Ballardian

David Pelham produced perhaps the most Ballardian images ever to grace the covers of Ballard’s novels, prompted by this brief from the author himself: ‘‘monumental/tombstones/airless thermonuclear landscape/horizons/a zone devoid of time’. Here, Pelham discusses his apocalyptic art with James Pardey.

Andrew Bishop’s fascinating interview with artist Brigid Marlin, who created for Ballard two of the more enduring symbols of his career: reproductions of lost paintings by surrealist Paul Delvaux, which adorned Ballard’s Shepperton home and formed beguiling conversation pieces for visiting interviewers.

The story of Savoy Books is one of the strangest in publishing history: a tale of lost opportunities, missed opportunities, repression, censorship, imprisonment … and, most importantly, an incredible legacy of work that continues to disturb, challenge and confront. All of those qualities are equally applicable to Savoy Records, the music arm of Savoy’s black empire, as Simon Sellars discovers when he talks to Savoy co-founder David Britton. The interview features sound clips from selected Savoy releases.

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognizable music critics around. His work reached a peak with the publication of Rip It Up and Start Again, a timely excavation of post-punk: Cabaret Voltaire, PiL, Magazine, and so on. What’s more, J.G. Ballard was a thread throughout the book, as Reynolds charted the influence of JGB — and especially his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition — on the era. In this interview, as Simon meets Simon, these topics are discussed in the wake of JGB’s death.

The story of Savoy Books is one of the strangest in publishing history: a tale of lost opportunities, missed opportunities, repression, censorship, imprisonment … and, most importantly, an incredible legacy of work that continues to disturb, challenge and confront. Mike Holliday talks to Savoy co-founder Michael Butterworth about all this and more, including the guidance Butterworth received as a young writer from J.G. Ballard.

Nic Clear leads the remarkable Unit 15 course on the built environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. In this interview, Nic explains the course’s focus on the work of Ballard as a way to counter the lamentable state of current discourse on architecture. The article includes clips of six stunning films produced by students as part of this Ballard-inspired methodology.

Rick McGrath interviews Solveig Nordlund about her feature film, Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (2002). Based on JGB’s short story, ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, it’s arguably the best Ballard adaptation of them all, although it has rarely been shown outside Portugal. Included with the interview are clips from the film as well as from Solveig’s previous Ballard adaptation, ‘Journey to Orion’ (based on ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’).

Here’s another republished interview, this time from 2005 as Mitchell and Ford probe JGB about his infamous 1970 ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition, which elicited drunken aggression from its bemused audience.

Troy Paiva’s desert photography evokes the crumbling, decadent resorts and enervated cityscapes of Ballard’s Vermilion Sands and Hello America stories. Enjoy this interview with Troy, the Light-Painter of Mojave D.

Dan O’Hara is back with another translation of a German Ballard interview, this time from 2007 with JGB in priapic, puckish form.

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.

This one’s a transcript of BBC 2′s Newsnight Review segment on Miracles of Life. It features Tony Parsons, Julie Myerson and John Harris and is presented by Kirsty Wark.

Here’s a transcript of Philip Dodd’s recent BBC Radio 3 interview with JGB.

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.

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.

Cousin Silas has created two albums inspired by the works of J.G. Ballard. Simon Sellars spoke to Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock). ———————————————— Interview by Mike Holliday ———————————————— 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 [...]

Mac Tonnies is a Kansas-based writer of post-cyberpunk science fiction (recently published by the redoubtable Rudy Rucker). He’s also the author of the book After the Martian Apocalypse, a speculative search for life on the Red Planet, as well as the originator of a ‘cryptoterrestrial’ philosophy that ambitiously seeks to explain (with ‘balanced skepticism’) a [...]

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 [...]

Interview by Gwyn Richards & Simon Sellars Toby Litt is an English novelist who published his first book, Adventures in Capitalism (a volume of short stories), in 1996, when he was 28. He’s since won praise for the dark inventiveness of his writing, a combination of cinematic prose, apocalyptic imagery and sharp wit that freely [...]

Interview by Simon Sellars Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman. He is also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs some book covers. Rick has written [...]

by Simon Sellars Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission. Geoff Manaugh is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in Contemporary, Space & Culture, Blend, Lumpen, Inhabitat, WorldChanging, the Oyster Boy Review, the Urban Design Review, Subtopia, Vector, things magazine, and The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection (a short essay in the CD liner [...]

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy. On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his [...]

Interview by Simon Sellars John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice. This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful [...]

Interview by Tim Chapman Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006. Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His early writing, notably Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), was rooted in his adopted home of East London. It [...]

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 [...]

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.” —————————————————– [...]

by Simon Sellars Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’. ———————————————————————————————————————- NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, [...]

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his [...]

interview by Simon Sellars Isabelle Jenniches, originally from Germany, is a multimedia artist now based in California. With collaborator Stefan Kunzmann she staged a theatre adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island at the Theater de Balie, Amsterdam, in 2002. The performance incorporated aspects of Butoh as well as an industrial/ambient soundtrack, projections and video; [...]