The images evoked by automobiles vary depending on which part of the car you examine. Surely, the front of a car is facelike, which is why automobile designers routinely referred to the radiator as the mouth and chrome uprights in the radiators as teeth. Throughout the early 1950s, the faces of cars tended toward hostility and defensiveness, especially on the big cars, but also on Chevrolets and Plymouths. The chrome was thick. The teeth were large, the bumpers suggested armour. One is tempted to find the countenance of Senator Joseph McCarthy glaring out defensively from their front ends. The pugnacious grilles provided a mobile image of an America obsessed with finding and fighting enemies within.

That image changed in the Populuxe era [1954–1964]. Cars gained a friendlier look. If they had teeth they were smaller, but the mouth often stretched the entire with of the car in an almost Eisenhowerish smile. Headlights developed rather large and protruding eyebrows, but these did not project a defensive air as much as an urge to move forward. A few cars, notably the late 1950s Dodges, maintained a fierce, toothy image with catlike eyes, but they were peaceful compared to what had been on the road earlier in the decade.

– Thomas Hine, Populuxe

LHOOQ (1919), Marcel Duchamp’s “unshaved” Mona Lisa.

All of the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and molded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressively outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.

– Walter Pater on La Gioconda

The scientist refuses to create a female helpmate for his melancholy monster. It is only at this point, on seeing all his hopes of companionship crunched, that this late Romantic forerunner of the cyborgs decides to kill the family and friends of his creator. Having had to watch Frankenstein dismantle the half-finished female monster and sink her remains in the lake by his laboratory, he now drives his own father into the open countryside, pursuing him to the North Pole, far from all civilization, so that he, too, can feel the deadly consequences of solitude.

– Elisabeth Bronfen on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (published in 1818)

“Woman – Friend – Wife!” A melancholy Monster, a culprit at the bar – both horrendous and Christlike – in a world that remains the same towards its involuntary outsiders; a crude and clumsy anthropomorphic vessel in agony; betrayed, misunderstood, accused of being human, almost; burdened by a vague understanding that he will never become a real human being since he was brought to life in a lab by a mad scientist; a Monster with a rotten man’s heart and nonetheless with the drives and longings of a better man; a very lonely Monster looking for a woman to court and spark.

“The artificial human being comes into the world in the condition of division and longing for unity,” argues Georg Sesslen in his essay in Artificial Humans: Manic Machines and Controlled Bodies, echoing the philosophical, talkative Monster in Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein novel, in which he describes himself as “miserable beyond all living things”. As Schwarzenegger much later concluded as Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, “It is not pleasant to discover you were invented.”

The second Frankenstein movie is the unsurpassed masterpiece of Universal Studios’ many monster movies from this new world of gods and monsters, the “Universal Horror” era. Once again directed by James Whale, the terrifyingly sad and beautiful and likewise perversely entertaining The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which was shot in 46 days, is in itself a laboratory of highly daring cinematic sensibilities, furnished by this infidel from Dudley, Worcestershire, England.

Boris Karloff was 47 when he gave the greatest performance of his career in The Bride of Frankenstein. “The Monster is a faithful interpretation of Shelley’s literary creation, but the cinematic character does not rely on the author’s lengthy and weighty dialogue to express himself eloquently,” writes Scott Allen Nollen in his very fine biography about the only man who could fill Dr Frankenstein’s hideous creature with real human life. “Relying upon few words, Karloff expands upon his original 1931 performance by creating yet another moving, and wholly convincing, work of pantomimic wonderment.”

In 1815 Indonesia’s Mount Tambora exploded in the largest eruption ever known to man. It put the sun away for a very long time. The dark and chilling veil that had suddenly been thrown upon the world and which had caused a volcanic winter across the globe was only beginning to disintegrate at the time when the 19-year-old Mary Shelley put the finishing touches to her novel in May 1817. (Frankenstein was published anonymously the following year in London.)

