‘The Return of the Monster from the Id’ now available on BBC i-Player

‘The Return of the Monster from the Id’, my BBC Radio 3 piece for the Between the Ears slot on the story behind Bebe and Louis Barron’s extraordinary soundtrack to the 1956 M-G-M science-fiction fantasy Forbidden Planet is currently on BBC i-Player. Produced by Mark Burman, it features personal accounts from the Barrons themselves recorded on two separate occasions. Most of the comments and statements made in the show by Bebe are from an interview recorded by Mark in LA sometime in the 1990s. He had called her up on the off-chance of meeting her and recorded about two hours of material with her – this has never been broadcast before. The interview with Louis Barron, in which Bebe also participates but to far lesser extent, was recorded in the mid 1980s for a US public radio show and is extremely rare. The session took place about two or three years before Louis’s death; and from the unedited tapes, in which you can hear him fire up several cigarettes and occasionally break off to cough his lungs up, it’s not hard to figure what killed him in the end.

The Forbidden Planet OST is one of those disastrous successes that haunt art in the late twentieth century: the Barrons never got a chance to work in Hollywood again and felt cheated of an Oscar nomination for their own on the movie. M-G-M even went so far as to downgrade their music to ‘electronic tonalities’ in the credits, and the true nature of what Louis and Bebe were producing from their circuits has never been fully understood or explored. Many years ago I included the Forbidden Planet soundtrack album, with its spectacular cover painting by Renate Druks (who also appeared in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome) in The Wire’s notorious ‘100 Records that Set the World on Fire (When No One Was Listening)’ special feature which marked their 175^th issue. The richness and complexity of  the Barron’s electronic score was so far in advance of what more academic composers were producing at the time using magnetic tape that it still stands out from what else was being produced in the electronic music studios of the 1950s. Bebe and Louis had an instinctive feel for technology, which – perhaps paradoxically – makes their work sound less primitive than that of their ‘musical’ contemporaries. Go figure.

The only other voice that you hear in the show is electrical engineer Phil Taylor who built us some noise-making circuits based on what technical information he could glean from comments Bebe and Louis had made about their work, plus the few photographs that had been taken of their studio. Phil showed remarkable cheerfulness and forbearance towards Mark Burman and myself as we crashed around his studio outside Stoke on Trent asking him complicated questions, poking at thermionic valvess and getting him to make outlandish noises from the circuit boards he had constructed specially for the occasion. Tormenting and ill-treating circuits was not really in his nature – even though the Barrons had spoken often about ‘torturing them death’ – and it thanks to him that we really got to see circuits as living creatures. The experience sent us back to our copies of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine – even though Phil said he found the book so dry he required serious medication upon finishing it.

A lot of this experience took me back to the world of Welcome to Mars, and it was a real pleasure to become reacquainted with its themes – with my latest book, The Bright Labyrinth: Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Regime, imminent from Strange Attractor Press (watch this space), that is always something to value.

You can find ‘The Return of the Monster from the Id’ by clicking here.

The following copy is from the Radio 3 site:

In 1956 Louis and Bebe Barron birthed the world's first electronic film score with their unearthly soundtrack to M.G.M.'s Forbidden Planet. Ken Hollings considers their act of creation and wonders if the Monster from the Id can ever be re-awakened?
Forbidden Planet was M.G.M.'s lavish leap into science fiction. Fusing Shakespeare's Tempest, pop Freud and pulp SF. Fleetingly Hollywood and the electronic avant-garde embraced to make unworldly music inspired by the new science of cybernetics. The Barrons were close associates of John Cage and at the cutting edge of new technology and music. Their "electronic tonalities", as credited on screen in deference to an anxious musicians union, were groundbreaking for both experimental music film scoring. In the cramped space of their Greenwich Village apartment the Barron's poured current through homemade circuits made up of valves, oscillators and wires. Music, sound effects and character were all arrived at by wiring, art and sweat. The roaring Monster from the Id, the bubbling sounds of Planet Altair IV and the vast caverns of glowing, ancient Krell technology. Even the Krell music, anthem to a long dead race of technologically advanced beings. Audiences and filmmakers were startled by this great musical experiment. It remains one of the most perfect fusions of film and music, defining the way we thought the future would sound. In rare recordings Bebe and Louis Barron relate their adventures in sound.
Meanwhile, somewhere near Stoke, Ken Hollings challenges music boffin Phil Taylor to a hardwired search for the secrets of Krell music and the electronic heartbeat of the Monster from the Id. 

