Autumn is upon us, so I’m busting out all of my favorite fall records. First up: anything and everything Jill Tracy has ever touched with her long, thin, alabaster hands.
As can be plainly seen from this gorgeous music video for “Haunted by the Thought of You”, Madame Tracy is one classy dame. Cool as a cucumber. Who else do I know who could maintain such an unflappable air of poise and elegance as reanimated hearts, levitating chairs, creepy humanoid automata, and even the arse of Satan himself loom directly behind her? No one!
Jill Tracy performing live in NYC. Photo by Don Spiro.
I’ve been swooning over the Victorian parlor pianist/netherworld chanteuse ever since a video for her seminal song “The Fine Art of Poisoning” was released a few years back, but she’s been casting her Ghostly Gloom Glam Queen spell for well over a decade (since long before this latest incarnation of the “dark cabaret” movement picked up speed), always with unparalleled grace and sincerity.
The songs collected on her latest album The Bittersweet Constrain(two in particular: “Sell My Soul” and “Torture”) do indeed invoke a delicious sort of pleasure/pain, not unlike the burn of real wormwood absinthe trickling down the gullet; unsettling and exhilarating as receiving a languorous tongue bath from a black cat at midnight on some foggy, windswept moor. Highly recommended.
Get ready for 96 glossy, full-color pages of art, photography, music, fashion and literature. In this issue, the stark android beauty created by Andy Julia for our cover is counterbalanced inside by his elegant portfolio of vintage-style nudes. Our biggest feature in Issue 01 is an exclusive 10-page showcase and interview with the incredible taxidermy sculptress Jessica Joslin. Also in Issue 01, Coilhouse travels to Ljubljana, Slovenia (literally! we actually went!) to interview Laibach, while singer Jarboe tells war tales from her career post-Swans. Photographer Eugenio Recuenco contributes a lush 10-page portfolio and interview, while Clayton James Cubitt delivers a poignant, visceral spread (again, literally) on the topic of genital origami. Renowned science fiction author Samuel R. Delany shares an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “From the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,” while our first installment of “All Yesterday’s Parties” digs up forgotten party photos from eras long gone, starting with London’s Slimelight circa ’95. Fans of WZW and Z!ST will love Zo’s fashion pictorial, in which she reconstructs a Galliano outfit on a budget. Pop-surrealist Travis Louie gives us a glimpse of his inner monster, and cult painter Saturno Butto has some medical fun at the expense of Catholics everywhere. All this, and much more – including supervillain how-to’s, Coilhouse paper dolls, interviews, fashion and art await. Get it now!
Readers of the blog, we have another treat just for you: the fact that the version of the magazine that you are buying here today will not be available in stores. Coilhouse will be in stores this fall, but it won’t be the unique version that’s available here. On this site, and on this site only, you can get the uncensored edition. This version includes a powerful piece that was too risqué for stores to accept without problems due to the graphic (and in our opinion, beautiful) images involved. Only 1000 copies of this very limited version exist – a mere fraction of the entire print run. And that version is only available here, on this site. When we run out, we’ll start selling the censored version that will also be available in stores – so get the limited edition copy that we call the “true version of the magazine” while we still have them!
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East Coasters, are you sad that you missed Mer’s theremin performance at the launch party? New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Lousiville, Nashville, Atlanta, Columbia, Knoxville and Baltimore, you’re in luck: Faun Fables is coming through, and Mer is performing with them. Click here for the tour dates.
You know the drill: we’ll be light on Mer-posts for the next couple of weeks, but when she returns, there’ll be wonders to show! When the tour went through Europe, Mer revealed the the most depressing towel rack ever made, found at the Tyrolean Folk Museum in Austria. When she toured the midwest, Mer uncovered The Tarnished Beauties of Blackwell, Oklahoma – a poignant post that inspired both my mom’s first-ever Coilhouse comment and a heartfelt comment from Shirley Love, a 72-year-old native of Blackwell. What will Mer discover on her East Coast adventure? Stay tuned.
Theremin-soaked electronica duo Zombie-Zombie cites John Carpenter and Goblin as two of their biggest influences. Appropriately, the “unofficial” music video for their Goblinesque tune “Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free” is a surprisingly complex re-enactment of Carpenter’s The Thing. It features stop-frame animated G.I. Joe dolls wandering stoically through carefully lit, finely crafted model sets, confronting one unearthly horror after another.
I was genuinely creeped out! And suddenly I’m deeply nostalgic for low-budget 80s horror flicks. Time to bust out The Stuff.
“Pardon! Bonjour! Fromage!” (photo by Rafe Baron.)
