Ballardian

The story of Savoy Books is one of the strangest in publishing history: a tale of lost opportunities, missed opportunities, repression, censorship, imprisonment … and, most importantly, an incredible legacy of work that continues to disturb, challenge and confront. All of those qualities are equally applicable to Savoy Records, the music arm of Savoy’s black empire, as Simon Sellars discovers when he talks to Savoy co-founder David Britton. The interview features sound clips from selected Savoy releases.

The story of Savoy Books is one of the most strangest in publishing history: a tale of lost opportunities, missed opportunities, repression, censorship, imprisonment … and, most importantly, an incredible legacy of work that continues to disturb, challenge and confront. All of those qualities are equally applicable to Savoy Records, the music arm of Savoy’s black empire, as Simon Sellars discovers when he talks to Savoy co-founder David Britton. The interview features sound clips from selected Savoy releases.

JG Ballard’s writing encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis, technological fetishism, urban ruination and suburban mob culture. In this extract from the September-October issue of Architectural Design, Nic Clear explores how Ballard’s understanding of architecture and architects made him one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor.

Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.

The first episode of BBC Radio 7′s adaptation of The Drowned World is now online.

This short piece about Ballardian sound art appeared in the CCCB’s catalogue for their Ballard exhibition. Accompanying this post is a 12-track muxtape featuring selections from the music curated for the event.

“What kind of animals are being exhibited?” Ballard’s “The Recognition” is currently featuring on BBC Radio 7.

Miracles is BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

From BBC Radio 3: ‘Philip Dodd meets two of the most important voices in contemporary British writing: Martin Amis and JG Ballard, who are both publishing new works of non-fiction.’

Forthcoming on BBC Radio 4: Will Self on J.G. Ballard.

Ballardian fave Cousin Silas mentioned in our recent interview that he had a new CD on the way: SS: As far as your compositional style goes, were you inspired in any way by Ballard’s experimental techniques, for example, the cut-up nature of Atrocity, or the collages and fake ads he produced around the same time? [...]

I’ve created a YouTube outpost for this site, divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music.

Speaking of thatspace, Cousin Silas, who recently unleashed volume 2 of his masterful, dark-ambient Ballard Landscape series, emails to inform me he has several unreleased and remixed bits from that and other projects over at his Myspace. There should be an interview with Cousin over here at Ballardian in the very near future.

Free downloads for this band here. Biography Question: What is Super-Cannes? + Answer 1: A sexy town located in the South of France. + Answer 2: The name of a novel by J.G. Ballard about Western society’s ever increasing appetite for thrills. + Answer 3: A rock band in Boston playing music that involves hip-hop [...]

Still from ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, dir. Thomas Cazals, 2007. Ballardiana, Part 1 Via Podcast Pickle, I found a rendition of ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’, Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s ‘iconoclastic homage to the great author’: Oh Jim, We can’t get enough of him In Empire of the Sun He was on the run Captured by the Japanese [...]

Thanks to Master Rick McGrath for this link, to a free download archive containing mp3 files and artwork for an album called Ballardian Landscapes by one Cousin Silas. This is highly recommended, and goes a long way towards answering the questions, Paul, Mike and I posed at the end of the Mike Ryan interview…I hope [...]