Synergy (group) – { feuilleton }

• Cover art by the Quays for Inner Sanctums—Quay Brothers: The Collected Animated Films 1979–2013, a Blu-ray collection which will be released by the BFI next month. Being something of an obsessive where the Quays are concerned I have a lot of this material already (some of the films in multiple copies), but I’ve been hankering for a BR collection for some time. The new set will include everything that’s on the BFI’s DVD collection plus more recent films, some of which have been the subject of previous { feuilleton } posts.

• Aubrey Beardsley: “The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent. Strange hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Pierrot costumes or modern dress; quite a new world of my own creation.” Alan Hollinghurst reviews the catalogue raisonné of Beardsley’s work.

• How to find the spirit of HP Lovecraft in Providence. Related: there’s now a funding page for the statue of Lovecraft by Gage Prentiss being proposed for downtown Providence. Read about it here.

• At The Quietus: Robert Barry on KPM and the history of library music, and James De Carteret on Mike Hodges’ underrated The Terminal Man (1974).

• Michael Newton reviews Erica Wagner’s First Light, “a festschrift of essays, reminiscences, poems and stories dedicated to Alan Garner and his work”.

• Cosey Fanni Tutti‘s forthcoming memoir Art Sex Music should prove more interesting than some of the recent music business autobiographies.

• Mixes of the week: A New Age mix by Matthewdavid, FACT mix 563 by Deerhoof, and Secret Thirteen Mix 193 by Nite Fields.

• Underground music, echoes of war: using the vast Inchindown storage chamber for its resonant properties.

• Totally Lost: a photographic and video exploration of abandoned European totalitarian architecture.

• More animation: Nonsense, Cartoons, and My Post-Soviet Adolescence by Naré Navasardyan.

• Annie Rose on the allure of the predatory lesbian vampire in film.

• “Let’s write an encyclopedia of things blue,” says Bernd Brunner.

• Ferrets can be gods: Katherine Rundell on the inimitable Saki.

• The Mystery of Hieronymus Bosch by Ingrid D. Rowland.

• iO-808: A TR-808 drum machine for browsers.

• A Good Book

• Terminal Hotel (1981) by Synergy | Sataan Is Real (1992) by Terminal Cheesecake | Terminal (1999) by Monolake

More of an oddity than an odyssey, discovered while browsing YouTube. Ron Hays Music Image: Odyssey is a 45-minute collection of video-synth graphics, animation and other effects made for Pioneer’s LaserDisc system in 1979. Among the visuals there’s slit-scan work from Con Pederson, creator of some of the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, animation by John Whitney, rudimentary computer graphics, and some very of-their-time dance sequences with glowing women working out in a cosmic void.

Each sequence is set to a different piece of music provided by Wagner, Pachelbel, Frank Serafine, and Larry Fast aka Synergy. It’s difficult to imagine anyone paying money to watch this unless it was the only disc on sale; more likely it would have been playing in television shops as a promotional tool, although you can also imagine it being piped into the rooms of inmates of the Arboria Institute in Beyond the Black Rainbow. I used to own Games, the Synergy album from which Delta 1 is taken. Hearing that piece again makes me regret getting rid of the album several years ago.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Tag: Synergy (group)

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Ron Hays Music Image: Odyssey