They did it live at the Cinémathèque Française in 2021, then a year later Potemkine Films invited them to add the same music to a DVD re-release (to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this landmark piece of cinema history). That plan didn’t quite pan out, for licensing reasons it seems, but now here’s the music on a CD along with some excellent graphiste images and comic strips from Marie-Pierre Brunel, Foolz, Caroline Sury and Alexios Tjoyas, printed in a handy paperback in stark black and white.

Nothing wrong with the music of course, which is a pleasing array of electro-acoustic sounds made with saxophones, trumpet, Buchla synth, percussion, live electronics, voices, and even a hurdy-gurdy – an instrument I would personally love to see deployed more often in an experimental context. Quentin Rollet has one of the most recognisable voices in improvised sax-playing today, reminiscent of Steve Lacy or Lol Coxhill in its slippery shapes, and only a hard-hearted troll could fail to be swayed by his altruistic charms. But it’s not dark enough for me. The trio’s take on Nosferatu doesn’t really get close to the atmosphere or uncanny terror of Murnau’s images. Instead, they play the film as though it’s a slightly unsettling walk in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont after closing time on one crisp Autumn night.

The track title ‘Entre Chien et Loup’ is a French phrase which I’ve heard and read many times, and admire its precision in expressing such a subjective condition and a very human apprehension of things we don’t fully understand, things bordering on the supernatural. Yet the music here doesn’t fully capture it. I had high hopes for the long track ‘La Traversée en Eaux Troubles’, which is evidently intended to accompany the grisly sea voyage of the vampire and his memorable appearance when he springs up out of the coffin he has stashed below deck. But the music is a rather pedestrian meander through modal playing and digital drones, barely registering a flicker on the fear-o-meter.

The four visual artists do a better job of quickening the blood pulse with their images; Brunel accurately reflects the bleakness and futility of the source, Sury sings of the violence and how the characters are locked into a framework as unbreakable as one of her heavy-outlined emblems. Tjoyas gets closest to the horror with his ugly, trembling lines and inexplicable pictograms; Foolz somehow finds a species of black slapstick humour in episodes from the story. Great package, but the music needs an extra dose of horror to truly match the diabolical plans of Count Orlok! From 27th June 2024.

In case it’s not clear from this brief excerpt, it’s a fairly “zany” take on the subject and perhaps shouldn’t be taken too seriously…or should it? After all, I am the Emperor of Ice Cream and many a true sentiment is wrapped in a mirthful crispy coating.

The full four-page story is printed in the latest issue of Ugly Mug, produced by my good friend Harley R at the House of Harley. I can recommend ordering a copy right now. Two other stories by me can be found in its wildly buzzing pages, plus incredible stories and graphics from artists such as Tom Tiffin, Denny Derbyshire, John Bagnall, Iestyn, Jason Atomic, Savage Pencil, and many others. If you think comics should be fun as well as deeply serious, and want to ingest a brew of art laced with heavy doses of insanity, wonder, and escapades inside the Dream-House, then this totally unique underground publication is your beer.

The character RSD Lang also appeared in a half-pager in the previous issue of this magazine. He grows incensed at a Forum post on Discogs about The Beatles White Album, and things quickly take a strange turn. Will he never win?

Click here now to start mauling that Mug!

Which brings us to The Magnificent Pigtail Shadow. In front of us we have the soundtrack CD, but it’s a much larger project – there’s a film (DVD available from Wow Cool), and a book of images and stories called Sunbeam On The Astronaut which is not unconnected to the project. The audio CD totally stands up as a work on its own terms, and it’s a highly distinctive statement. Cerio composed the music and wrote the text, and plays a good deal of the instrumentation himself in the form of percussion and keyboards, but also has assembled a small army of guitarists (including Marc Arsenault, who runs the Wow Cool label in California) to realise the music, along with many other musicians – playing strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, and electronics. The libretto is read out by Kristin Hersh, intoning the texts in her usual self-important lugubrious tones (I have never particularly cared much for Throwing Muses, and her contributions are a sour note for me here). The CD comprises the original score and a further 8 bonus tracks of outtakes from the recording sessions.

