The Odyssey Exhibition

Lychee before Furuya: These images are from the short mangas Das Brute: Blood, Moon Age 15: Damnation, and Jinta ☆ Jinta by pseudonymous manga author Not Osada. Like Furuya, Osada was an audience member for the original Tokyo Grand Guignol underground performances who was left fascinated by the aesthetics and bizarre narratives of their plays. While Furuya’s manga was based more or less on the direct events of the play, in Osada’s short stories a student council reminiscent of the light club are depicted carrying out various atrocities in scenes that mirror the aesthetic fixations of the plays. The short comics in question were published in the anthologies Night Reading Room (1988) and Blind Beast (1996). Moon Age 15 would be most recognizable to fans. In the short story, the club grow concerned about their current hideout (an abandoned industrial shelter that they converted into a space called Eden) after a lonely girl discovers a lab rabbit kept by one of the members outside the space. They eventually lure her into Eden under the pretense of letting her meet her first friend, just to shock her with a grotesque robot made of garbage. They then trap her in the space and burn it to the ground, killing both the girl and the robot in the process. Moonlight lingers as a continual archetype throughout the stories, matching the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s distinctly nocturnal atmosphere. And during the climax of Das Brute: Blood, the student council’s leader (the story’s own stand-in for Zera) refers to the blood of their last victim as being “dirty”, like how the teacher in Mercuro calls Mikami’s blood dirty after killing him in the medical lab at the end of act 2.

In concern of the mixed relations between later Lychee adaptions and the original Tokyo Grand Guignol affiliates, while many members held complicated feelings towards Furuya’s manga, many speak of Osada’s renditions with an open fondness. Despite Osada having retired from horror manga, he remains a fan of the Tokyo Grand Guignol. On Tsunekawa’s own accounts, Osada was even invited as a cohost for a special Tokyo Grand Guignol memorial event. While I understand the concerns of said affiliates with the increasingly detached and commercial nature of subsequent Lychee spinoffs (with there now being an idol band, comedy anime, etc) I like both Furuya and Osada’s manga works equally as their own interpretations of the TGG’s story. Neither can be direct replacements or likenesses, but instead unique adaptions of a now phantom-like work in how it was known to exist, but can never be directly witnessed in its original form. The screenplay for Lychee Light Club remains unreleased to this day, whilst the screenplays for Mercuro, Galatia Teito Monogatari and Walpurgis were all printed in one way or another in various publications. Osada and Furuya were both authors who were inspired by the underground originality of the production, but Furuya’s was the one that would gain a broader commercial success despite the underground nature of the Tokyo Grand Guignol. It could essentially be read as an ideological complication, with how the theater group was abandoned with the departure of Ameya and K Tagane, what should happen with the legacy of their art? Some fear that the success of Furuya’s manga would ultimately erase Ameya and Tagane’s history. With proper handling though, it could be a gateway into a previously obscure period of underground theater. Original video recordings do exist of several of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s events, and if published through a public service like Ubuweb (which hosts videos of performances by the Tenjo Sajiki like Directions To Servants, Cloud Cuckooland and The Lemmings), the plays can be assured a lasting cultural legacy in the field of experimental art. In a recent pandemic-era interview, Norimizu Ameya gave his opinions regarding the availability of video recordings of his plays. In the interview, he roughly said the following: “I’ve always believed that there is a finite nature to theater. The fact that it disappears on the spot is the ultimate fate of theater. I have left behind hardly any works from my past. I see myself as a director rather than a playwright, so I have almost no plays. I also feel that many people generally wouldn’t enjoy the videos that do exist as records. I do think however that it’s very important that anyone who is interested in a work can watch it at any time, even if it’s a small number of people. When I was asked to direct Transfer Student, I went to the Wasada Theater Museum to watch a video of the play’s first performance under Oriza Hirata’s direction. I think it’s a good thing that the eyes that have passed through time were able to create a circuit that provides a direct connection to the past. The fact that it’s possible to transcend the finite limit to help others is a testament of humanity.“

