John Coulthart's Blog, page 39

Telepathic Heights by Hawksmoor

No designer credited but probably the work of Adrian Self.

Too much unanticipated website wrangling has set my work back this week, but in the meantime I’ve enjoyed listening to more of the mostly-electronic music of Cabaret Voltaire (inevitably), plus the mostly-electronic music of Hawksmoor (James McKeown), whose latest album, Telepathic Heights, arrived a few days ago. According to the promotional copy this one “follows a path along the electronic skyways first created by the German/Krautrock electronic pioneers of the 1970s such as Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Roedelius and Michael Rother”. And so it does to an extent, although Hawksmoor’s buzzing timbres and synthesized rhythms are closer to those created by The Human League on their first two albums, Reproduction and Travelogue, a percussive pulse which an early reviewer of the League’s music compared to steamhammers in a mineshaft. The early League records, and the first album by Marsh & Ware as the B.E.F., Music For Stowaways, have always been cult items round here, so anything that approaches them is liable to catch my attention. Hawksmoor’s other albums push further buttons of interest with subjects that include Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches (no surprise there), JG Ballard’s Concrete Island and The Crystal World, the psychogeography of Milton Keynes, and Old Weird Britain. I’m looking forward to seeing what future paths this 21st-century Hawksmoor chooses to follow.

Telepathic Heights is out now on Soul Jazz.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews
• Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes, 1979
• German gear
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score

Fender guitar catalogue, 1976

Another post prompted by 70s Sci-Fi Art, and a publication that’s very typical of its decade. The Fender guitar catalogue for 1976 showcases its product range with a series of illustrations that carefully pastiche the kind of art you’d find in books of fairy tales. Selling rock’n’roll equipment in this manner wasn’t a trend-setting step by 1976, not with the punk hordes on the march, but corporations are seldom ahead of the general culture. The cover art by Ruby K. Lee is a copy of one of Kay Nielsen’s drawings for East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Lee also provides one of the interior drawings, with the rest of the art being the work of Bruce Wolfe. (There may be another artist involved since one of the illustrations lacks a credit.) This looks like a huge amount of effort for a small product catalogue but the illustrations were also part of an ad campaign with accompanying storybook copy. It’s good to see Busorama being used for all the headings. I’ve been using this font myself for its associations with the 1970s.

Since I keep borrowing tips from 70s Sci-Fi Art I’ll note again that Adam Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s will be published by Abrams next month.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kay Nielsen’s Grimm Fairy Tales
• Kay Nielsen’s East of the Sun and West of the Moon

Maintenance 2

“Ralph in his space flyer overhauls the Martian, Llysanorh. He will trap him with his Ultra-Generator.” A scene from Ralph 124C 41 + written by Hugo Gernsback.

Another public service announcement to say that the aforementioned server replacement has now taken place. In fact I’ve moved my site to a new webhost after service at the previous place had become increasingly poor. Most of today has been occupied with upgrading WordPress and installing the database on the new server. This is always a tricky business if you’re not used to the eccentricities of WordPress or moving databases around. I can do all this but, like Bartelby the Scrivener, I prefer not to. The effort was worth it, however, the software is now more future-proof than it was, and the site is finally https which may please some people. I still have to check web pages for missing images and the like so if you see anything that looks awry please leave a comment. Regular service will resume tomorrow.

Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews

Cabaret Voltaire, circa 1981. Left to right: Richard H. Kirk, Chris Watson, Stephen Mallinder.

…A few brief facts. CV came about from a mutual interest in producing “sound” rather than “music”, a few years ago, making very rare live appearances from time to time. Now an interest has developed in the band, we are playing live more frequently instead of just recording. CV dislike the sick commercialism which pervades most “contemporary music”.

At the moment we are working on a basis which involves two types of performance. A “set” which consists of songs, and a set which is completely improvised, lasting from 20 minutes to “x” number of hours. CV also use films + slides as lighting in live performance. A CV concert is like a bad acid trip; CV want to create total sensory derangement. MIT UND OHNE POLITIK, UNVERNUNFTIGKEIT.

INFLUENCES — “anything which is unacceptable”.

The band’s line up is —
RICHARD – Guitar, Clarinet, Tapes, Vocals.
MAL – Bass, Electronic Percussion, Lead Vocals.
CHRIS – Electronics, Tape, Vocals.