Pictured above: cover for the Bantam Books paperback novelisation of the Forbidden Planet published in 1956; Phil Taylor’s circuits; Phil Taylor and Mark Burman listening for signs of the Monster from the Id; Renate Druks’ sleeve art from the original album release of the Forbidden Planet OST; deadly Krell storage

Talking Trash in Venice: Autumn Respawn

Another summer ends and the bloggers, as they must, fly south in the autumn: which also means that after a long period of playing dead I am now back in business again. It has been a busy time for me over the past three months. Most of it has been spent on preproduction for my new book from Strange Attractor Press: ‘The Bright Labyrinth: Sex, Death and Design in the Digital Regime. This is based on the lecture series I have been giving to postgraduate design students at Central St Martins over the past few years and will definitely be out in the autumn. Typography and layout design are by Minus 9’s Rathna Ramanathan with full-spread illustrations by Mr Mathew Frame; which means that, if nothing else, the book is going to be a beautiful thing indeed. I will be posting more on this in the coming weeks.

I have also been working throughout the summer on a new ‘Between the Ears’ piece for BBC Radio 3: an exploration of the amazing ‘electronic tonalities’ created by Bebe and Louis Barron for the MGM science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet. Putting this show together has meant revisiting some of the material from Welcome to Mars, talking to some really interesting people and playing around with some ingenious circuitry. Through their agency, my producer Mark Burman and I are planning to invoke the ‘Monster from the Id’ in the studio so stay tuned. The show will be going out in the next two weeks or so.

Meanwhile, anyone who finds themselves in Venice later this week may like to visit the ‘Salon Suisse’ in the Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, where I will be talking trash with a select panel of researchers and theorists on the evening of Thursday September 12. ‘Low is the New High’ is a public outgrowth of the ‘High Trash’ conference I participated in and blogged about at the start of the summer. This event is actually part of the Venice Biennale and during the course of the evening I will be introducing a screening of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, proving that there really is some point to these art-market equivalents of an international Shriners convention. It also makes complete sense that I should be working on a radio programme about Forbidden Planet, one of the most expensive, high-concept attempts at a science-fiction movie, while at the same time speaking about one of the cheapest and most magnificently lowbrow efforts in the same genre. The fact that both were completed in the same year – 1956, except of course that Plan 9 was able to get a release until 1959 – only makes the comparison all the more poignant.

Also participating in ‘Low is the New High’ will be Dr Jason Pine, Dr Joseph Imorde and Dr Jörg Scheller, whose dedication to the anatomical achievements of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the stirring heavy metal anthems of Motorhead remains an inspiration to us all. The following is from the Salon Suisse catalogue copy:

In the good old days of postmodernism, “Trash” was considered as a criticism of elitist culture. In this regard, it continued the Enlightenment's “criticism from below”. Today, Trash can also be used to strengthen power structures. For instance in the policies of Silvio Berlusconi or in the art of Jeff Koons. Even Luis Vuitton has “trash bags” designed. Proceeding from various case studies, tonight's guests will explore the dialectics of Trash―from King Ludwig II of Bavaria to the Neapolitan music genre to the Berlin “beer pyramid” of contemporary artist Cyprien Gaillard. 

More information can be found by clicking here.

‘Low is the New High’

Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi
Campo S.Agnese-Dorsoduro 810
I-30123 Venezia
T +39 041 24 11 810

Pictured above: monsters, monsters, monsters, courtesy of the Italian Tourist Board, Plan 9 from Outer Space and Forbidden Planet

High Trash and the Decomposing Spectre of Mass Society

Earlier this month I took part in a fascinating three-day conference on High Trash and the rise of Low-Brow Culture. It had been organized by the School of Art History at the University of Siegen in collaboration with the Department of Art and Media at the Zurich Hochschule der Künste. I had been invited to come and talk about Ludwig II, Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley as a further stage in the development of my new project: The Psychoanalysis of Trash.

I am reproducing the conference programme above as it gives an excellent overview of how wide the field of Trash Aesthetics has now become – ranging from Henry Darger’s hoarding to recycling plastic, the reverential disposal of nuclear waste, knock-off luxury goods and Comara-backed pop singers in Naples, plus the heroic efforts made by the German public to demolish an entire pyramid constructed from cases of imported Turkish beer. Nothing, after all, is more ‘post’ than trash; and those who struggle with the decomposing spectre of modernism, which is also to say mass society, suddenly have a reference point that simply won’t go away. On the contrary, it threatens to bury us in our own ideological landfill. Any attempt at transforming this into a useful virtue only suggests a nostalgic yearning for twentieth-century notions of progress and the enthusiasm of those who wished to be the last.