Good morning, or evening, or whenever you read this. It’s March 13, 2022 and it’s a Sunday. David Lynch weather report impressions don’t quite read out in text form, this’ll just confuse anyone who reads this post in the future. Forget I just wrote that. Back throughout 2021 I’ve been posting a handful of production logs on here about this animation I’ve been working on called The God Machine. It’s basically a lot of the aesthetic junk I’m fascinated by clumped up into one large beast. If you found this blog through any of the horror-related posts I’ve done lately there is a high chance that what brought you here has been in some way or another either referenced or played some sort of direct inspiration in this animation. I originally started making it with the intent of it being a short, but over time it naturally grew until it finally hit its (as of writing this post) current hour-long run-time. And even then I still have a lot left to work on it. There’s not that much exciting stuff you can write out about the process of doing an animation by yourself. It’s a very monotonous process that builds up to really what’s best expressed in the art itself. Variants of this film were basically stirring in my creative stream for years and if there was any time to sink countless hours into a bit of art that requires total solitude to make it, it would be these past several years. Production has slowed down slightly the past month with inevitable burnout, but I’ve kept work on it going through other means like recording music queues for certain scenes and doing video collages for it. I’ll post the music later, but these are some of the more recent shots I’ve drawn for the film. I’m not quite sure what else to write here, it’s same-old for me but it’ll likely be a first impression of this film for many. The pressure! Linked below are a handful of posts with previously shared segments of my animation. If any of what you see here catches your interest please check out what I linked below and consider following my Twitter if you’re active on there: - Trailer - Violent Reincarnation - Atrocity Driver - The Putrified Ascetic - Cemetery Metamorphosis - Part-Time Death (Dialogue Scene) - Prologue Scene - My Twitter (where I sometimes give live updates on the film’s production)

(EPILEPSY WARNING - Contains flashing lights) Originally written on January 22nd, 2022 A short clip of the current sequence I've been animating for The God Machine. The first few seconds of a surreal body horror metamorphosis where I intend to cross animation with Tetsuo-inspired live action cutaways. One thing I attempted in the scene is to contrast horror with a transcendental atmosphere through the soundtrack. It's a detail that stuck with me from certain cyberpunk films in how they handled their music, like Shozin Fukui's "Rubber's Lover". In the original Lychee Light Club play as well, the concluding bloodbath is described as playing out against the Ryuichi Sakamoto song "A Carved Stone". There's a distinct combination of combining horror with an abstract atmosphere to make it appear as a transformative state. - Trailer - Violent Reincarnation - Atrocity Driver - The Putrified Ascetic - Part-Time Death (Dialogue Scene) - Prologue Scene - My Twitter (where I sometimes give live updates on the film’s production)

(EPILEPSY WARNING - Contains flashing lights) A longer excerpt of one of the film's early dialogue scenes, further demonstrating the backmasked dialogue technique I use throughout the film. Many of the subjects discussed in the film are influenced by observations I made when watching various experimental films. The black sinew anomaly for example came from an observation I made while watching Hollis Frampton's "Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I: The Red Gate I, 0" where I noted the cadavers in the film resembled the texture of burnt wood. Image credit to @hermetictardigrade for a photo they got at an anatomy museum that I collaged in a later shot. - Trailer - Violent Reincarnation - Atrocity Driver - The Putrified Ascetic - Prologue Scene - My Twitter (where I sometimes give live updates on the film’s production)

While it seems that the film itself will no longer be permitted on YouTube, I decided that I would still upload The God Machine’s trailer to keep some representation for it on my channel. The God Machine is still an ongoing production, once it is finished I plan to upload it to Vimeo. While a more niche site, Vimeo is catered to artists and doesn't have the same glaring flaws in the user experience for independent filmmakers as YouTube does. The following text is my short synopsis of the movie: A mysterious biomechanical phantom washes ashore on the ruins of an island that doubles as a mining facility. Many of the workers are already dead, with only a few left surviving. The phantom possesses one of the already dead miners to take a humanoid form, setting out on a mission to find an equally enigmatic figure that it calls the God Machine, which it believes to be hiding somewhere in the island. A complex interlinking of themes related to Bataillian philosophy, Japanese body horror, cyberpunk, and Russian necrorealist film, The God Machine is an animation that explores the underlying theme in these seemingly unrelated subgenera of existential enlightenment being experienced through the destruction of mortal senses. Decaying ascetics, dictators haunted by the ghosts of past atrocities, bizarre bodily transformations into incomprehensible holy forms, and the enlightenment of death. Animated independently in solitude throughout 2020 into 2021, the film also reflects the social and political turmoils that its production coincided with, resulting in a gloom-riddled apocalyptic atmosphere. - Violent Reincarnation - Atrocity Driver - The Putrified Ascetic - Prologue Scene - My Twitter (where I sometimes give live updates on the film’s production)

(EPILEPSY WARNING - Contains flashing lights) A segment from the opening of The God Machine. It starts off upfront about the multi-media aspects of the film, digital animation that was originally drawn on paper mixed with physical sculpture and analog CRT video synth effects (filmed fresh off the TV screen). The sculpture was one I specially made for the film, using an old ashtray I found as a base where I built the rest of it around that, using the ashtray’s flipping lid as a way to animate the sculpture. With the process of covering it in plaster gauze and painting, it took around 3 days to make the sculpture.