Early band correspondence with a German fanzine

Another week, another book of music talk. Cabaret Voltaire: A Collection of Interviews 1977–1994 was published two years ago but I only just discovered it as a result of my recent cycling through the Cabs’ discography. I’ve never been a great reader of music books yet here I am with three of them devoted to this particular group. Fabio Méndez’s collection joins Cabaret Voltaire: The Art of the Sixth Sense, the first Cabs book from 1984, in which Mick Fish and D. Hallberry interrogate Kirk and Mallinder about their progress to date; and Industrial Evolution, a reprint of the Sixth Sense interviews plus newer ones appended to Fish’s memoir about life in the Cabs’ home town of Sheffield during the 1980s. The Méndez collection is the most substantial of the three, gathering articles from fanzines, magazines and newspapers, and translating into English many pieces from European publications.

Badges not included.

As with Coil, I’ve always liked hearing what Kirk, Mallinder and Watson had to say. There was a fair amount of historical intersection between the two groups, Cabaret Voltaire having been a part of the first wave of Industrial music along with Throbbing Gristle, 23 Skidoo (whose records were produced by TG & CV), Clock DVA and the rest; later on the Cabs were part of the Some Bizzare stable along with Soft Cell, Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten and others. One of the interviews in Méndez’s book is from Stabmental, a short-lived fanzine edited in the early 1980s by a pre-Coil Geoff Rushton/John Balance. The zine ended its run with a cassette compilation, The Men With The Deadly Dreams, which included two exclusive recordings by Chris Watson and Richard Kirk. Watson’s piece, which applies cut-up theory to a radio news broadcast, is a good example of Cabaret Voltaire’s engagements with William Burroughs’ speculations about electronic media. Further examples of cut-up theory may be found in the group’s lyrics and in the video material they created, initially for use as projections while playing live, then later for their music videos which were in the vanguard of the form in the early 1980s.

A lot of the things we do tend to get glossed over. We’ll talk to anyone. We do loads of interviews with fanzines.

Unidentified group member, 1980

582 pages of interviews with a group that never had any kind of popular success is more information than most people would ever want or need. But as with Nick Soulsby’s Coil book, Méndez is doing future historians a service by resurrecting material from scarce and ephemeral sources. The post-punk period from 1978 to 1982 was a uniquely fertile musical moment, especially in Britain. For a few years absolutely anything seemed possible, with much of the wilder activity being logged and discussed in fanzines like Stabmental which usually had a limited circulation (often distributed by mail order) and a print run of a few hundred copies at most. The British music press also covered this scene, of course, but only up to a point, especially when the music was pushing the boundaries of the possible or the commercially acceptable. Méndez’s book emphasises the differences between the music-press approach—where the article is often as much about the writer as the group itself—and the fanzine interview which tends to be a list of questions with a small amount of contextual commentary. Fanzines were a circumscribed medium but they had advantages over the music papers; sincerity, for a start, allied with genuine enthusiasm and fewer of the tics that made reading the music press each week such a chore. The small publications weren’t always free of the bad habits of the weeklies but there was less of the journalistic posturing, the ignorant dismissal of whole areas of music, and the relentless snark and sarcasm which you’ll find thriving today on social media. The drawbacks of the fanzines were mostly about quality; fact-checking was often non-existent. Méndez’s book is littered with footnotes that log the errors present in the transcripts.

Which bands are influential on your music?
Chris: “Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Captain Beefheart…especially Can have influenced us.”

Spex magazine interview, 1980

Questions about influence are a common feature of any interview with creative people. Chris Watson’s reply is the first example I’ve seen of the Cabs mentioning so many German groups, as well as Captain Beefheart. A recurrent theme of these interviews concerns the group’s unusual trajectory, a career which evolved through a series of changes in direction that weren’t always predictable. The trio had started out in 1974 as resolute non-musicians and sound-collage provocateurs with Dadaist intentions; the music-making took time to develop. By the late 1970s the group that now called itself Cabaret Voltaire had become a more disturbed and disturbing counterpart to Sheffield’s other electronic music ensemble, The Human League. When Chris Watson departed in 1981 Kirk and Mallinder joined the Some Bizzare roster and followed the League to Virgin Records where a substantial advance helped the pair upgrade their equipment, launch their own independent music and video label, Doublevision, and record some of their best work.

The Crackdown (1983).

For groups with an ever-growing audience, the post-punk era saw a continual fretting over the issue of selling out, the question being whether it was possible to move from the independent world to a bigger label while retaining all the spiky and unpredictable originality that set independent musicians apart from their more commercial contemporaries. Neville Brody’s sleeve art for The Last Testament (1982), a Fetish Records compilation, foregrounds these anxieties, with the hand of big business grasping for the independent fish. Cabaret Voltaire worried over this themselves but their deal with Virgin was brokered by Some Bizzare and pitched in their favour. All the talk from this period is of a perpetually subversive operation, infiltrating the mainstream with aggressive rhythms freighted with the underground concerns of Industrial music. Their first album on Virgin was named after that policy beloved of authoritarians everywhere, The Crackdown, with music that included a rhythm borrowed from a Haitian voodoo ceremony, dialogue sampled from a TV documentary about torture in the British army, and a track bearing the title Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself). This last is an example of the Cabs’ sly sense of humour, the phrase being taken from the beatnik party in Tony Hancock’s The Rebel (always listed as a favourite CV film), but separated from its source it’s not the kind of sentiment you’d expect to find in the pop charts.

