Ballardian

It’s often said that for a writer who claimed never to listen to music, Ballard has had an inordinate influence on a whole ecosystem of musicians. But sometimes more fruitful connections can be found in the slipstream, in parallel worlds where sui generis artists ply their trade in different fields with equally brilliant results. Brian Eno is such a musician, and this is a review of Geeta Dayal’s book about his 1975 album, Another Green World

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.

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. 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.

JG Ballard on the BBC TV documentary Synth Britannia.

The first question about J.G. Ballard’s short story The Sound-Sweep put Bill Drummond immediately on the defensive…

John Gray meets Mike Skinner, discusses Ballard.

The return of Moorcock, Hawkwind, Frendz… and Jim Cawthorn.

With thanks to Headpress books, here’s an interview with JGB conducted by Mark Goodall in 2006 for his book Sweet & Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens. The interview covers JGB’s admiration for the Mondo Cane films of Gualtiero Jacopetti, so-called ’shockumentaries’ that in their artfully faked scenarios present what Ballard terms ‘an elective psychopathy that would change the world (so we hoped, naively)’.

This is a review of John Foxx’s Melbourne performance of Tiny Colour Movies, his found-film collection and live soundtrack. For the reviewer, witnessing this may have solved a two-year-old puzzle; certainly, it brought everything full circle back to Ballard.

This short piece about Ballardian sound art appeared in the CCCB’s catalogue for their Ballard exhibition. Accompanying this post is a 12-track muxtape featuring selections from the music curated for the event.

Ballard & Eno: quite possibly the ‘two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century’.

The music of kode9 and Burial: just how ‘Ballardian’ is it? We investigate the viral spread of this apparent internet meme, detouring via Crash, The Drowned World and ‘The Sound-Sweep’.

Iain Sinclair and Will Self together on stage talking about Ballard, Orson Welles and CCTV. Garden gnomes, Simon Reynolds and John Lydon get roped into the ring, also.

Did William Burroughs really tell Ian Curtis to ‘get lost’? And how did the younger man take it? RealityStudio finds out.

Drawing inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, the Crashman presents his own festival of Atrocity films: aviation disasters set to musical soundtracks.

Chris N-B asks: ‘What is Michael Jackson’s favorite literary science fiction? I’ll bet you dinner at Picasso that right now he’s curled up in the overstuffed armchair of his penthouse suite at the Bellagio, giggling at The Atrocity Exhibition.’

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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, lots [...]

Flyer for Northern Void.
Last night I attended the second (and last, for now) screening of Philip Brophy’s 50-minute film Northern Void, billed as a “live cinema performance” accompanied by the real-time sonics of Ph2 (Brophy and Philip Samartzis). Northern Void is set along Plenty Rd, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston — specifically a [...]

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 [...]

Mick over at Dead Flowers informs me that Thom Yorke has taken to quoting from Kingdom Come at the Radiohead group blog.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Jah Wobble, John Lydon’s old mucker and former bassist for Public Image Ltd, has reviewed the Pocket Essentials guide to Psychogeography, by Merlin Coverley.
It’s an odd little review. Wobble gets headaches from the concepts on offer and writes that “you will always find marginal blokes walking in marginal (urban) places”, while expounding the belief that [...]

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, 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 & 16th (found via k-punk).
Some lovely London-based reader could, though, and perhaps summarise Steve ‘kode [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]