Happy Halloween!

These fascinating pictures come from Haunted Air, a book collecting antique Halloween photographs by Ossian Brown (with a foreword by David Lynch). Mr Brown is former member of Coil and one of the founding members of Cyclobe. I did an interview with Ossian on this blog. There is a surreal, sometimes scary atmosphere to these photographs. I own this book and if you are like me and you love to own beautiful books you can order it here!

Olivier de Sagazan — Transfiguration (2011)

Olivier de Sagazan is a french performance artist. He plays in various venues in France, Canada and Korea. Here he performs Transfiguration for the movie Samsara (2011) by director Ron Fricke. I already mentioned Fricke's most famous movie, Baraka (1992) on this blog.

Madge Gill (1882–1961)

Drawings from Madge Gill

Images from Newham London

Emptyset — Fragment (2013)

Amazing video for the track Fragment featured on the album Recur by the noise / electro band Emptyset. Here is the explanaion from their Vimeo page: "The video mirrors Recur's production approach, applying greater layers of detail and complexity into a signal chain, and continues from our previous moving image work exploring aspects of analogue video, broadcasting and electromagnetic induction. Fragment follows on from this line of research, integrating more physical processes by using reflective surfaces as a means of reshaping the transmitted image."

Timo Stammberger — Underground Landscapes

Timo Stammberger is a photographer from Hamburg. For his Underground Landscapes series, he photographs the subway tunnels of different cities: Berlin, New York and Stockholm.

Automelodi — Schéma corporel (2012)

Automelodi is the minimal wave project of Xavier Paradis. The band originates from Montréal (Québec) but plays an electronic music very inspired by french 80's synth pop music (see Indochine or Taxi Girl). Here's an article about them for francophone readers of my blog.

Photo: Tears by Man Ray (1932)

The Rothko Chapel (Houston, Texas)

Ben Frost — After Death, Nothing Is (2013)

Denis Brihat — Natures mortes

Wim Mertens — Struggle for Pleasure (1988)

Quote of the day — Woody Allen (2010)

«You start to think, when you’re younger, how important everything is and how things have to go right—your job, your career, your life, your choices, and all of that. Then, after a while, you start to realise that – I’m talking the big picture here – eventually you die, and eventually the sun burns out and the earth is gone, and eventually all the stars and all the planets in the entire universe go, disappear, and nothing is left at all. Nothing – Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo gone. And you think to yourself that there’s a lot of noise and sound and fury – and where’s it going? It’s not going any place… Now, you can’t actually live your life like that, because if you do you just sit there and – why do anything? Why get up in the morning and do anything? So I think it’s the job of the artist to try and figure out why, given this terrible fact, you want to go on living.» Interview with France 24 (2010)

Klaus Nomi — The Cold Song (Live in Germany - 1982)

I'm not very fond of Klaus Nomi's synth-opera music, some of it dosen't age very well. But there is a song by him I think is just timeless. It's his interpretation of The Cold Song taken from Henry Purcell's King Arthur opera. The fact that Nomi knew he was dying of AIDS while giving this show (and that it was certainly his last visit in the country where he grew up) makes his performance all the more intense and troubling.

Tor Lundvall — Paintings

Tor Lundvall is a painter and ambient musician. He has also done the artwork for a few neofolk acts such as Sol Invictus. America's landscapes, paganism and solitude are a recurrent themes in his paintings.

Coil — Rosa Decidua (1998) [Featuring Rose McDowall]

Rose, I hear your voice near to me

I've put away the poisoned chalice, for now
And lie down amongst the flowerbeds

Whichever stars we walk among
We both seek out the darkest red
The wine was turned to blood again
Without this blood we'd both be dead

I've wound myself tight into the hedgerows
Let's see which way the winter wind blows

(You are my shadow)

Painting: Georgia O'Keefe — Abstraction White Rose (1927)

Pierre et Gilles — La Madone au cœur blessé (1991)

Alejandro Jodorowsky — La danza de la realidad (2013)

The Nightmarish World of Roland Topor

Myrninerest — Journey to Avebury

Journey to Avebury (The Spheres Five) is Myrninerest’s soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s movie of the same name. Myrninerest is a side project of David Tibet (Current 93) and pianist/composer Michael Cashmore. You can buy this song on Boomkat.

Andy Goldsworthy — Land Art

Tropic of Cancer — A Color (2011)

Philippe Fichot — Sombre Printemps

Philippe Fichot is the man behind electro-industrial band Die Form. He is also a photographer and has done the artwork of most of the Die Form albums. His photographs deal mostly with subjects related to sex, death and sadomasochism. These photograms were created for the Sombre Printemps album. Some of his photographs can be viewed on Die Form's  webpage.