Tuxedomoon – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 340

Fly Carefully (1969) by Stanislaw Zagorski.

• Video of Tuxedomoon live in San Francisco, Rotterdam and Paris, 1983 (or try this copy), and a late-night German TV broadcast from 1985. The first Tuxedomoon album, Half-Mute, has been reissued by Crammed Discs with an accompanying album, Give Me New Noise: Half-Mute Reflected, featuring cover versions of the songs by various artists.

• More end-of-year reviews: Dennis Cooper’s recommendations are always eclectic (and thanks again for the blog shout!); not necessarily the best ambient and space music of 2016 by Dave Maier; a review of the year by graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook; the 15 finalists of the 2016 Art of Building architectural photography competition.

• The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington will be published in April 2017 by Dorothy. Related: Letters, Dreams, and Other Texts by Remedios Varo will be published next year by Wakefield Press. Also of interest on that page is a new edition of Haschisch by Oscar AH Schmitz illustrated by Alfred Kubin.

• The week in Things (see this post): John Carpenter’s The Thing: The Story of an SF Horror Game-Changer. Ennio Morricone’s score will be infecting the vinyl world next year. Meanwhile, Matthew Thrift recommends “10 great films set in the Arctic and Antarctica”.

• Mixes of the week: FACT mix 581 by Pan Daijing, XLR8R podcast 468 by Jan Jelinek, and Secret Thirteen Mix 203 by Blood Sport.

• A Year In The Country on Monumental Follies (1972), a book about architectural eccentricity by Stuart Barton.

• William Burroughs reads 23 random paragraphs from Naked Lunch each time you load this page.

• “The world is terrifying and destructive and dehumanising and tragic,” says Charlie Kaufman.

• Scents and sensuality: William Dalrymple on the perfumes of India, past and present.

• Brenda S G Walter on Hill House: The haunted soul of Shirley Jackson.

• A trailer for Dome Karukoski’s Tom of Finland. There’s more here.

• Illustrating the Sixties: Paintings by Italian artists in London.

• Michael Rother and Cavern Of Anti-Matter live in Berlin.

• Cinemetal

• Network 23 (1981) by Tangerine Dream | Exit 23 (1989) by Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia | Studio 23 (2012) by The Time And Space Machine

Urbatecture

Spotted at Neatorama this week, Cédric Dequidt‘s Urbicande lamp, a cubic design which appears to be sinking into the table. The Neatorama people don’t seem aware that the name of the lamp refers to Fever in Urbicande (1985), a comic book by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and the second volume in the masterful Cités Obscures series.

Fever in Urbicand: Urbatect Eugen Robick ponders the properties of the strange cube which is invulnerable yet able to grow through solid materials.

The mysterious para-dimensional cube and its effects on the divided city of Urbicande have been described here already. Fever in Urbicande is my favourite of the core stories by Schuiten and Peeters, and it seems to be one of the more popular of Schuiten’s creations to judge by the lamp and some of the spin-off works that follow.

Fever in Urbicand: Several months later, and the cube has burgeoned into a city-spanning “Network”.

Continue reading “Urbatecture”

Weekend links 279

Untitled painting by Jen Ray.

• Lots of architecture links this week so it’s fitting that one of them is director Ben Wheatley talking to David Fear about his forthcoming film of JG Ballard’s High-Rise: “I was just thinking about this the other day, how hard it was to get a hold of stuff before the Internet. You really had to hunt down stuff or have someone who knew what was up to say, ‘You gotta read Naked Lunch, mate. You gotta read Crash.’ […] They were secretive things you had to ferret out, those books. It was the same with music and certain movies. And drugs.” Related: Souvenir d’un Futur, photographs by Laurent Kronental of the high-rise banlieues of Paris.

• “In Ancient Egypt, if a lowly official received the glyph of an owl from the Pharaoh, it was understood that the recipient should take his own life.” Carey McHugh in a brief history of the owl.

• I’d always thought the red buildings seen briefly in Blow-Up (1966) had been painted to Antonioni’s orders. Not so, says Another Nickel In The Machine.

He belongs right up there with Poe and Kafka. The best writer of weird fiction in the past half century. And the reason he belongs there is Ligotti’s both visceral and intellectual, formally experimental and able to tell a traditional horror story with equal ease. He’s also modernized the weird tale, from his early work on. The later workplace stories complete that process. The other thing he brings is a very dark sense of humor and a sense of the absurdity of the world—and a critique of that world that serves as subtext. All of these elements in harmony—symbiosis and contamination—equal genius. I read his work in a continuum that includes Kafka, Poe, Angela Carter, Bruno Schulz, Rikki Ducornet, and the great Caitlin R. Kiernan, but also absurdists and realists and flat-out surrealists. I appreciate that Ligotti stories can be revisited and reveal new dimensions.

Jeff VanderMeer on Thomas Ligotti

• David Ferry talks to the people trying to excavate the remains of sets from Cecil B. DeMille’s first film of The Ten Commandments.

• As part of the ongoing vinyl reissue deluge, Crammed Discs are releasing a 10-disc box of albums by the great Tuxedomoon.

• At Strange Flowers: I see for it is night, remembering Marie Cermínová, better known as Surrealist artist Toyen.

• Blue Sun Chiming, an animated video by Elisa Ambrogio for the song of that name by Six Organs of Admittance.

• At BLDGBLOG: Occult Infrastructure and the “Funerary Teleportation Grid” of Greater London.

• Enigmatic music makers Watch Repair are now selling their works at Bandcamp.

• Video by Harald Albrigtsen of whales basking under the Northern Lights.

• The urban explorations of Russian photographer Ralph Mirebs.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 164 by Discipula.

• The lost rivers that lie beneath London

• Egypt (1985) by Tuxedomoon | Whales Tails (1986) by Cocteau Twins | London’s Lost Rivers (1996) by Coil

Weekend links 276

Beautiful Void: Holy Void II (2015) by Andy Diaz Hope.

• “Feeling like a woman. Looking like a man.” Rick Poynor on the cover art for Nightclubbing by Grace Jones. Related: A One Man Show, Jean-Paul Goude’s essential film of Jones’ 1982 tour where many of the songs are better than their album versions.

• Crammed Discs’ revival of the Made To Measure series continues with the release in October of Blue Velvet Revisited by Tuxedomoon & Cult With No Name, a soundtrack from the Peter Braatz documentary about David Lynch’s film.

• “We were learning from point zero; we created something that wasn’t around before…” Hans-Joachim Roedelius talking to Bruce Tantum about his work with Cluster and Harmonia.

• “In the Shangri-La pool there are no floating impurities. Apart from myself.” Iain Sinclair swims in “the highest pool in Europe” on the 52nd floor of The Shard, London.

• From 2012: “Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific” by Benjamin K. Tippett.

• After 23 years of delays and bootleg versions, Backwards by Coil is being given an official release.

• “Relaxed terror”, “perky dismay” and “unspecified uncertainty”: library music at Scarfolk.

• Mix of the week: a 4-hour collection of favourite music compiled by Autechre.

• Masakazu Shirane and Reuben Young make a human-size kaleidoscope.

• “I always was a weird child,” says John Waters.

• A new version of Argent by Jane Weaver.

• Chaos Magic (sic): The Fashion Trend

• Void (2009) by Monolake | Void (2011) by Emptyset | Void (2014) by The Bug feat. Liz Harris