoor, and Golden Apples of the Sun by Suzanne Ciani & Jonathan Fitoussi.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – June 2023, and isolatedmix 121: Oslated & Huinali Showcase mixed by S-Pill.

• At Unquiet Things: Crystal Castles and Harmonious Heavens: Wenzel Hablik’s Glittering Utopias.

• At Public Domain Review: Wonder and Pleasure in the Oude Doolhof of Amsterdam.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Exploring Tokyo’s Hidden Shrines.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: Bush Tetras interviewed.

• Ben Chasny’s favourite albums.

• RIP Glenda Jackson.

• Utopiat No. 1 (1973) by Utopia | Utopia (2000) by Goldfrapp | Utopia (2013) by Brown Reininger Bodson

Weekend links 637

A Risograph print by Raimund Wong for a forthcoming London concert by Suzanne Ciani. Via.

• “What makes him such an exemplary film composer is the adroitness with which he used style as a catalyst, conspiring with directors to illuminate crucial elements of character, tone, and plot through the expressive resources at his disposal.” Nate Chinen on Henry Mancini, a timely piece since I’ve been watching a lot of film noir recently, including two of the features mentioned there, Touch of Evil and Experiment in Terror. The latter is an uncharacteristic thriller from Blake Edwards with a marvellous, brooding score by Mancini. Here’s the main theme.

• “Infinitesimal as they are, phytoplankton produce more oxygen than all the world’s rainforests combined and roughly half of the oxygen on the planet—in other words, roughly half of the air we humans breathe.” David Greer on the importance of plankton.

• “Someday I’ll come into a place and someone’s playing my music and I’ll leave immediately because I don’t want to go through the editorial process again!” Diamanda Galás talking to Kevin Mccaighy about her new album, Broken Gargoyles.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 25 experimental horror films. Not sure I’d class Night of the Lepus as “experimental”—”rubbish” would be more accurate—but you may disagree.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: 69 Exhibition Road: Twelve True-Life Tales from the Fag End of Punk, Porn & Performance by Dorothy Max Prior.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Gunkanjima (aka Battleship Island) from above: exploring what was once the world’s most-densely populated city.

• Previews of pages from A Tiger in the Land of Dreams by Tiger Tateishi, newly reprinted by 50 Watts Books.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Ali Safi of the Marionette label.

• New music: Verde Pino by Beautify Junkyards.

• Mark Pawson & Disinfotainment

• Tiger Rag (1929) by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra | Night Of The Tiger (1959) by The Markko Polo Adventurers | Tiger (1967) by Brian Auger & The Trinity

Weekend links 486

Magma concert poster, 2017. Art by Jofre Conjota.

• The Dream Foundry is a new venture with a mission “to bolster and sustain the nascent careers of professionals working in the field of speculative literature.” This includes artists as well as writers, and to this end I was asked to answer a few questions about my work as a creator of book covers. I also offer some advice about visibility as an artist which I tried not to hedge with too many caveats. Related: my cover for The Resurrectionist of Caligo by Wendy Trimboli & Alicia Zaloga was one of the covers of the month at Muddy Colors.

• “…for a band that were so compositionally advanced, they were adept at producing primordially insistent and hypnotic rhythms.” John Doran on Magma (again), appraising the band’s music and history before presenting Christian and Stella Vander with questions from appreciative musicians.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 731 by Meemo Comma, mr.K’s Soundstripe vol 2 by radioShirley, The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XIX by David Colohan, and The Pumpkin Tide by Haunted Air.

• At Dangerous Minds: Roddy McDowall reads HP Lovecraft’s The Outsider and The Hound. Related: David McCallum reads HP Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and The Haunter of the Dark.

• “Mathematics is not unique in drawing out charlatans and kooks, of course…” David S. Richeson on cranks, past and present.

• “I plan to take psychedelics again…” Helen Joyce, the finance editor of The Economist, takes a trip.

• The City of Light and its shadows: Brassaï’s Paris.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Dennis Hopper Day.

• Paris (1958) by Perez Prado And His Orchestra | Paris 1919 (1973) by John Cale | Paris 1971 (1971) by Suzanne Ciani