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Hexa (1971) by Victor Vasarely. • New music of the week is Tape 05, three minutes from Boards Of Canada following their thirteen-year silence, which was released on Thursday after several days of the group and their record label teasing a comeback with mysterious VHS cassettes and cryptic posters. I’ve been listening to the Sandison brothers’ discography for most of the week while trying to get a major illustration commission finished; this revelation has been the icing on a deteriorated,…

Telemann. The DVD of Piotr Kamler’s animations released by aaa a few years ago contained almost all of the director’s works, comprising a handful of short films together with the 50-minute Chronopolis. The most recent film in the collection was Une mission éphémère, made in 1993, but this wasn’t the last of Kamler’s films. He … Continue reading "Three short films by Piotr Kamler"

Prologue. Last week a Kay Nielsen illustration passed through my RSS feed, a picture I thought for a moment I hadn’t seen before. A quick search revealed that the illustration is in fact present in a book on my shelves, The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977), one of the series of art books co-published … Continue reading "Kay Nielsen’s Arabian Nights"

Hexagon Sequence II (c. 1970) by Rosalie de Meric. • Boards Of Canada obsessives have been in a frenzy this week following the appearance of mysterious VHS cassettes sent at random to a small number of users of the Warp Records mail-order service. The contents of the tapes look like this. With the group having … Continue reading "Weekend links 825"

Synopsis: This flamboyantly poetic film includes two works of art: Livret De Famille and Carte De Vœux. A hallucinogenic voyage, psychedelic images float across the screen, of family and friends (Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Yves Beneyton, Valérie Lagrange…) as they share their adventures. A slight return to Cyrille Verdeaux via actor Pierre Clémenti. If you watch enough … Continue reading "Visa de censure numéro X"

The Clearlight that concerns us here is a French musical ensemble with a shifting line-up, formed by and oriented around the activities of its keyboard-playing composer Cyrille Verdeaux. Clearlight, in other words, shouldn’t be confused with the short-lived American psychedelic band known as Clear Light. Cherry Red have just released five Clearlight albums in one … Continue reading "Clearlight: Symphonies"

“A view of Earth taken by NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft’s windows after completing the translunar injection burn on April 2, 2026. The image features two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.” • … Continue reading "Weekend links 824"

Good to see this again even if it is an unofficial “remastering” of the original. Visions of Light is a feature-length documentary about the art of cinematography as practiced in (mostly) American cinema. The film was made by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels for the American Film Institute in 1992, and is unique … Continue reading "Visions of Light"

Earlier this year when I wrote about Tadami Yamada’s illustrations for William Hope Hodgson I mentioned the existence of books by other authors that were published along with the Hodgson as part of a series. Kokusho Kankōkai published ten of these books from 1976 to 1977, most of them being collections of short horror fiction … Continue reading "Tadami Yamada’s weird covers"

“NASA’s Hubble revisits Crab Nebula to track 25 years of expansion.“ • Snakes and Ladders is a video adaptation of the one-off Moon and Serpent performance presented by Alan Moore and Tim Perkins at Conway Hall, London, in 1999. With visual samples from Eddie Campbell’s comic-strip adaptation of the audio recording, plus my artwork from … Continue reading "Weekend links 823"

You can’t really say there are always more Rubáiyáts—the Fitzgerald translation isn’t as popular today as it was a century ago—but there are many illustrated editions even though the poem makes for a slim volume when not bulked out by variant translations. The popularity of the text when combined with the ease of imitating Edward … Continue reading "RS Sherriffs’ Rubáiyát"

Shogi Chess Board. I ought to have posted this several weeks ago for the advent of the Year of the Horse. Umazukushi is a series of wood-block prints by Katsushika Hokusai created to celebrate another Year of the Horse, 1822. Umazukushi (also Uma-zukushi) is usually translated as “A Selection of Horses”, and this is what … Continue reading "Hokusai’s Horses"

Untitled (2013) by Fred Tomaselli. • The latest book from A Year In The Country is Ghost Signals: The Shadowlands of British Analogue Television 1968–1995, an exploration of “a shadowland of terrestrial TV hidden in plain sight across the unmediated and unmarketed corners of the internet”. • New music: After The Rain, Strange Seeds by … Continue reading "Weekend links 822"

It’s been a while since Scotto Moore’s newsletter turned up any of the abstract animated visuals I enjoy. Locked Groove by Emanuele Kabu fits the bill perfectly, an exercise in vibrant random symmetry which bears the subtitle “A hypnotic audiovisual animation inspired by pareidolia”. The video might also have been inspired by psychedelic hallucination given … Continue reading "Locked Groove"