With his foppish manners and versed R’s – “Frightened of the thunder fearful of the dark. And yet you have written a tale that sent my blood into creeps” – that’s how Lord Byron addresses Percy Bysshe Shelley’s new missus in the film’s great prologue. Elsa Lanchester made a comment in 1979 why director Whale decided to cast her in two roles in The Bride of Frankenstein, in which she begins as Mary and ends up as the electrifying Bride: “James’s feeling was that very pretty, sweet people, both men and women, have very wicked insides … evil thoughts [...] So, James wanted the same actress for both parts to show that the Bride of Frankenstein did, after all, come out of sweet Mary Shelley’s soul.”

The origin of Mary Shelley’s story stems from a cold and rainy summer eve in Switzerland, 1816, when Lord Byron entertained a party of guests in his Villa Diodati at the slopes of Lake Geneva. The host was engaged in reading horror stories for his friends – writer and doctor John William Polidori, writer Matthew Lewis, Percy Bysshe Shelley and, of course, the accomplished poet’s wife-to-be, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, along with her older stepsister Claire Clairmont – and when the evening was over he prompted them to start writing their own little piece of horror.

The prologue with the three literary figures takes place after Shelley had completed Frankenstein, and she speaks confidently with Byron about her novel and that it will surely find a publisher soon – and as the thunderstorm roams around the villa she reveals that there is a continuing story to the novel. James Whale also uses the prologue to reintroduce the original Frankenstein movie with a flashback composition of 24 two-second shots, bringing us back to the windmill inferno and the inhuman lynch mob leaving the hunted, human Monster confined by the flames. And this is where Shelley carries on with her story, The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Monster falls into a body of water and survives. He is withdrawn from the film after the dramatic introduction, and almost forgotten by the shouting villagers, until the start of the second act (the film consists of three parts, each of them 25 minutes long). “If the power-craving, insane, necrophilic Pretorius is a despicable character, the ‘average’ citizens who surround him are even worse,” is Scott Allen Nollen’s remark on the brainless actions of God’s chosen ones in this nameless Germanic small town, starkly reflecting what was going on both in the Third Reich and in the States with the KKK when the film was made.

Elizabeth, Dr Frankenstein’s wife, has an ominous inner vision about an apparition of death the same night as the mill burns down, followed by the heavy thumpings on the Gothic castle’s door by a priestly figure that appears to have way more than a healthy little dose in common with the devil. The funnily uncanny Dr Septimus Pretorius has come to see his old student baron Henry Frankenstein on, as he puts it, “a secret grave matter”. Pretorius’s boldly artful antics become evident when the Monster’s creator follows him back to his cryptlike cellar, a laboratory for evil ideas and experiments beyond the sacrosanct.

Toys in the attic, gin in his system and those fabulous little people in the jars that he toys with like a disturbed child playing wicked games with her dolls. “Our fantasy of the artificial human being seems to aim above all at a reading of the Bible from beginning to end in the fast-forward mode,” writes Georg Sesslen. “The father who creates a child without a mother is the ’scientific’ answer to the religious fantasy of the mother who bears a child without a father.” Dr P (Ernest Thesiger) and Dr F (Colin Clive) are to work together to emulate the heavenly Maker, give the finger to the endless monopoly on creation.

The Pretorius character was James Whale’s own concoction, voicing the director’s penchant for oddities and wit loaded with blasphemies. Thesiger was Whale’s mentor, a trouper that is said to have been just as wacky in private. In The Bride of Frankenstein we have two non-heterosexual men, directed by the homosexual Whale, that join forces to create a female out of dead flesh and by pseudo-scientific means, without the help of copulation, conception and the Holy Bible, amen. Only Whale’s ingenuity and wonderful storytelling could make this elaborate filmwork tiptoe past the censors without really waking them – “only” a quarter of an hour of the film was corked.

Pursuing the Monster in a forest with those apocalyptic dark skies looking like marmalade Weimar, and trees as straight as the flagpole trees in the sickly groomed Schorfheide forest around Hermann Göring’s country estate Carinhall northeast of Berlin – the villagers manage to capture the Monster again by some kind of mob-rule crucifixion; a pig on a stick, brought to the town dungeon for his “murder” of a little girl he figured would float as lovely as the flowers they threw into the lake together, smiling.

