Revisiting and (Almost) Rounding the Circle – The Eccentronic Research Council, The Kunsthaust Gallery, Ben Wheatley and Tam Lin

As is a (semi) custom at A Year In The Country, this year’s posts are (almost) ending with something of a round up of cultural curios… and this year it involves something of a revisiting of things that have appeared at the site before. First up is a revisiting of a “wyrd memento”…

Above is the flier design for a 2012 Finders Keepers Records/Bird Records event featuring The Eccentronic Research Council, Jane Weaver and Andy Votel (who I think probably design the flier as it has a similar handcrafted style as quite a bit of his other work), around the time the witchcraft history orientated 1612 Underture album by The ECR was released.

It’s a prime example of what elsewhere at A Year In The Country I’ve described as graphic design/art that utilises “otherly geometry” and in this case uses very simple and effective minimalistic geometric shapes to represent a gathering of witches via the shapes of their hats and could be considered a more folk art-like variation on the 1612 Underture cover art.

Looking at it again now it’s also an interesting memento from a time just before the interest all things wyrd, folk horror etc began to really gather pace…

Which brings me (back) to The Kunsthaus Gallery and the shape of the future’s past…

Above is a photograph of the very distinctively designed Kunsthaus gallery in Austria (its name translates as “arthouse”) which its architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier describe, somewhat appositely considering its science fiction-like appearance, as a “friendly alien”.

It features a “20-meter-high active facade, which displays animations and text messages”, which presumably is the set of illuminated mini-porthole-like circles to the left of the photograph and that in a way could be considered something of a public, stationery, almost 8-bit-like precursor of, say, GIFs that are posted on social media.

The photograph is reproduced in a clipping from I think, possibly, an old issue of The Face magazine, probably from the 1990s or early 2000s.

The Face was part of a set of type of magazines known as “the style press” that had a fairly prominent mainstream-ish profile in the later 1980s through to the early 2000s and could often be bought in many high street and corner newsagents etc, which also included other titles such as i-D, Blitz, Sleaze Nation, Dazed and Confused etc.

Once upon a time such titles were reference points and arbiters for fashion, “hip” culture and the like but they have now largely either stopped being published or have become much more niche titles and looking back at them they have become curious time capsule snapshots of a particular cultural time. In that sense, I would perhaps file them alongside the CD promos that you could once buy cheaply in second hand record stores, which I have written about before at A Year In The Country, and that now have largely been filed into history as a way of promoting or discovering music.

In an interconnected manner, the Kunsthaus gallery seems like a notable example of “the shape of the future’s past” and a now retro-future idea of the coming modern age, when we would all be living in silver saucer shaped houses and flying via jetpack to work… and, well, it is 2023 now and still no jetpack (!)

And then to end the post… revisiting American Gothic, Ben Wheatley, Pentangle, pathways to Tam Lin and unsettling cinematic worlds…

The above American Gothic-esque illustration by Rumbiozai Marilyn Savanhu of director (and occasional graphic novel author) Ben Wheatley accompanied an interview with him in a 2020 issue of Little White Lies magazine around the time when his film adaptation of the novel Rebecca was released.

Rebecca is an interesting oddity even amongst his notably varied career, in that it was less obviously a Ben Wheatley wyrd/transgressive/folk horror etc film that easily slots next to the likes of Kill List and High Rise but rather, if memory serves correctly as it’s a while since I’ve seen it, is a more mainstream-friendly gothic romance film and a thoroughly entertaining one at that.

However alongside its more mainstream-friendly aspects it does include a number of, at times almost flashes of, moments, images, atmospheres etc that connect it with his other more overtly unsettling work. It was also a pleasant unexpected surprise to hear Pentangle’s jazz folk rock take on traditional folk song “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme” on its soundtrack, which seemed to connect it back to the 1960s hippie-dream-gone-sour tale of bewitching and sorcery film Tam Lin (1970) which also used songs by Pentangle in its soundtrack and in turn to the more folk horror etc orientated work by Ben Wheatley.

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