So far, the popular-prog fan might mistake this for an avant-garde update on a Rick Wakeman LP from the 1970s (who can forget the abomination that was Journey To The Centre of The Earth, with the story read out by actor David Hemmings in front of an orchestral backdrop and Wakeman’s grotesque pseudo-symphonic keyboard bombast?). But if there’s a story unfolding here on Pigtail, I’m hard pushed to discern it; no characters, no scenes, no conventional clues to narrative development. Instead, a series of surreal disconnected snapshots illuminated by meagre clues in the allusive text, and accompanied by extremely strange mood music. With its visions of animals, nature, and candy, it’s almost like a Children’s Book from the 1950s gone bonkers; Cerio’s Little Golden Book. The music is quite beautiful in places; the powerful acid-drenched opening made me think we’d be in for a modern psychedelic rock fest of some sort, but the majority of the tunes are near-shapeless experiments in drone and instrumental noodling staying in a single vague key, rich in atmosphere but short on progression. Even when instructed to “rock out”, the band deliver a wodge of melded sound and mixed chords that’s akin to a guitar-wielding version of Tangerine Dream. It’s compelling, but somehow lacks musical force or energy. Maybe that’s the point, but by end of play I didn’t feel I’d advanced one inch down any particular road, just stayed in one enchanted place for a long while.

The Sunbeam On The Astronaut book is a treat for the eyes, assuming you’re prepared to spend hours decoding these incredibly intricate and layered images. Last time I looked at Cerio’s work, it was all done by hand – the obsessive pen and ink scrawls which you’d normally associate with a psychedelic artist working for 36 hours non-stop and producing highly intricate but formless cosmic visions. He’s since discovered the computer, and uses it to add vector images, drop-shadows, multiple generations of images, impossible layers of depth, and typeset captions that tell stories (or obscure them). Exhausting. Yet these bright and cartoony images don’t feel like the exact visual counterpoint to the music, which is haunted, melancholic, possessed of the stark witch-like weirdness that makes every track appear to be unfolding under a full moon. I realise I’m missing the third part of the puzzle, i.e. the film itself, so if I ever get to see a print one day you’ll be the first to know.

Many artists, including for instance the surrealist Max Ernst or the Outsider Henry Darger, have created entire worlds from their imagination, replete with impossible detail, which the viewer can get lost inside as we explore. With a work as opaque and fully-realised as The Magnificent Pigtail Shadow, Steven Cerio is surely ready to join them. From 21st July 2015.

New comic book by Ed Pinsent available now! Windy Wilberforce Meets Sun Ra. A 28-pp comic which proposes Windy Wilberforce performing as a free jazz saxophonist in New York in the early 1960s, making a critically-acclaimed album called Provenance for the Prestige label. But commercial success eludes him, and by a chain of coincidence he enters the orbit of the mysterious Sun Ra.

In the alternative-reality fantasy story that follows, Windy becomes the curator of Alton Abraham’s library, wears an elaborate space-age costume created by June Tyson, plays with The Arkestra, travels in outer space, meets John Cage and Chris Cutler, visits the Egyptian pyramids, and works on a telecope that can see backwards in time. And more…

The story is constructed as a series of one-page, six-panel episodes, some of them expanding into full-page spreads.

Written and drawn June-August 2015 and published early September 2015. This is my first all-new story of this length for a long time.

Available now from www.lulu.com priced £5.00. Click the logo below to purchase same.

UK improviser Richard Sanderson is also a broadcaster for Resonance FM (Little Atoms) and I welcome his bluff, no-nonsense remarks whenever we bump into each other at the studio. He released his second solo record Improvisations for Melodeon (LINEAR OBSESSIONAL RECORDINGS LOR002) in May 2011, a fine collection of music and sounds produced with this squeezebox-type instrument more often associated with English folk music, and which he has sometimes used to accompany his sea-shanty-like songs with their offbeat lyrics. No songs on this solo release, though – it’s a showcase of varied approaches to music production, reflecting for example his live setup with foot pedals and amplification, or those tracks where he pushes the sound through a computer programme called Audiomulch which mangles it into a species of low-grade electroacoustic murk, with results that are somewhat like witnessing a phantom apparition of John Kirkpatrick adrift in a never-never land somewhere above the IRCAM studios. Sanderson also has his own idiosyncratic approach to the “prepared instrument” methodology (John Cage via Keith Tippett), adding bells, shells, the windup mechanism from a music-box, and a dictaphone to his impedimenta. In contrast to what some critics regard as the typically English approach to improv, i.e. hyper-fast and full of twitchy space-filling notes, this release is slow, creaky, wheezy and in places the music resembles the movements of a guttering candle flame. It’s also very sonically rich, and I feel sure that if so inclined the very talented Mr Sanderson could find a home among the international EAI jet-set. Limited edition, of which the cover is a black and white photocopy enhanced with coloured gel overlays; the box is packed with cryptic conceptual-art inserts, including a fragment of a London street map and a page from a summary log of space launches. The whole release has the attention to detail and English quirkiness that we used to get with Recommended Records, The Remote Viewers, or The 49 Americans, all now nearly vanished manifestations of a 1980s radicalism that is somewhat lacking today.

