Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

“What kind of animals are being exhibited?” Ballard’s “The Recognition” is currently featuring on BBC Radio 7.

Miracles is BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

A few notes on Steve Severin, the Banshees, and Ballard…

This post is given over to recent links readers have sent me. ‘Ballardian’ or not? You decide.

Will Self was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 4 by Mariella Frostrup about his admiration for J.G. Ballard’s work. Here’s a transcript of that interview.

From BBC Radio 3: ‘Philip Dodd meets two of the most important voices in contemporary British writing: Martin Amis and JG Ballard, who are both publishing new works of non-fiction.’

Forthcoming on BBC Radio 4: Will Self on J.G. Ballard.

Dan O’Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a German mixed-media radio play based on High-Rise. Transposing the novel to Berlin in 2013, it references Nazism, notably Speer’s social engineering through architecture, on its way to exploring Ballard’s relevance to speculative models of German life.

This just in: ‘This month’s “Mojo” magazine includes a free CD of electronica, with a hefty mention of JGB in the introductory splurge: “Thirty years ago, famed British futurist JG Ballard remarked that the domestic computer’s impact would lead to mass internalisation and self-reflection… The 15 tracks collected here are proof of just how much of a reality Ballard’s comments have become …”‘

Ballardian fave Cousin Silas mentioned in our recent interview that he had a new CD on the way:
SS: As far as your compositional style goes, were you inspired in any way by Ballard’s experimental techniques, for example, the cut-up nature of Atrocity, or the collages and fake ads he produced around the same time?
CS: I […]

Interviewed at Mstation, here’s lo-fi acousmatic macrosonic electroacoustic turntablist, Janek Schaefer, on J.G. Ballard:
MR: Your Memory Museum was based around a similiar idea of taking sounds from elsewhere and putting them into a new space…
JS: In a way, yes, That was based on a book “Concrete Island” - you can tell I’m a fan of […]

Over at Fact magazine, k-punk has written a great re-appraisal of John Foxx’s Metamatic album from 1980. Metamatic still sounds as remarkable as it must have done to unschooled ears back then, completely wrenched from time and space and forged with laser hammers, ion-driven lathes and neon tongs. K-punk’s article is dense and packed with […]

I’ve created a YouTube outpost for this site, divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music.

The other night at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), I saw Control, Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic. In the first part of the film, before Curtis has met the rest of Joy Division, he’s in his bedroom and the camera focuses on his bookshelf. The shot lingers for a few seconds on the spine […]

LEFT: Johnny in his Crime days (1977; photo by James Stark).
Johnny Strike, lead vocalist and guitarist with original San Fran punk legends Crime, has just released a new collection of short stories published by Rudos and Rubes. Entitled A Loud Humming Sound Came from Above, it features ‘Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review’, first published here on […]

J.G. Ballard at KURBgallery.
Please pass on to anyone who might be interested.
From Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield:
“From January 11 to 20 2008 KURB gallery, an artist run non-profit art gallery, studios and performance space at 310 William Street Northbridge, Perth, Australia, will hold an exhibition, forum, programme and events in celebration of J.G. Ballard.
Interested […]

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).
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Interview by Mike Holliday
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Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction professionally as soon as […]

Interview by Simon Sellars.
Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognisable music critics around — or at least his style is, not least for its willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of sustained intellectual discourse rather than as a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unbridled […]

Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Simon Sellars.
All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their […]

Speaking of thatspace, Cousin Silas, who recently unleashed volume 2 of his masterful, dark-ambient Ballard Landscape series, emails to inform me he has several unreleased and remixed bits from that and other projects over at his Myspace. There should be an interview with Cousin over here at Ballardian in the very near future.

+ The programme for the University of East Anglia’s two-day J.G. Ballard conference on 5 & 6 May 2007 is now available as a PDF. It looks thorough and exhaustive, with a wide spread of topics — a tribute to Ballard’s appeal. The conference should be a cracker; let’s hope the UAE also onlines the […]

Free downloads for this band here.
Biography
Question: What is Super-Cannes?
+ Answer 1: A sexy town located in the South of France.
+ Answer 2: The name of a novel by J.G. Ballard about Western society’s ever increasing appetite for thrills.
+ Answer 3: A rock band in Boston playing music that involves hip-hop grooves colliding with space, […]

Writer Tim Footman unpacks the Thom Yorke/Ballard thing (I posted on Yorkey’s Ballard quote yesterday):
I referred to [J.G. Ballard’s Crash] in some depth when discussing ‘Airbag’, the opening track of OK Computer, in my forthcoming book. … The sexual/spiritual rush that Thom Yorke’s narrator seems to achieve from near-annihilation on the road is prefigured by […]

Cripes, they’re all at it! Mick over at Dead Flowers informs me that Thom Yorke has taken to quoting from Kingdom Come at the Radiohead group blog.
Go, Thom!
(But why the long face, always, man? Cheer up, OK? KC works out alright in the end.)

