Today's edition of the Financial Times FT Weekend Magazine features a four page interview and photo-feature with my fellow Cyclobe member Ossian Brown, about his new book Haunted Air (published by Jonathan Cape, £25). It's a fantastic collection of found photographs depicting Halloween celebrations from 1875-1950, and I can't recommend it enough. Ossian's collection has taken 10 years to amass, and it's a treasure-trove of weird, macabre and surreal images, full of bizarrely masked children and bewilderingly ominous groups of adults, many from the poorer regions of the Southern States. The introduction is by David Lynch, and there's an excellent afterword by Geoff Cox-Dorée (who also provided text and calligraphy for our new LP Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window). The book is available online through Jonathan Cape and the usual book retailers. The Financial Times website also features the article along with eighteen photographs. There's also an excellent review of the book here.
Ominous is the word - every image is heavy with potential menace. You get the impression that something creepy happened seconds after the photo was taken. American Gothic at its most sinister.
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