Pick Up Every Stitch

Anne Guthrie is a musician based on Brooklyn, and Perhaps A Favorable Organic Moment (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYR005) is a curious mix of field recordings, live acoustic music, and electro-acoustic treatments woven together into subtle tracts of sound. On the ‘Bach Cello Suite No 2. prelude’ piece, we first hear her playing her French horn in her room, recorded in such a way that the outside sounds of traffic and street noise leak in through the window and become part of the work; it’s a decidedly informal performance too, tipping us off to the idea that we’re not supposed to hear this as a work of “finished” classical music or anything. After that, she gives us an electro-acoustic derivation of that recording, producing an enigmatic episode where little segments of “reality” are dotted around an otherwise abstracted piece of ringing and rumbling noisy-gentleness. Very compelling listen. She proceeds to apply a similar approach to the singing of a piece of folk music on the ‘Annie Laurie’ tracks, creating something of even more desolate beauty and wind-swept strangeness. It’s very effective to hear small shards of something recognisable – a human voice, the French horn, or traffic sounds – twinkling like stars for a moment in these darkened skies of continuous sound. The centrepiece is a recording of Times Center in New York City, which may also be treated or layered in some way; after the halfway mark there is a gorgeous musical drone root whose serenity is contrasted with the near-hysteria of human activity that buzzes all around it. Another thing I like about this release is its symmetrical programming; it begins and ends with “pure source” recordings, which are sandwiched around the processed and treated musical works. A very satisfying listen and a good detailed documentary “study”. The cover artwork testifies to the hand-knitted and well-crafted nature of Guthrie’s music.

Photo of Anne from http://www.fraufraulein.com/billy/archive/upstate-delicates

Vis Comica

Highly unusual item from Saint Petersburg in Russia by the Wozzeck project, a band whose core members are Ilia Belorukov and Mikhail Ershov. For Act III: Comics (INTONEMA INT001), they are joined by four other local musicians recruited from other bands such as Penny Flame and Wooden Plants, and the plan was to perform 47 short semi-composed improvisations, playing instruments such as saxophones, guitars, trombone and violin in unorthodox fashion, and working to the “game playing” method of group improvisation which has sometimes been used by players like the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, John Zorn’s Cobra, Chris Cutler, and others. These 47 pieces are rolled into one long track, and for 23 minutes, you have no idea what is coming next, as the players let rip with perplexing eruptions of near-industrial guitar noise, sawing and scraping malarkey, turgid slow-burn drone-groan gloom and uncertainty, and several other undefineable modes; the “one main idea” they allude to may simply have been to keep the listener in a perpetual state of surprise. Things end almost as soon as they begin. Musical statements stutter out in incremental steps, drip-feeding us half-formed notions. Players stumble around the arena as though their feet are shackled to a large stone of shame, and the vibe of the album is very exploratory. The second track is a remix of these performances made by Piotr Kurek and Arturas Bumsteinas in Warsaw, who brought their own ideas to the party and contributed “another mood”. The nature of that mood is hard to determine, but early spins suggest it is not a very uplifting one, and they tend to confirm the vague sense of inertia and futility which hangs over Act III: Comics like a small dark cloud. However, their remix (supplemented with electronic organ, synths, laptops, clarinet and violin) is far less fragmented than the original 47 short works, and they find a coherent intellectual thread of sorts which they follow to the end of the tunnel, even contributing a slightly more musical dimension with their thin and weedy organ drones. The package is enhanced with a booklet and cover art “done in comics style” by the visual artist Victor Melamed, whose chunky expressionistic high-contrast drawings seems to be poking gentle fun at the use of sound effects in comic books. He doesn’t attempt to tell a story in his panels, and his otherwise wordless non-linear sequence matches the disjunctiveness of the music. An odd work which I am glad to receive and hope to take some time to digest more thoroughly; many thanks to Ilia for sending this.