Dreams before Surrealism: a sheet music cover from 1926 by René Magritte.
• The week in music: Listen to compositions by Annea Lockwood. | At the Free Music Archive: Uncomfortable Music, a tribute to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (and, it should be said, to Alan Splet’s unique soundtrack). | Alan Licht plays a track from Trout Mask Replica then loops some Donna Summer and improvises guitar noise over it. | Music Experiments with Terror: The Spooky Isles presents Joseph Stannard‘s list of recent eldritch sounds from British musicians.
Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend, but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.
Salman Rushdie on the censorship of art
• All Diamond, No Rough” says the School Library Journal about the first volume of The Graphic Canon. Volume two should be out in August.
• Scientific American asks: Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?
• From 2010: A Dandy in Aspic – A letter from Derek Marlowe.
• Tom Phillips and A Humument: how a novel became an oracle.
• Timeline Maps at the David Rumsey Map Collection.
• Happy 50th birthday, A Clockwork Orange.
• Jim Dandy (1956) by LaVern Baker | Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, part one (1972) by King Crimson, live on Beat Club.