For my part, I felt proud to speak on behalf of the modern alchemists of trash, whose garish, shining palaces are temples to the subversive combined spirits of Orpheus and Narcissus. But then Elvis claimed to be afraid of intellectuals and Michael Jackson was…well…Michael Jackson. One thing that was particularly useful about the programme for the conference, and the main reason why I have reproduced the running order above, is the manner in which the papers have been sequenced, the divisions between them suggesting some useful avenues for future research and discovery. A conference of this sort is always going to be a problematic affair: so far as I am concerned, the appreciation of trash is simultaneously rebellious and aristocratic, making it something that has to be enacted or performed rather than critically reviewed to the level that strict academic analysis might require. The two may never fully meet – however, there is also much that we may learn from the tension between them. The fact that Alissa Alexander, who gave the talk on Henry Darger’s hoarding, has a Vivian Girl tattooed on her wrist gives me some cause for hope. Downwards and onwards...

Godzilla is Dead: ‘How Buildings Kill’ at X Marks the Bokship

I am giving a short talk and a reading from my new essay ‘Godzilla Is Dead – and We Have Killed Him’ at X Marks the Bokship on Friday May 24, at 6.00 pm. The event is to celebrate the launch of the new Tombstone Press anthology, How Buildings Kill. It would be wonderful to see you there if you can make it. Press release follows:

Tombstone Press is pleased to invite you to the How Buildings Kill book launch on Friday, 24th May with special guest Ken Hollings. How Buildings Kill is an anthology of writing featuring the Marquis De Sade, Owen Hatherley, Ian Nairn, Ken Hollings, David Dawkins and an interview with The Situationist Times creator and co-editor Jacqueline De Jong, alongside a collection of illustrations by Gareth Barnett. 

Tombstone Press is a Hackney based publishing house committed to confronting the way we interact with the book, exploring the way we experience and construct narratives through the physicality of printed matter.

The book launch will feature a talk from Ken Hollings on his contribution and an exclusive preview of the 200 limited print run of How Buildings Kill. If you would like to join us please RSVP to info@tombstonepress.com

How Buildings Kill
Published by Tombstone Press
Book Launch: Friday, 24 May 2013
X Marks The Bokship

Pictured above: scenes from 1968 version of Destroy All Monsters, courtesy of Horror 101 with Dr Ac

Twitter and EVP Spam: Some Notes

This is not one of my usual blog posts as I am not documenting or giving advance warning of anything, and perhaps it marks a change of approach in the way I use this particular medium. However, it seems like the best platform to set out some observations and remarks - after which, I am sure normal service will be restored.

Over the past couple of months I have become increasingly fascinated by a type of Twitter Spam that seems to resemble the EVP messages received by Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive. These take the form of tweets received from accounts that belong to what I can only describe as ‘non-people’: the most obvious clues are that these suddenly turn up unannounced in your list of followers with no corresponding notification of their status anywhere else in your account. The handle and the picture of this new ‘follower’ rarely match (male name with picture of female being an obvious example) and the short self-description often includes contradictory statements (guitars are my life, guitars and finding myself, sports bikes, bacon etc...).

If you examine their profile a little more closely, these accounts usually have just 22 tweets (occasionally 20 or 21 but I have yet to see one with more than 22). They are usually worth examining, however, as that is where the strangeness really starts. Often the tweets take the form of words in unconnected strings (and I but have but when we but I never but) or selections of quotations from established names, but which have been put through some kind of weird syntactic blender (he need regarding knowledge, such as thirst for money increases previously while using buy it - laurence sterne) - or finally they form themselves into the kind of cryptic arrangement of images that Raudive would have instantly recognized as emanating from  another world  (organic mathematicians training it carefully).

At present I am not inclined to draw any conclusions about this phenomenon one way or the other - I do, however, have some thoughts as to their origin: one is that these ‘non people’ started out as being one of the millions of artificially generated followers which were originally intended to enhance the popularity of some corporate enterprise or media sensation. However, they have somehow broken free of their lonely non-existent crowd and are now wandering the Twitter-sphere in search of someone to follow and have fallen into your orbit - or it may be that they have somehow replicated themselves and it is the digital echo of their non-presence that has now decided to follow you. One aspect of their behaviour that supports this assumption is that a ‘non-person’ will sometimes attach itself to a conversation you are having with one of your real followers, as if they were somehow hovering on the edge of your exchange - shy but anxious to take part. Their contribution would, I suspect, turn out to be entirely unsettling if it were allowed to take place.

