File under: Trails and Influences: Recent Explorations. Case #50/52.
I’ve mentioned around these parts before that I have something of a soft spot for photo novels (see Day #247/365) – also known as photo romans or fumées.
The ones I have seen that are connected with the stories of film/television often seem to spring from a time when there wasn’t quite so much wall-to-wall, toe-to-top merchandise for such things… there’s a slight innocence to them as a form… but…
There is something slightly odd about them when they are applied to more to the more “mature” celluloid stories…
…one such time would be the photo novel adaptation of Curse Of The Crimson Altar (somewhat renamed in this instance and given a possibly more salacious title). Prurient is a phrase that comes to mind.
Still, it is quite an intriguing item, possibly in part due to its rarity in an ether that is full of artifacts and encasings… this is not such an easy rummage to find…
I may have mentioned this around these parts before but I’m drawn to elements of what has come to be known as folk-horror but I think it is more in a sense of the aesthetics and the cultural interlinkings/backstory of them – essentially (hopefully) not being too, well, po-faced about such things…
Along which lines and connected to Curse Of The Crimson Altar, I think it could well be time to return to this:
Trish Keenan: “I’d like people to enjoy the album as a Hammer horror dream collage where Broadcast play the role of the guest band at the mansion drug party by night, and a science worshipping Eloi possessed by 3/4 rhythms by day, all headed by the Focus Group leader who lays down sonic laws that break through the corrective systems of timing and keys…”
But with the addition of this:
Trish Keenan: “We were keen to conjure up the psychedelic witch party at the mansion scenario too, also to keep the idea ‘pop’ and tongue in cheek, very conscious of not becoming too dry.”
(From Joseph Stannard’s unedited transcript of an interview with Broadcast in Wire Magazine, circa Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of The Radio Age – a particular piece of writing, considering and exploring that I seem to return to around these parts – in both its bound and etherised form/s.)
The majesty of Ms Steel and films within films.