- Violent Reincarnation - Atrocity Driver - The Putrified Ascetic - My Twitter (where I sometimes give live updates on the film’s production)

(EPILEPSY WARNING - Contains flashing lights) A short clip from my upcoming horror animation, The God Machine. This clip shows the unwilling resurrection of the film’s protagonist, Prometheus. Some other clips from the film can be found below:

- Atrocity Driver - The Putrified Ascetic - My Twitter (where I sometimes give live updates on the film’s production)

One unusual mainstay in the Tokyo Grand Guignol's productions was music from the solo career of DEVO frontman Mark Mothersbaugh, in specific songs from his 1980s series of albums Muzik For Insomniaks. At least two songs from an original 1985 cassette tape release of the first album were known to be featured in the Tokyo Grand Guignol's work. The song XP28 plays briefly in their production of Teito Monogatari and XP39 plays in Lychee Light Club when the club gather to announce the completion of the Lychee android. This certain album was the thing that led to Mothersbaugh writing the music to Rugrats. The studio originally wanted to directly use songs from the album, but Mothersbaugh recorded an original soundtrack instead. So, quite literally speaking, 1980s ero guro had Rugrats music. Pictured below is the scene of the play where Lychee is revealed. A large coffin-like structure stands at the back of the theater for most of the production, with the gate swinging open a-la The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari when Lychee is unveiled.

A set of animation frame-styled drawings based on various scenes from the 1984 Tokyo Grand Guignol play Mercury. Mercury was somewhat of a loose predecessor to the Grand Guignol’s later better known play, Lychee Light Club, with notably similar aesthetics and some shared characters with the original 1985 Lychee play. I did a translation of a transcript of the play that was given in a 1986 volume of the magazine June (first published in Japanese around the time the Tokyo Grand Guignol disbanded), you can find the post about my translation here. Since there aren’t any photos from the scene in the last act of the play with Mikami’s sister, I based her likeness off a woman depicted on the front cover of a reprint of the Yumeno Kyūsaku psychological mystery novel Dogura Magura/Angels Detective, a book that was influential in the early waves of guro in a similar manner to Edogawa Ranpo’s literature.

Incoming post with a shitton of images from The God Machine, my upcoming surrealist guro body horror animation thing that’s coming soonish to an internet near you. My original plan was to have the film completed by April of 2021. I set that completion date back in 2020 though and I forgot that I can be really picky when it comes to my own art. So I’m still going at finishing what’s left to be done of the film. I’m still aiming for a completion date that’s this year. Given all the art that has already been made and how the currently finished scenes have been paced, I’d hazard a guess to say that it’ll be roughly feature-length. Not much I can say on the production aside from the fact that the film will be a sort of mixed-media project, utilizing video synths and some live action footage. I might make a huge photo collage diagram for it soon that I’ll photograph for one of the scenes. Also, when I do have it completed, its release will coincide with me dumping all the original music I recorded for it on Bandcamp. In the meanwhile, I’ll get back to musing over the songs that I wish I could use in this film. Into The Light by JG Thirlwell was one I was eyeballing since I heard it in the adaption of The Atrocity Exhibition. Der Kuss from Einstürzende Neubauten’s Haus der Lüge was a more recent one that just came to my attention, and god is there one scene that would be perfect for the guitar section of that track. Unfortunately I can’t by any means Tarantino my way through this stuff since copyright is a thing. It’s foiled quite a plenty of great would-be film soundtracks. Preview clips of the animation: Atrocity Driver - https://eyeodyssey.tumblr.com/post/649104480966770688 The Putrified Ascetic - https://eyeodyssey.tumblr.com/post/640877556364705792 More info and production updates on the film can be found on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheEyeOdyssey

