To celebrate reaching the second stretch goal of our Tarot Deck of
Austin Osman Spare Kickstarter campaign, Strange Attractor's Mark
Pilkington explores how the artist and occultist has influenced musicians -
from Amebix to Led Zeppelin - for our friends over at The Quietus.
The project is only live for another two days, and we've been blown away
by the response so far.
"While Spare was hardly a libertine, he was undoubtedly an improviser and
experimenter, developing styles and techniques to create a visual aesthetic
that, while broader than many people realise, was always his own. He was also a
tinkerer with a fascination for radios, which he built for himself and for
friends – a hobby popular with men in the 1920s and 30s. Visitors noted
that his flats were always littered with exotic totems, tribal art and radio
parts, and he regularly painted work onto wooden radio set panels and speaker
cabinets (as in the piece illustrated here, sold at Bonhams Auction House in
2015).
Spare was of course, also an occultist – perhaps primarily so. He
communicated regularly with the spirit world, and explored it in trance states,
encountering human, non-human and approaching-human entities. For Spare, radio,
and the waves that carried the music he loved to listen to, were more than just
a metaphor for the spirit world. They were an active mode of conveyance for
occult energies and vibrations – the swirling, ectoplasmic tendrils from
which odd figures emerge in some of his most dense and haunting work."