One balmy summer’s eve a couple years ago, Herr Titler came into my life. I was standing in the wings of an ancient Brooklyn theater, reeling in the chaos of Amanda Palmer’s boisterous Fuck The Back Row film/music/theater revue night, when I beheld a broad-shouldered figure in a slinky cocktail gown and perilous high heels. With his sultry voice, his sharply parted/pomaded hair and villainous moustache, Titler was simultaneously demure yet forceful, domineering yet somehow… dainty. I tell ya, he KILLED it that night.
Having basked in his commanding presence, I have trouble understanding what zealots on either side of the ongoing Dr. Steel vs Dr. Horrible debate are getting their jodhpurs in such a twist over! For my money, Titler is all anyone could ever want in a singing musical madman, with the unexpected (but welcome) bonus of a truly fetching décolletage.
Intellectual property is an ever-raging discussion here in The Age of The Internet. Often the lines between inspiration and imitation are blurred but today I give you an interesting case. You decide!
Long-time mad scientist Doctor Steel has, over the course of many years, made himself an infectious image. To do this he’s combined vintage war propaganda aesthetics, catchy tunes and an image of an asylum escapee who plots away in a secret lab and seeks to improve Earth with toys and total world domination. Through his website he’s pulled together an entire army of fans called Toy Soldiers, who organize events and distribute various Dr. Steel propaganda.
Left: Doctor Steel. Right: Doctor Horrible
Now there’s come along a Doctor Horrible. Produced by Joss Whedon and starring Neil Parick Harris, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is a website dedicated to video blogs starring a 30-something mad scientist who sings and wants to take over the world. In the site’s Master Plan, Whedon invites fans to spread the word, offers propaganda-style banners and promises a DVD release later.
Similarities beyond the singing mad doctor character include aforementioned propaganda-inspired banners, shiny gloves, goggles and an “Ask Dr. Horrible” segment – not unlike these “Ask Doctor Steel” videos. There is also the matter of the title itself : “Sing-Along Blog” is reminiscent of Doctor Steel’s Read-A-Long album.
Doctor Steel feels slighted by this endeavor and is rallying his troops in retaliation. Now that you’ve seen the evidence it’s time to cast your votes. Personally I’d like to see a bit of Doctor on Doctor boxing, shiny gloves and all.
Oh, my, yes! Happy belated birthday, dear Nikola. Your Coilhouse whelping day party continues with this booty-electrifying Musical Tesla Coil rendition of the Ghostbusters theme song, courtesy of Dr. Zeus. Nerd up.
While it’s my sincere hope that the wondrous Coilhouse Gushfest: Getting to Know You continues unabated, I can’t keep sitting on my hands with this one. Grace Jones has just released a new video for “Corporate Cannibal”, the first single off her forthcoming album, Hurricane (which features collaboration with Tricky, Brian Eno, and others). May Day is more heart-stoppingly badass than ever before:
Rawr. As previously mentioned on CH, Ms. Jones is my choice for It Girl of the 80s. Hell, let’s make her It Girl for ’08, as well. She’s sixty, she’s sexy, she’s scary as hell, and we should all bow before her fabulousness.
I’m writing quickly from the humid crotch that is Houston, Tex-Ass, to sing the praises of a most comely and delightful band who opened for Faun Fables on the eve of the Summer Solstice two nights ago. Death is not a Joyride is a rollicking, zoomorphic avant-pop five piece from Austin who won me over immediately with their butt-wiggling exuberance on the longest, steamiest day of the year.Their first full length album, The Human Zoo, was produced by John Congleton (The Polyphonic Spree, Explosions in the Sky and The pAper chAse) and features 45 blissfully cracked minutes of “girl-fronted dark violin burlesque dance rock.”
These days Seal‘s better recognized by his shiny dome but there was a time, long ago in the decade we call The Nineties, when that very cupola hid in the shade of undercut dreadlocks, best admired under sparse flashing light of an underground techno laboratory. In addition to an edgier look young Seal kept some interesting company. Take Adamski for instance: punk-turned-rave-enthusiast with a fondness for cyber-turbans, who worked with everyone from Johnny Slut to Nina Hagen.
Please turn your attention to Seal and Adamski’s video for Killer, their 1990 crossover hit. The plot revolves around Seal’s disembodied head, a lot of static and the aforementioned techno lab either birthing Seal from its circuits or, alternately, feeding Seal virtual reality visuals in the form of dancing loons. Note the neon, striped pants, amazing CG and broken down technology offset by Adamski’s shiny but vurt-addled antics. Could Seal be a secret Cyberpunk or was he merely lucky to be making music in the early 90s?
