The Cardboard Gods blog

SKY’s Carillon, featuring John Williams on guitar

SKY was a super-fusion group from the late 1970s and early 1980s who combined the elegant romanticism and technical proficiency of Australian classical guitarist John Williams, with the funk and world music influences of Herbie Flowers and Tristan Monk. They were an extraordinary group, largely unheralded, but revered by music-philes for decades for their adventurous approach to instrumentation and their genre defying arrangements, as reflected in this beautiful original composition, Carillon.

Re-release of Turkey’s Bulent Ortacgil

As many fans of the genre know, Turkey produced a lot of great psych folk and rock in the ’70s. 3 Hur-El and Mogollar are two of the more well-known acts from those days, their louder, more rock ‘n’ roll sound drowning the likes of singer/composer Bulent Ortacgil, a more soft-spoken and contemplative figure in Turkish rock history. His quiet, spare, and understated acoustic style punctuated have garnered him comparisons to Nick Drake and Cat Stevens, and with the recent re-release by Korean label 1 Numera of his 1974 debut album, Benimle Oynar Misin, he’s set to reach a new generation of fans outside his home country.

Scan Processor Studies

The source images of this fascinating video by experimental image/sound-maker Brian O’Reilly come from a video synthesizer called the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor from the 1970s, while the sound comes from manipulations via custom software designed by O’Reilly himself and co-designer Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan. Synth and programming geeks might get a little bit more out of this than I can, but I find the mere sound and visuals of this piece to be unnerving and captivating.

Victor LaValle’s Big Machine

People contort all kinds of ways to describe a really original writer, but Big Machine is an amazing piece of work. A true American Gothic ‘horror’ in the vein of Poe, or Melville or James — this book is authentically scary, compulsively strange, and hugely exciting on the sentence level. It’s also funny as hell. A riff about the Washerwoman cult, who rewrite the Bible in bizarre contemporary idiom, is worth the price of admission by itself. Read more

The writing of John N. Gray

Sometimes pessimism is more encouraging than optimism, because more is true. I’m a huge fan of Straw Dogs, but the English counter-Humanist philosopher’s Heresies is just as bracing: ‘Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes’. Living in Los Angeles, where a brittle, self-obsessed ‘hopefulness’ is everywhere, I might need this writer (who certainly shouldn’t be confused with the Men Are From Mars guy) even more than you do. But you do, you do.

The Sting

More timeless than current’. But I recently finished a long and complicated novel about Hollywood in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and am just now buckling down to write a short nonfiction book about this film, part of a series for Soft Skull Press. A little peremptorily written off as a mere ‘entertainment’, and also overshadowed by the in-fact-not-quite-as-good Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, this is a pretty dazzling effort: a coded Watergate-conspiracy narrative, a comment on the perils and pleasures of being fooled that’s also twice as much fun to watch as you remember. Which was pretty fun to begin with.