Escaping the chains of the dungeon, the Monster sets out on a hopeless walkabout, a crusade to find a friend. He soon becomes aware of why everyone he tries to encounter darts by the sight of him, screaming: when the Monster kneels to drink from the river, he’s immediately taken aback by the frightful manifestation surfacing him beneath; growling in pain while he is wiping out the awkward mirror image in the water, trying to erase his own sad being. But unlike Narcissus, he will never turn into a beautiful flower.

The original Frankenstein movie was an early talkie with a mute Monster. Karloff disliked the notion of the creature speaking in The Bride of Frankenstein, but since the Monster grows in consciousness as the film unfolds, some kind of human voice only becomes his rough-hewn grace and utter loneliness. He does find a friend in a blind man of a very kind and gentle disposition, a welcoming loner in a solitary retreat. Like the Monster he too lives outside of human society – a saintly figure that knows how to appreciate the simple pleasures of life, and how to pass it on to the Monster: “friend – good”, “wine – good”, “music – good”, “cigar – good” – “fire – bad”. Whale directs this with all the humbleness in the world, while simultaneously mocking the simplistic laws of religion and Disney.

“I dreamed of being the first to give to the world the secret that God is so jealous of – the formula of life. Think of the power – to create a man. And I did it. I created a man, and who knows, in time I could have trained him to do my will.” Dr Hernry Frankenstein, an AC/DC figure in a laboratory crammed with apparatuses that need electricity to work, and the heavenly contribution – after all – of thunder and lighting to reinstall life again in a human carcass. The Monster he created refused to serve his purposes, he’s back and he demands a mate!

With Pretorius assisting his old pupil in creating a Bride for his Monster, matters are set to go berserk. The female thing that the two men manufacture for the keenly awaiting Monster indeed comes alive, but she is just about as inviting as a surly swan. Elsa Lanchester – in her erratic hairdo, neck scars and glammy make-up – got the swan idea when she walked around Regent’s Park in London trying to feed the ill-tempered birds. (Her iconic Bride became an Aurora model kit in the late 1960s.) The Monster tries to take her hand, “Friend?” he asks, but she rejects his courteous attempts. “She hates me. Like others,” he says. And then he pulls the lab’s doomsday lever, urging Mr and Mrs Frankenstein to hurry out of the exploding castle, to continue their life together.

James Whale adapted Mary Shelley’s refined Gothic story about the dread of weird science, he made it come alive again with so much more art, humour and terror. And most of all, he showed us that the spirit of love is in truth sacrosanct, that it cannot be manufactured or infused in a lab or anywhere else but in a human heart drumming for love. Without it we are only bound to be miserable beyond all living things. Monsters.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

– John Milton, Paradise Lost (the epigraph to Shelley’s Frankenstein novel)

Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley.

Theda Bara worked for William Fox for five years. She made almost forty films, all of them variations on the vamp [...] She is the only actress who can claim to have played the entire repertoire of Romantic archaic heroines and fin-de-siècle Medusas […] The vampire that Bara played was really a 19^th century character that thrived on the silver screen for a brief period before the Modern Age took hold on the 1920s.

The contract that Theda Bara signed in 1917 was modelled to give legal form to an artificial figure that had nothing to do with daily life (let alone with “life” itself). She undertook never to marry, never to appear in public without a heavy veil, never to use any means of public transportation, and on no account to enter a Turkish Bath. Yet Theda Bara herself lends the nun-like image of a celibate Medusa a touch of radical feminist rebellion. “For every woman vampire, there are ten men of the same type, men who take everything from women  – love, devotion, beauty, youth – and give nothing in return! V stands for Vampire, and it stands for Vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. You see, I have the face of the vampire, perhaps, but the heart of a feministe.”

– Klaus Kreimeier

[Bortis Karloff's] Monster – the hideous Creature pieced together from partially decomposed cadavers – is a thoroughly convincing and deeply moving creation possessing a genuine inner beauty.

– Scott Allen Nollen

In terms of my own nature I’ve always found it easier to embrace the feminine rather than the masculine element, as it was represented to me growing up, was steeped in anger, violence, and associated with fear. It has taken me forty years to reach the point where I’m able to embrace the masculine side of my nature on a compatible footing with the feminine. This bias therefore is represented quite openly in much of my work.