The group’s next move was the one that disappointed me when they signed to Parlophone in the mid-1980s where the A&R people evidently wanted a more commercial, chart-oriented act. Kirk and Mallinder didn’t seem troubled by the dilution of their sound but I felt something substantial had been lost at a time when younger groups—Depeche Mode, the second-wave Industrial outfits—were borrowing liberally from the Virgin recordings. At Virgin the Cabs’ attitude had been summarised by a slogan printed one of the singles: “Conform to Deform”. The phrase was the work of Some Bizzare boss Stevo, and a sentiment that Kirk and Mallinder said they disagreed with—they didn’t want to conform to the expectations of a record label—but it was still an oppositional stance. Some of the non-conformism was carried over to the first Parlophone album, Code (1987), but the follow-up, the house-influenced Groovy, Laidback And Nasty (1990), is an album I’ve never liked, a release blighted by a bad title, bad cover art and attempts at proper singing in place of the growls and menacing whispers of the earlier albums. Stephen Mallinder has many talents but singing like other artists isn’t one of them. I’m curious to see how they justify this period in the later interviews; my feeling at the time was that there was too much conforming and not enough deforming. Flicking through the end of Méndez’s book I spotted a dismissal of complaints like these by Richard Kirk, with the suggestion that those complaining didn’t really get the changes in direction. My problem with the Parlophone albums, and with some of the subsequent recordings, was that the direction they were now following was all too easy to get, and evidence of a group who weren’t succeeding on their own terms. When Coil released their own response to rave culture, Love’s Secret Domain, the contrast with Groovy, Laidback And Nasty was stark. Cabaret Voltaire’s music had lost all its distinguishing features while the Coil album couldn’t have been made by anyone else.

Plasticity (1992).

It’s a perennial problem, how to develop your art without losing your audience; and how to be part of an audience without insisting that your favourite artists never change or evolve. In the case of the Cabs the later changes of direction weren’t all negative. I like the Plasticity album where familiar themes—William Burroughs, voodoo, the CV obsession with The Outer Limits—were combined with contemporary electronic rhythms. And the packaging from this period was looking good again thanks to the Designers Republic. But Stephen Mallinder was lost in the shadows by this time, leaving all the later releases sounding like yet more Kirk solo projects.

It’s pointless to speculate about the alternative paths that Cabaret Voltaire might have taken but I do it anyway. I wonder how they could have developed in the late 1980s if they’d signed to Mute instead of Parlophone, and created a dub apocalypse with Adrian Sherwood to rival Mark Stewart’s terminally-paranoid, Burroughs-inflected masterpiece As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade. (Sherwood did produce most of the Cabs’ Code album but you wouldn’t know it.) Or a collaboration with Bill Laswell and friends, something that Mallinder said he had in mind in 1986. Both Laswell and the Cabs had various degrees of involvement with William Burroughs, especially Laswell who recorded his Burroughs-themed Seven Souls album in 1989. I reel when considering these possibilities (if only…if only…) but it’s all just history now, frozen on disc and in the pages of this book.

Cabaret Voltaire: A Collection of Interviews 1977–1994 is available via mail order.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Richard H. Kirk, 1956–2021
• Recoil and Cabaret Voltaire
• Pow-Wow by Stephen Mallinder
• TV Wipeout revisited
• Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire
• Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
• European Rendezvous by CTI
• TV Wipeout
• Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo
• Elemental 7 by CTI
• The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records

Weekend links 679

All this and the best tunes. Via.

•As noted last month, Space Ritual by Hawkwind turned 50 this year so here comes the inevitable reissue which in its most lavish edition will run to 11 discs. This isn’t as immediately attractive for me as the recent Calvert-era collection—I already own four different copies of Space Ritual, including the original vinyl—but I may feel differently a few months from now.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine explores The Prophecies of N’Gai, something which sounds like a story from Weird Tales but isn’t.

• “Is function in the eye or mind of the beholder?” Steven Heller on Jacques Carelman’s Catalogue of Impossible Objects.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Yoko Tada began painting in her 80s. At 100 she’s publishing her first book.

• “The Magnificent Ambersons: rebirth for ruined Orson Welles masterpiece that rivalled Citizen Kane.”

At Wyrd Daze: Disco Rd 3: 23 pages 23 minutes. Free PDF, music mix, Discordianism, etc.