One thing is clear to me at this stage: just as the digital spectres that haunt architectural renderings of new buildings find themselves occupying a non-existent space that is barely contained within two dimensions, so these digital non-people that haunt Twitter are a new form of being that do not inhabit the same dimension as us. Do they have anything to say to us? That, I would suggest, is another matter for another time. Let me close by noting once again, however, that it is only through examining how a network is distorted that we will get a true sense of how it behaves. Spam already tells us more than we want to know about ourselves: the EVP Spam coming from (or perhaps through) Twitter may take that uncomfortable understanding to a whole new level.

The Psychoanalysis of Trash at Goldsmiths College

MA Aural and Visual Cultures and English Heretic Present:
Weekend OtherWorld 

Weekend OtherWorld imagines a parallel present where the forensic documentary intensity of 1970s television, seen in World In Action, Man Alive, Weekend World and Chronicle, still exists, but the reporting all comes from a sorcerous angle. What if the earnest authority of these programmes could be extended to the aesthetics of the occult? Weekend OtherWorld will feature a mixture of lectures and performances on topics such as the haunted shoreline; horror film locations; the psychoanalysis of trash; aesthetic psychopathology; revolutionary sacrifice; eerie capitalism. Participants will include: Tristam Adams, Anthony Clayton, Lisa Cradduck, John Cussans, Blue Firth, Mark Fisher, Laura Oldfield Ford, Will Fowler, Hannah Gilbert, Alison Gill, English Heretic, Ken Hollings, Dean Kenning, Mark Pilkington, Haunted Shoreline, Cerys Thomas, Nicola Woodham 

On Saturday April 27, I will be talking once again about the Psychoanalysis of Trash at Goldsmiths College in London and once again I will be doing so in the presence of worshipful company. Expect more on the intertwined subjects of Ludwig II of Bavaria and Wagner, Elvis and Michael Jackson, alchemy and dandyism. There will be accompanying images of rococo interiors, remote castles, secret grottos and imperial libraries plus a suitably Wagnerian soundtrack from Asterism. Also taking part are my old friends Mark Pilkington, Mark Fisher, Haunted Shoreline and John Cussans – presiding magister once again will be English Heretic. Click here for further details from the Goldsmith College website. The event starts at 1.00 pm and admission is free – so all you have to lose is your body, mind and soul.

See also: Psychopathia Esoterica: the Beauties of Bath's Masonic Hall III

Pictured above: Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s castle dedicated to the operas of Richard Wagner. It was from this tower that Ludwig attempted to throw himself in an effort to claim his own life and therefore avoid being deposed as mentally unfit to serve as king.

He is Risen: The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale

Just in time for Easter, this unforgivably late post offers some details on The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale, which is now available by mail order from Strange Attractor Press at an obscenely reasonable price and comes with a limited edition poster. Of course it’s highly likely that you already have your own copy by now – but just in case you haven’t, or have leant it out to someone and are already regretting it, then this is what you need to know.

Edited by S.S. Sandhu,The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale is a limited-edition Risograph book – published by Texte und Töne in collaboration with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture – to mark A Cathode Ray Séance: The Haunted Worlds of Nigel Kneale, a day-long event held in New York, right after the storms and tidal waves, November 2012.

The book was designed by Rob Carmichael and ‘really is a beautiful and fascinating piece of work’, according to books editor at the Belbury Parish Magazine.

Contributors include: Sophia Al-Maria, Bilge Ebiri, Mark Fisher, William Fowler, Ken Hollings, Paolo Javier, Roger Luckhurst, China Miéville, Drew Mulholland, David Pike, Mark Pilkington, Joanna Ruocco, Sukhdev Sandhu, Dave Tompkins, Michael Vazquez, and Evan Calder Williams.

Copies come with an 11 x 17 Risograph poster produced by Rob Carmichael for the original Cathode Ray Séance event

For international sales, please visit the Seen Studio website by clicking here. And for a great piece on the increasing relevance of Nigel Kneale to the fractured realities of the twenty-first century (a term which now seems worn out before anyone came to claim it), visit the Copy Cat Effect by clicking here.

And now I return to the sleep of ages – wake me when our spaceship has been uncovered again.