– David Sylvian

Secrets of the beehive, a philosophy of the world, human life in a nutshell. And a savvy, hidden watcher. After two vocal albums and of course a long career in his band Japan, David Sylvian (b 1958) recorded an album in 1987 that shifts between darkness and shadowy light. What he created with Secrets of the Beehive – at only 29 years of age – is a wildly temperate work that has lost none of its pensive powers. Lichtenberg pens somewhere in his aphoristic Waste Books that man can do more for his freedom with a hairpin than with a battering ram, and that’s how Mr Sylvian approaches his Secrets of the Beehive too. He’s a haunted house that makes his ghosts dance by the tones of his music. What a brilliant way to deal with one’s own hang-ups and fears.

“We need to grow into modern works. We shouldn’t ask that things be made too easy for us,” Sylvian stated some time ago. “It should be remembered that to be challenged is something of a gift if the work truly has something new to offer, a fresh perspective or experience.” He disbanded Japan with a rather nasty coke habit, jaded by this group “that fooled around with calculation and artifice”, to eventually find his own and much deeper voice as a solo artist, though keeping the name Sylvian. Debris, left by the tide or washed up on the beach, make the sleeve art for Secrets of the Beehive – Sylvian’s music sounds like something that has been honed by the sea for a smaller eternity, and it coruscates.

Secrets of the Beehive – which (together with Sylvian) was produced by Steve Nye, who also worked on Japan’s fifth and last album The Tin Drum (1981) – became the insightful artist’s final solo album for twelve years. Another father of emotive songs was Orpheus, which is also the title of the most beautiful song on the album. Orpheus’s spouse, Eurydice, died from a snakebite, and in order to get her back to life again the performer travelled to the Underworld. Orpheus managed to do the impossible with his heavenly lyre and voice: he weakened the hearts of the heartless Hades and Persephone, and they gave him Eurydice back if only he would keep his promise not to look at her until they both were back in the living world again. He couldn’t.

One can read this myth as a man losing it all because his love is too strong, but another interpretation is that Orpheus’s love was shallow and that the Eurydice he got back was just a mirage, because the king and queen of the Underworld saw through him, and that she was destined to vanish anyway. Jean Cocteau – who took great interest in the myth with his Orphée Trilogy – was once asked a trivial question by a French cultural monthly: “If your house were burning down, and you could only take away one thing, what would it be?” His reply was fabulous: “I would take the fire.” And this is what David Sylvian accomplished with Secrets of the Beehive. This is a work about human life, a fire that never stops.

Mr Sylvian, you’ve said that, “I no longer feel I am the author of much of my own work and so sometimes feel an impostor when performing the material.” You can’t say that this holds true with Secrets of the Beehive, can you? You weren’t even 30 years old when you recorded this remarkable piece of work. Apart from “Maria” then – I think – with its “wardrobe” of 80s production values – absolutely everything else here is flowing with beauty of infinite values. You must be very proud of what you achieved in 1987?

My comment wasn’t meant to give the impression of pride or a lack there of – just that the emotional, psychological, and philosophical perspective of the person who wrote the material is obviously, necessarily, quite different from the person I am today. This is really a simple fact of life. You’d only have to go back and read something you’d written ten, twenty, thirty years ago to have a similar experience. Could be anything from a school essay to a love letter. You remember writing it, the circumstances, your frame of mind, et cetera. but you no longer relate emotionally directly to the heart of the subject itself as you once did. You’ve necessarily moved on, evolved, matured. This doesn’t mean it’d be impossible to recapture the original spirit of the piece. This is the job of the performer, the interpreter of song rather than the writer or composer.

Okay, on a good night it’s possible to tap into the original spirit of the work and fully embody or represent it. But it’s possible to do this with compositions by other writers too. I was attempting to point out that I had no more right than anyone else to “cover” my own material. That this doesn’t generally appear to be apparent and openly discussed by artists. If you go see Dylan in concert and he sings “Blowing in the Wind” do you come away feeling you’ve experienced the author’s unique take on that work or something other? Is it the token experience that’s important? ‘”I saw Sinatra sing ‘My Way’ at his last concert in …” Tokenism standing in for the power of the real experience. Would it possibly be a more powerfully compelling experience to hear the piece interpreted afresh by a younger, impassioned voice, who’d taken the sentiments to heart and reinterpreted the song for a contemporary audience? Just questions that run through my own mind when asked about performing material live.

