John Coltrane – After The Rain
Our Gift To The Future
It makes me wonder what people a hundred years from now will think of our popular fiction, our popular movies. What do we take for granted that they will find odd, and perhaps even distasteful? You can already see some obvious candidates in things that are still accepted, but barely, like smoking. What will people [...]
Daughter Of Darkness: the art of Alison Scarpulla
Oo-ee-oo. When I first clocked for the photography of Alison Scarpulla, I realised the Lollipop Shoppe song ‘You Must Be A Witch’ was playing in my mind. Unfortunately, that’s the impression I was left with, that these images are not so much captured as willed onto the film by a mind more suited to lurking [...]
The Theory of Relativity
During this new interview, Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai explains the complex quantum processes that define their success:
Major to relative minor + delayed guitar = girls crying
Mogwai – I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead
Darkness Visible: the art of David Kassan
Hell fire, here’s yet another contemporary artist that I approve of. It’s getting to be a habit these days – and there was I thinking that it was all over and the world would shortly be consumed by the fecal discharges of a hundred, thousand Banksy wannabe’s. It seems there is hope after all, and [...]
Boredom Is Underrated
George Shaw the artist was recently interviewed by Alli Shama for Garageland magazine #8. Unfortunately, there’s little of his work featured, but it’s always interesting to hear what he has to say about his work and the ideas that influence him. Here’s two of the key exchanges:
You keep returning to Tile Hill. Did that start [...]
Deathbells
No-one to crawl a thousand hours
No-one at all to grow my graveyard flower
Mark Lanegan growling about death and damnation to a sonic backdrop of guitars trying to replicate the siege of Stalingrad… Yeah! The Mogwai remix technique is similar to that employed by Iggy Pop when remixing Raw Power – turn all the guitars up [...]
Night On Earth: the art of Jeremy Mann
Jeremy Mann is, like Kim Cogan, an artist who came to San Francisco and uses the city as his primary subject matter. Realism is his forte – be it cityscapes, still life or figurative – and what strikes you at first glance is the confidence with which he makes his marks on the canvas. It’s [...]
Bible John: A Forensic Meditation
Regular PsychSkull readers will know I’m no fan of Grant Morrison’s work but he has managed to produce one piece of writing during his career that I still find interesting today: Bible John, a Forensic Meditation. Originally serialised in IPC’s Crisis comic throughout 1991, the story was a personal exploration of the enduring mystery of [...]
Tonight The Sky: the art of Kim Cogan
I remember reading years ago that throughout our lives we undergo periodic changes in terms of our tastes and preferences; basically the entire basis of our view of the world undergoes a shift. The timescale for this, the research suggested, was approximately every seven years – and when I look back to what I was [...]