• A (brief) conversation with Milena Canonero, Wes Anderson’s costume designer.

• At Public Domain Review: Specimens of Fancy Turning (1869).

• New music: Móatún 7: Tetsu Inoue by Various Artists.

• Arik Roper’s favourite album artwork.

• RIP Peter Brötzmann.

• Table Turning (1973) by The Upsetters | Forever Turning (1995) by Scorn | Turning Towards Us (2008) by Redshift

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

1: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1560

A painting (or a copy of the same) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

2: Musée des Beaux Arts, 1938

A poem by WH Auden.

3: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1962

A poem by William Carlos Williams.

4: The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1963

A novel by Walter Tevis.

5: The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1977

A feature film written by Paul Mayersberg and directed by Nicolas Roeg.

6: La Chute d’Icare, 1988

A composition by Brian Ferneyhough.

7: Upon Viewing Bruegel’s “Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus”, 2007

A song by Titus Andronicus.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fall of the Magician
• Bruegel’s sins
• Proverbial details
• Babel details
• Three stages of Icarus

Comps

The month in complimentary copies. In publishing you often get sent at least one copy of something you’ve worked on although there are plenty of occasions when this doesn’t happen. This trio turned up while I’ve been waiting for two other books to arrive, both of which I’d contributed to (one of them even has my name on the cover) but still had to request from editors. It’s always a quandary when this happens. You feel reluctant to add to somebody’s working day by making a petty request for a copy of that thing you provided some artwork for a year ago; on the other hand, one of the books I’ve been waiting for is published by an international company with a 70-year history who nevertheless didn’t have a budget to pay for all the artwork they were using. The comp was supposed to be my payment for their use of a single picture. It looks like I’ll be buying this one myself.

Great Work of Time is a book I’ve already mentioned here, being a hardcover reprint of an award-winning novella by John Crowley. I designed the interior and the cover which has been beautifully printed by Subterranean Press on textured paper. The interiors feature two-colour printing, with various details picked out in magenta ink. A handsome edition that’s also one of the best time-travel stories I’ve read.

Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil has also been mentioned here before. This is Nick Soulsby’s collection of interviews with Coil, a book that rescues from obscurity and potential loss a wealth of interview material—magazine features, fanzine profiles, video and tape transcripts—which chart the group’s career. I assisted in a very small way with this one, letting Nick see some of my written correspondence with John Balance. I’m also mentioned in one of the interviews which was a surprise to discover after all this time. This is a very large book which will be essential reading for all Coil cultists.

Fifth Quarter: Derek Jarman, Keith Collins and Dungeness is a collection of personal responses to the films and art of Derek Jarman. The book has some slight relation to the Coil volume via the pictures that resemble the Jarman piece used on the cover of How To Destroy Angels. Fifth Quarter has been published by the Subtext record label to accompany Fifth Continent, an album by Alexander Tucker and the late Keith Collins, Jarman’s former partner and custodian of Prospect Cottage. I didn’t contribute to the book but I’ve done a lot of design work for Subtext who have been releasing avant-garde music now for almost 20 years. Book publishing is a new venture for them. The list of contributors to Fifth Quarter is an impressive one: Barry Adamson, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Sarah Bade, Derek Brown, Keith Collins, Garry Clayton, Peter Fillingham, William Fowler, Dan Fox, Elise Lammer, Matthew R. Lewis, James Mackay, Frances Morgan, Garrett Nelson, Stephen O’Malley, Paul Purgas, Damien Roach, Howard Sooley, Mark Titchner, Alexander Tucker, Peter Tucker, Luke Turner, Simon Fisher Turner, and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Great Work of Time
• Man is the Animal, issue three
• Derek Jarman album covers

Maintenance

Don’t try this at home.

A rare Sunday post to inform regular readers that plans are in motion to move this site to a new server. The software that runs the site requires upgrading in several areas so relocation is the best solution for an essential process. There may be a short period when { feuilleton } seems to be unavailable but this shouldn’t last long. Fingers crossed.

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

Cormac McCarthy, 1933–2023

Yes, I liked his books. Blood Meridian remains the favourite although my late friend James insisted that Suttree was the finest on a sentence level. I tend to agree. I’ve read The Border Trilogy twice, and don’t mind the parts that everyone else seems to hate, when significant older characters launch into strange reminiscences that last for several pages. I still wonder what those episodes are all about. The same with the trilogy’s curious mystical moments. Contemplating these enigmas adds to the enjoyment. I’ve yet to read his last two works, having spent most of the year so far re-reading other books. But I’m looking forward to them.

• NYT: Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Repackaging Cormac
• Cormac McCarthy book covers