And “Maria” … I’ll never tire of “Maria”.

The Belgian academic Maurice Maeterlinck used the beehive as an analogy for human life itself in his The Life of the Bee from 1901. Victor Erice’s masterfully directed The Spirit of the Beehive from 1973 is in reality a poignant study of what is going on under the surface in Franco’s Spain, seen through the dislocation of a psychosomatically injured family searching for the miraculous in their own little ways. What are your secrets of the beehive?

I first came across the subject as touched upon by Yeats, Rudolph Steiner, and later Joseph Beuys – who was influenced by Steiner’s writings. But the references go further back in time and stand as metaphor throughout the ages for the structuring of society based on a hierarchy as led by its spiritual and philosophical masters.

In his otherwise weak biography David Sylvian: The Last Romantic, Martin Power writes that, “With Secrets of the Beehive, David Sylvian largely realised his long-time desire to create a sense of jarring unease in the most opulent of musical surroundings.” You went from being David Sylvian the reluctant pop star to David Sylvian the reclusive musician in just a matter of years. Did you change your musical and spiritual direction in order to quickly go somewhere definitely opposite to who and what you were in Japan, or were your years in the band in fact a necessity to make you understand that you needed something more from life, that your music too had to change drastically?

The latter. The work reflects the values of the life led. I went through some well-documented, fundamental changes following the break up of the band. The work reflects those changes.

You have emphasised that the album came through you – what made it come through you, what made you write these profound songs?

I’ve frequently commented on the subject of the necessity of the past to inform the present. Of course, like everyone else, I had to live through a specific set of circumstances in order to reach the present moment in time, to become whatever it is I’ve become, to follow the trajectory I have. Nothing of the past is denied, nothing’s superfluous. It was all as it should’ve been although not, I might add, in an ideal sense. On some level, you’d wish that it could’ve been otherwise, that so much of the journey could’ve been different, avoided, that you might’ve been a little wiser. This is inevitable.

The musicians who worked with Bowie when he recorded Low at Château d’Hérouville were obviously annoyed by Brian Eno’s dingbat intellectualism before the sessions. Was there any such musician on Secrets of the Beehive that brought in “crazy” ideas but nonetheless augmented the heart and soul of the album? Par example, one hears Sakamoto all over and it’s just wonderful what he does to the songs. In order to create a work anything near Secrets of the Beehive you have to be able to leave more than just some of the most intimate parts of music making in the hands of others, while fully communicating your ideas to your musicians – have you always been comfortable with collaborating this way?

I think with Secrets there was less room for interpretation than on other projects I’d been involved with. I demoed most, if not all of the material and created roughs for the orchestral arrangements, et cetera. I knew what I was looking for and all in all the guidelines were fairly specific. Not that individuals didn’t have room to find their voices within the material, but everyone had been chosen specifically for their contributions to particular compositions.

For example, I’d seen [guitarist David] Torn play with Jan Garbarek and had heard him on the album It’s OK to Listen to the Gray Voice. It was this facet of his playing that I requested when he came to the sessions above and beyond any other. Torn is a multifaceted player and could’ve brought all manner of alternate ideas and contributions to the sessions. Ryuichi [Sakamoto] followed my rather awkward piano playing as demonstrated on the demos. Ryu is an extraordinarily generous musician and doesn’t feel the need to place his “stamp” on a performance or to “interpret” one’s ideas so as to give them a personal spin – although his playing remains unmistakably recognisable regardless. Whether it was the piano lines or the orchestral, he was generally working from my crude ideas and arrangements and reference points. The exception would be his wonderful arrangement for “When Poets Dreamed of Angels”, which I gave him no notes for, and his contributions on the Hammond organ.

So, in short, it was the album on which I gave the musicians involved the most limited amount of freedom when seen in relation to other solo work of this time.

The album starts with some kind of loving – that lacks presence – and ends with the line, “Is our love strong enough?” Is that your take on the Orpheus myth as well – that he was the singer, not the song – that his love that seemed so strong for Eurydice in fact was fakery? This Grecian myth was of course written in hexameter. You are singing your “Orpheus” in a softly marked prosody as well, don’t you?

