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Archive for the ‘interviews’ Category

The 032c Interview: Simon Reynolds on Ballard, part 2

By Simon Sellars • Dec 7th, 2009 •

Category: Brian Eno, Lead Story, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, interviews, music, science fiction, short stories

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.



“Driven by Anger”: An Interview with Michael Butterworth (the Savoy interviews, part 1)

By Mike Holliday • Nov 5th, 2009 •

Category: Ambit magazine, Iain Sinclair, Lead Story, New Worlds, Savoy Books, William Burroughs, alternate worlds, body horror, censorship, horror, humour, interviews, punk, surrealism

The story of Savoy Books is one of the most 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.



'Architectures of the Near Future': An Interview with Nic Clear

By Simon Sellars • Dec 24th, 2008 •

Category: Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, academia, architecture, enviro-disaster, film, interviews, politics, urban ruins, utopia, war

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.



'Like Alice in Wonderland': Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard

By Rick McGrath • Aug 24th, 2008 •

Category: Barcelona, Solveig Nordlund, YouTube, alternate worlds, biology, body horror, film, flying, interviews, medical procedure, short stories, urban decay

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’).



The Light-Painter of Mojave D: An Interview with Troy Paiva

By Simon Sellars • Jun 6th, 2008 •

Category: America, Lead Story, Philip K. Dick, alternate worlds, architecture, deep time, entropy, enviro-disaster, flying, interviews, photography, science fiction, speed & violence, surrealism, urban decay, urban ruins, visual art

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.



‘You are Hochhaus!’: Ballard in Berlin

By Dan OHara • Jan 9th, 2008 •

Category: Chris Marker, David Cronenberg, Germany, Steven Spielberg, WWII, architecture, dystopia, entropy, fascism, film, gated communities, interviews, urban decay, urban revolt, urban ruins, utopia

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: Another Flask of Ballard

By Simon Sellars • Oct 3rd, 2007 •

Category: Brian Eno, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, William Burroughs, entropy, interviews, music, paranormal, urban ruins

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.



Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

By Mike Holliday • Jul 9th, 2007 •

Category: Borges, Brian Eno, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, William Burroughs, film, interviews, literature, music

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 [...]



UFOpunk: Mac Tonnies' Strange Blue World

By Simon Sellars • Jul 3rd, 2007 •

Category: Bruce Sterling, David Cronenberg, William Burroughs, alternate worlds, cyberpunk, interviews, paranormal, posthumanism, science 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’) [...]



'Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling': Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection

By Simon Sellars • Jun 2nd, 2007 •

Category: Brian Eno, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, Salvador Dali, William Burroughs, entropy, interviews, music, science fiction, short stories

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 [...]



‘The Stuff of Now’: Toby Litt on J.G. Ballard

By Gwyn Richards Simon Sellars • May 2nd, 2007 •

Category: Australia, Toby Litt, consumerism, interviews, invisible literature, literature, medical procedure, suburbia

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 dissects [...]



'Woefully Underconceptualised': Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard's Cover Art

By Simon Sellars • Feb 28th, 2007 •

Category: Philip K. Dick, Salvador Dali, advertising, boredom, consumerism, fashion, interviews, visual art

Interview by Simon Sellars
Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman (which explains the pithy insights to come). He’s 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 [...]



From Shanghai to Norwich: An Interview with Jeannette Baxter

By Simon Sellars • Jan 12th, 2007 •

Category: Australia, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Jean Baudrillard, Steven Spielberg, academia, interviews, invisible literature, surrealism

J.G. Ballard, in 1960, posing in front of his ‘experimental billboard fiction’.
On 5 May 2007, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’, apparently the first-ever conference on the work of Ballard, will be held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Guest speakers include the novelist Toby Litt; Roger Luckhurst, author [...]



The Politics of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Geoff Manaugh

By Simon Sellars • Nov 7th, 2006 •

Category: America, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Steven Spielberg, architecture, boredom, dystopia, interviews, psychology, utopia

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 notes). He’s [...]



Rattling Other People’s Cages: The J.G. Ballard Interview

By Simon Sellars • Sep 29th, 2006 •

Category: Australia, Iain Sinclair, Shepperton, consumerism, dystopia, interviews, psychology, short stories, sport

Interview by Simon Sellars

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
In the year that this website’s been in operation, it seems to have had a momentum — a secret logic — all its own. Our interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, John Foxx, Mike Ryan and Iain Sinclair — even the irascible Jonathan Weiss — have been [...]



An Evening with J.G. Ballard

By Ben Austwick • Sep 20th, 2006 •

Category: Shanghai, consumerism, humour, interviews, psychology, short stories, surrealism, terrorism

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 age [...]



A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview, part 2

By Simon Sellars • Sep 2nd, 2006 •

Category: Australia, Brian Eno, John Foxx, William Burroughs, cyberpunk, film, interviews, music, punk

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 — weave [...]



'When in doubt, quote Ballard': An interview with Iain Sinclair

By Tim Chapman • Aug 29th, 2006 •

Category: Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, William Burroughs, architecture, film, flying, interviews, politics, psychogeography, utopia

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 did much [...]



A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview

By Simon Sellars • Jul 11th, 2006 •

Category: Chris Marker, Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair, Ian Curtis, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, architecture, film, interviews, music, psychogeography, surrealism

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 [...]



'No-One Dances in Ballard': An Interview with Mike Ryan

By Simon Sellars • Jun 15th, 2006 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Brian Eno, David Cronenberg, Futurists, Ian Curtis, Steven Spielberg, William Burroughs, architecture, interviews, music

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, [...]



"Thirsty Man at the Spigot": An Interview with Jonathan Weiss

By Simon Sellars • May 2nd, 2006 •

Category: America, Australia, Chris Marker, Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Steven Spielberg, academia, consumerism, dystopia, film, humour, interviews, sexual politics

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’.
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NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, [...]



'Child of the Diaspora': Sterling on Ballard

By Chris Nakashima-Brown • Oct 7th, 2005 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Bruce Sterling, Shepperton, William Burroughs, cyberpunk, enviro-disaster, flying, interviews, invisible literature, medical procedure, science fiction, sexual politics, urban decay

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 [...]



Concrete Island: J.G. Ballard Goes Dutch

By Simon Sellars • Oct 7th, 2005 •

Category: Ballardosphere, architecture, interviews, media landscape, theatre

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; it [...]