Friends, you ask me many questions, most of which I cannot answer, but Kate from Brighton wanted to know what my work-space looks like. I like this question. I reckon you can tell a lot about an artist from the environment in which he works. Look at J.G. Ballard. Look at Jack Henry Abbot. Look […]

The Klaxons’ CD “Myths of the Near Future” lifts its title from the J.G. Ballard story of the same name. They namecheck Ballard in their songs, as well as the other Killer B — Burroughs. (It’s amazing they didn’t jam Phil Dick in there, too.) Yes, it’s all rather old hat for me to […]

Still from ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, dir. Thomas Cazals, 2007.
Ballardiana, Part 1
Via Podcast Pickle, I found a rendition of ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’, Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s ‘iconoclastic homage to the great author’:
Oh Jim,
We can’t get enough of him
In Empire of the Sun
He was on the run
Captured by the Japanese
For far more than a year and a […]

‘Ballard and music’ gets another go-round, this time at the Guardian. Old standbys — Joy Division, The Buggles and The Normal — are checked, while new referents — the Klaxons, Burial and kode9 — spin their wheels, too.
[via Mike H.]
See here for backdated scoops on this topic with minimal Ian Curtis references.
..:: RELATED
+ Mike […]

JG Ballard appeared on the South Bank Show on ITV in the UK on Sunday. There was a long interview with JGB conducted by Melvyn Bragg and filmed at Shepperton Studios, plus an overview of Ballard’s career, a discussion of Kingdom Come, and contributions from Martin Amis, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. As […]

If you enjoyed our Sinclair interview and are curious to place a voice to the text, or you just need an entry point into Sinclair’s work, listen to Radio QBSaul, which podcasts “audio theatre, poetry, music and sound by Paul A Green and guests”. Paul is currently featuring a podcast from Mr Sinclair, Lud […]

Thanks to Master Rick McGrath for this link, to a free download archive containing mp3 files and artwork for an album called Ballardian Landscapes by one Cousin Silas.
This is highly recommended, and goes a long way towards answering the questions, Paul, Mike and I posed at the end of the Mike Ryan interview…I hope to […]

by Simon Sellars

an image from John Foxx’s Cathedral Oceans project
John Foxx, the former lead singer of Ultravox, is an undisputed electronic music pioneer. Before Midge Ure came along, the band’s three Foxx-driven albums, Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1978) and Systems of Romance (1978), fused near-future melancholy with icy man-machine interfaces and the remake/remodel aesthetic […]

Thanks to Jo for pointing us to this: Crash: A Tribute To James Graham Ballard (Various Artists), an apparently released-in-Greece only, electro-styled Ballard hoedown.
It mentions Clock DVA…Sheffield contemporaries of the Human League. Their founder Adi Newton has described them as “sex and magic in an industrial setting”. Vaughan himself would approve. Of the rest, I’m […]

We recently interviewed RE/Search’s Mike Ryan about his DJ set at the RE/Search–JG Ballard launch party last year…
Now, on his always interesting blog, Premeditated, Mike has explained in further detail the thinking behind each selection. Mike’s an insightful Ballard scholar and I agree with him when he said that thinking through Ballardian connections in music […]

As part of our Ballardian Music series, Cat Hope looks back at Howard Shore’s soundtrack for the David Cronenberg adaptation of Crash.

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Cat Hope is an Australian musician and academic, based in Perth, Western Australia. Besides performing in the bands Lux Mammmoth and Gata Negra, she also performs solo noise music using bass guitar. Cat lectures […]

by Simon Sellars

I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record. I’ve never understood why, because my maternal grandparents were lifelong teachers of music, and my father as a choirboy once sang solo in Manchester Cathedral. But that gene seems to have skipped me.”
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- JG Ballard, […]

Being as I’m based in Australia (the most powerful country in the world, and could blow your head clean off), I obviously can’t make it to London yesterday (your time) and tomorrow (yours, mine, our time) to attend Cultural Fictions II, sponsored by the AHRC and the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, June 15th & […]

Googling for an mp3 of Orson Welles monstering, for semantic crimes, the director of the frozen-peas radio spot he was appearing in, I instead ended up with J G Ballard and frozen peas — in the 2002 lyrics to “Me and J.G. Ballard”, which appears on the Bitterness Spite Rage and Scorn album by Dan […]

Chris Bohn’s editorial in the latest issue of UK music mag The Wire muses on ‘Ballardian music’, tying it in with RE/Search Publications and their championing of JGB in the postpunk era. This echoes some of the discussion in my forthcoming interview with RE/Search’s Mike Ryan.
Chris articulates something I’ve wondered about. From being namechecked by […]

I’m on a bit of a music kick at the moment; preparing for upcoming interviews.
From Stolen Kisses:
“JG Ballard once said that he read the NME every week throughout the punk era because even though he had no knowledge of the bands that it was writing about, he was carried away by the energy of the […]

Regarding Propaganda:
“ZTT release Propaganda’s new five-track EP in early November [1985], called Wishful Thinking, and comprising remixes and some previously unissued material. It remains to be seen whether Propaganda can elude ZTT’s tiresome penchant for cerebral games-playing.
They’ve already run into a spot of trouble over a quote from novelist […]

from 2005: it’s old but good, it’s k-punk — where it at. Decipher at will.
“Wasn’t Postpunk in many ways already cyberpunk, the ‘post’ precisely signaling a break with lumpenpunk’s dull r and r orthodoxy? But the ‘cyber’ component of postpunk was not only, or even primiarily, sonic, it was also a matter of the incorporation […]

Hyperdub, the London dubstep label run by Steve Goodman (kode 9), has just released its first CD, from ‘the mysterious Burial’. A Ballardian release, to be sure… Steve, and Hyperdub, are influenced by Ballard’s ’sonic fiction’, and although this isn’t a kode 9 release, the Burial CD is an intriguing concept that seeks to meld […]

From Flagpole Magazine, an ‘alt.weekly’ based in Athens, Georgia (USA)
“J.G. Ballard: Conversations (San Francisco, 2005) is the latest dispatch from the hell-raising subculture documentarians at RE/Search Publications. Between its covers, J.G. Ballard engages in exactly what the title promises with RE/Search’s taste-making head honcho V. Vale and a few other well-informed fans.”
I’m very interested in […]

I tracked down the cover of the JGB book in the ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ series (see post below). It’s interesting the image they used: a motorway overpass. This has become the default Ballard image, hasn’t it? Of course I use similar images myself on this site. It’s strongly linked to Crash, I’m guessing, which would […]