Although I don’t object to your asking the questions or your innate curiosity, I don’t wish to nail down the experiences and influences that informed the writing of the material. It lives a life of its own just fine without the extra baggage.

Secrets of the Beehive is charged with some diffuse Christian imagery – was this something that concerned you at the time, or did this imagery sort of “come in handy” for a rather young spiritual aspirant back then?

It was something I was imbued with as a child and chose to question and explore further as an adult. This might’ve been the last project written in which I used references to Christian themes to such a degree. Possibly another reason why it’s not always easy to connect with the material on a personal level. Although, having said that, “Maria” rises above and beyond such references for me.

You have referred to the period following Secrets of the Beehive as “a decent into hell” – how was that then to set off for your first world tour as a solo artist with a band, with the In Praise of Shamans Tour of 1988?

The beginning of the decent. Utterly painful for myself and, I’d imagine, for most involved in the tour, although each for their own reasons.

“I find other people quite dreadful, I think the only possible society is oneself.” Does Oscar Wilde’s best quote apply to you at all? With your withdrawing tendencies, you seem to live your life like a hermit crab – as they only congregate with their peers when they have something to exchange. Is life in a shell or in an ivory tower necessary to be avant-garde, or isn’t there a risk that it may lead to self-centred solipsism? Satie lived alone outside Paris, and he had to walk around with a hammer in his pocked to defend himself from people who hated his music, or wouldn’t even call it music.

I don’t relate to Wilde’s quote except on truly off days. I don’t seek out large gatherings of people and would rather live in a place few others would choose, to avoid overcrowding, but I love the company of good friends and enjoy expanding my world with the introduction of new acquaintances. I’m not in the slightest solipsistic. I don’t consider myself a shell-like creature nor am I locked in an ivory tower. This is an illusionary public perception perhaps. I will admit that my isolation has increased over the past decade or so, partly by choice, but I counter that isolation both through the process of creating new work, running a label, and spending brief periods in various capitals of the world.

No, it’s not necessary to isolate oneself to create new work but a little isolation certainly doesn’t hurt. You can get too caught up with the concerns and needs of contemporary culture and merely end up echoing it rather than speaking with one’s own true voice and values. Maybe when young this need to be sponge-like and soak up all that’s around you isn’t at all a negative attribute but as you get older that need dissipates and something other takes its place.

I like this quote from Umberto Eco: “I like the notion of stubborn incuriosity. To cultivate a stubborn incuriosity, you have to limit yourself to certain areas of knowledge. You cannot be totally greedy. You have to oblige yourself not to learn everything. Or else you will learn nothing. Culture in this sense is about knowing how to forget … Discriminating what you want to learn and remember is critical from a cognitive standpoint.”

How come you moved to the land of artifice and simulacra? What does a culture that obviously brainwashes people and makes them sick have to offer a man who is trying to uncover other truths and realities? And how does your spiritual life affect your everyday living? David Sylvian in the United States feels like Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. The prime alien-factor is not that he comes from space, but that he’s a British passport holder in ultra-foreign clothes. A stranger in a British duffle coat, in a strange land.

I like living in a foreign land. I like the perspective it affords me, a distance achieved via alienation and the lack of cultural touchstones. Seen from a certain vantage point, to remain permanently rooted in one’s own culture is to possibly live a kind of myopic existence, as if we’re never to move out of the home of our parents. To lose one’s sense of belonging was – is – necessary for me. To become uprooted, unable to put down roots elsewhere, isn’t this the definition of detachment? A desirable state, as far as I’m concerned.

There is a lot that is good about America and Americans. It’s too easy and intellectually lazy to point out all that is wrong, the obvious negative influences of its culture and politics on the world stage. In much of America you’ll find a generosity of spirit and feeling of optimism you might be hard pushed to find elsewhere. Yes, there are many problems with this country, many. But that forces an active intellectual engagement with the culture and its system of governance, which is no bad thing. It’s a vast land of diverse people. It’s an experiment in many ways that’s yet to play itself out. To change the hearts and minds of a nation this large and, in some cases, fearful, is a massive undertaking but once achieved it shifts the dynamic on a global scale.

When Bush came to power many people thought about leaving the country. Many did. But then why hand over this nation to rightwing fundamentalists? It’s worth fighting for what one believes in and in the US that fight is still taking place, everyday. Although it may look from the outside that we’re still dealing with issues long resolved by other, smaller, “mature” nations, the scale of the United States has to be taken into account along with the diversity of its population. It is a land of exiles, a melting pot. The simplicity of the political language comes about in part as a means to communicate ideas succinctly to a broad demographic, to those for whom English isn’t a first language, and for an ever hungry and impatient media. This doesn’t indicate a lack of depth or complexity on the part of all Americans. Not to say that many of the stereotypes don’t ring true, but this is only part of a larger picture.

I live in self-imposed exile from a place that I can’t return to because it no longer exists. So, instead of considering one nation my home I have the option of feeling no more at home here than any other place on the planet which for me is a worthwhile sacrifice. In effect the world becomes my home. “World citizen” … To one degree of another, this state of mind should be a fairly desirable aim for most everyone, surely?

I have often said that the desire is to blow the listeners hearts wide open. By this I mean I wart them to be moved to the point of abandonment. This would be beautiful, an ideal, but it is too much to expect. That the work might resonate in the lives of others is no lesser achievement and one I might more modestly aspire to.

– David Sylvian

Snow crystal photography by Kenneth Libbrecht.

Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone without leaving any record behind.

– Wilson A Bentley, 1925

From the stern, icy and very lovely minimalism of the elementary hexagonal prism, to the photogenic beauties that emerge around –15° C in dense, moist air, and then to the equally coordinated but freaked out six-armed symmetry of the over-complicated prima donna types – a snowflake is a freeze-dried droplet with an inherent order that tumbles down from heaven as a singular crystal of ice, a unique sculpture shaped by mystery, shaped by the inner workings of its 10¹⁸ water molecules and how these principles of geometry are ruffled and kissed by the dynamics of the sky.

“Why snow crystals grow this way is something of a scientific puzzle,” writes Caltech professor and snow authority Kenneth Libbrecht in Field Guide to Snowflakes (one of his many books on his favourite topic). “If you consider the life of a snowflake, you find that its shape is determined by the history of its growth. As it blows about inside the clouds, a developing crystal experiences ever-changing temperatures and humidity levels, along the way. Each change in its local environment causes a change in the way the crystal grows. After numerous twists and tumbles, the final structure can be quite complex. And since no two snowflakes follow exactly the same path, no two are exactly alike.”

Planetary-minded scientist Johannes Kepler wrote a treatise on snow crystals, On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, in 1611.But the first one who saw heaven in a snowflake and captured these ephemeral specimens for eternity was a farmer from New England. “Snowflake” Bentley had fallen in love with snow crystals as a teenager, and later in life he found a method to photograph them on a wired blackboard under his microscope. He produced 5,000 photographic black and white plates of perfect snow crystals – or “ice flowers” as he called them – and half of them were published in Snow Crystals in 1931, the year of his passing. (There is a fine selection of Bentley’s work in Snowflakes in Photographs, a reprint by Dover Publications.) Void of colour, Bentley’s “ice flowers” look like X-rayed snow crystals.

The Japanese scientist Ukichiro Nakaya – who created the first manmade snow crystal in his lab – presented his systematic study in 1954, in which he had attempted to arrange these endlessly diverse crystalline hexagons into different groups according to their similar features. He wasn’t looking for perfect symmetry, his aim was to understand the order of nature through these miracles of beauty. As we have learned, the snowflake begins its life as a tiny prism that will likely begin to sprout with arms and fingers, dependent on how it’ll be conditioned by weather regimes and how water molecules will condense on its surface as it builds while puffing down to our world. The slower the growth-rate, the more perfectly aligned branches. And think about this: a snow crystal positively needs the “transpiration” of the Earth. Make love and catch a falling snowflake in your mouth.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

– William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII

A wild thing that makes your heart sing: Eddy Current Suppression Ring from Melbourne, Australia – auspiciously formed by a gang of lingering guests during a rather plastered Xmas party at a pressing plant in 2005. The foolish band name comes from the copper ring encompassing the transformers used in such plants. But unlike the usual rock’n'roll swindlers of the genre, there’s absolutely nothing foolish about this band. Eddy Current Suppression Ring hybridise a stubborn pre-punk sound with a mellifluous attitude. The boys, who won the Australia Music Prize in 2008, consist of Eddy Current – or Mikey, who is the man that talks to Just another colettte blog about the band – on guitar, Danny Current on drums, Rob Solid on bass and the always-gloved singer Brendan Suppression, who dances like a bee and stings like a butterfly. A detail about Eddy Current Suppression Ring, which is such an instant fall-in-love factor, is that they – just like The Damned–- have a song as the b-side’s opening track on their first album with a rose in its title.

Who gave rock’n'roll to you?

Kiss and Rod Stewart

Iggy kicks off Raw Power with a burp. Brendan Suppression launches your first album with a “Hi”. That’s quite a different approach to your audience.

It’s actually a “Hey” – it’s his check 1-2, 1-2 at the start of every gig.

Your music has none of the “search and destroy” of the Stooges, but a lot of  (if you will) “search and enact”, spiced with some frustration. You turn frustration into a creative state of mind, don’t you? It’s Raw Power with a healing hand. It’s very hard but also very sweet.

Thank you, that’s nice. I don’t feel that frustrated. Most of that must come from good old Brendan and his delivery. Perhaps Danny’s drumming too, he’s got some frustration in him. I think we are just trying to write energetic pop songs.

The old walrus Nietzsche complained about that there was too much beer in the German way of reasoning, but we are dearly grateful about the intoxicated Xmas party at the pressing plant, which then of course and in fact actualised the band. What’s the rather detailed chain of events that led up to Eddy Current Suppression Ring?

Danny and I are brothers and have been jammin’ on and off since we were 19 and 14 respectively. I had my first jam with Brad when I was 15 and played in a band with the three of us that year. Danny met Brendan years later as he worked at a friend’s shop. I got him a job at the record plant that I worked at, and had the pleasure and privilege of experience a bunch of great records with him. Then when the Xmas party day came, everyone went home and us three stayed around, drunk, and bashed the instruments that were set up. There was no working mic, so Brendan just yelled into the tape deck. We took the tape home, sobered up and decided it was good. This recording was the b-side of our first 7″. A week later we got Brad down to play bass on some more stuff so we could make a single. We did this, played a gig, it went really well and we lived happily ever after!

Your band name is like The Sex Pistols’ – so silly that it’s almost good. Electricity and rock music are forever married, but this small eddy current suppression ring gadget isn’t (honestly) overly rock’n'roll, is it?

No, it’s overly nerdy. It was a part on the electroplating bath at the plant. I thought it sounded like a shit jazz fusion combo and decided to use it in the next band I had

You mentioned that Danny Current is your brother. How would you describe your band mates? And your good self?

We are all pretty likeable easygoing normal chaps. Some of us are less stressed than others. Some of us are more anxious than others. But we all mean pretty well and try to be decent folk as much as we can.

Mikey, your guitar charge is awesome!

I finally fell in love with an amp and felt totally comfortable with the way I play, but this is the first band where I thought I got my sound right. I appreciate your compliment.

Is the title Primary Colours [their second album] referring to the great “simplicity” of your music?

Simplicity for sure, but mainly the thought that primary colours are simple but also can combine to make everything in life, no matter how, complex.

You recorded your first album in a couple of hours. I trust that this wasn’t really out of mere necessity, but that you love to work that way? You recorded Primary Colours all in a day’s work, and it is quite a different record - what about your next album, how will it differ from the others, sound-wise?

Next one sounds best, I think. We went back to recording in a rehearsal room in six hours. I have recorded a lot of bands lately and finally am better at getting the sound in my head down on tape. New one sounds energetic and live, not overly raw, just accurate. We don’t take short amounts of time because we are in a hurry, or anything, or have no money. It’s just that it doesn’t take that long. It’s all live including vocals so we really should be able to record 40 minutes of music in half a day. Or else we shouldn’t be playing the songs.

… And a really easy one (not): what is rock’n'roll?

Some sort of vast genre that includes plenty of awesome music and plenty of bad music. Or the correct answer may as well be “I Want You” by The Troggs.

I love your music.

Thank you!