Tokyo Grand Guignol Mercury Transcript Happy to say that the first version of my English transcript/recreation of the Tokyo Grand Guignol's 1984 play Mercury (マーキュロ/Mercuro) is now up on my website. Here's a link where you can read it: - View the PDF - It's a 50-page booklet, the first 43 pages being the transcript, the last 6 being personal notes. I’ve also attached a foreword below about the transcript that I'd recommend reading in advance before the play itself. It gives some further context along with a necessary disclaimer. My original plan was to hold off releasing it until I got access to some further sources to verify its accuracy. Since it's become apparent though that I won't be able to access them, I decided to release the text as is with the basic disclaimers given: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The following PDF is my personal transcript/recreation of the 1984 Tokyo Grand Guignol theater production Mercury (originally titled Mercuro). It was the first of four plays they would perform through their short-run between 1983 up to their disbanding in 1986. The play concerns a mysterious student who transfers to a school that’s strict and authoritarian while simultaneously having a grimy underbelly with the extracurricular activities that are hosted by a squatting hobo. The student is searching for his sister, who had gone missing just a few years prior. He was guided to the school by the moon, which constantly lingers above the school grounds. He is confident that the teacher is in some way linked with his sister’s disappearance, but while there he bears witness first-hand a more sinister secret regarding the teacher. While the Tokyo Grand Guignol were greatly influential in the Japanese underground art circuit, info on their plays in the English corners of the web ranges from scarce to practically nonexistent. Their most well-known play is the 1985 production Litchi Light Club, sometimes also known by the title Lychee Hikari Club. Litchi started off as a play, but it would later be adapted in a highly popular manga from 2005. The manga adaption would later spawn an anime, an idol band, a movie and eventually a completely separate theater production that was based on the manga that was based on the play. Try wrapping your head around that one. The Tokyo Grand Guignol was founded in 1983 by the experimental artist Normizu Ameya, who got his start in theater just a few years earlier in directing the plays of Kōbō Abe. He found the troupe in partial collaboration with the manga author Suehiro Maruo, who himself would later become a highly influential figure in horror manga, with one of his more popular eventual influences being the artist Junji Ito. The Tokyo Grand Guignol was a strange sort of collateral crossing between guro, Japanese cyberpunk, punk subculture and the then-current experimental music scene of the 80s. The plays were described in one source as being like punk rock concerts, with the intense moments having characters practically shouting their dialogue over booming soundscapes. Music and sound design was a main focus of these plays, with Ameya describing the plays as being an ensemble of his favorite sounds. This is evident in the varied music choices, with some of the featured music acts across the plays including Public Image LTD, The Residents, DEVO (and some of Mark Mothersbaugh’s solo work), Test Dept, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft and SPK. Their set designs would cross derelict architecture with almost organic-looking industrial machine sculptures. One artist who clearly took influence from the Grand Guignol was the filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto, with his film Tetsuo: The Iron Man practically being like a Tokyo Grand Guignol play itself. This is further evident in the 1985 super 8mm film rendition, Phantom Of Regular Size, which shares several of the musical artists that the Tokyo Grand Guignol featured along with special effects of the salaryman transforming into a biomechanical monster closely resembling the set design from their Litchi Light Club play. This transcript is a rough translation of the description provided on the blog Endless Art (keikotoendlessart), combined with details provided in photos of the play and the clip that was broadcast on the TV program Youth Performance Special. The translation is rough given that I don’t speak or read Japanese. For the transcription process, I used a machine translator and picked apart the original text by sentence fragments, comparing the fragments with how the paragraphs would read out in full, sometimes even going by individual words. With what I gathered from these translations, I adapted them to the closest English terms and phrases. It’s far from a proper means of translation. There is a decent amount of guesswork going on in the process of recreating the play, so take things with a grain of salt I suppose. The full booklet is 50 pages, the first 43 pages being the transcript itself and the last several pages being personal notes I took while transcribing things along with an afterword. - From the subpage on my personal website under the miscellaneous section

(EPILEPSY WARNING - Contains flashing lights) "Atrocity Driver" from my upcoming surrealist horror animation The God Machine. This is a sample of the film's more "infernal" scenes, the hellish vibe of parts like this being a representation of the dehumanizing nature of capitalism. The tone of the film is abrasive, with the violent visuals and morbid historic references. My intentions with the film aren't to shock or offend. They tie in with an underlining humanitarian anti-capitalist narrative and an homage to the surrealist origins of guro. I intend to write an essay down the line about the general concepts behind the film, both politically and in the context of surrealist philosophy. My intentions with The God Machine are basically to capture a certain period of political turmoil and distress in America with the dangerous slope to nationalism and fascism, to distill the mental state of constant fear and uncertainty. It’s a state of apocalypse, how dehumanization can lead to apocalypse.

A frame-by-frame demonstration of how I use distorted photography to bridge the drawings together. I did this effect by photographing the images through a glass wine flask. More info and production updates on the film can be found on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheEyeOdyssey

(EPILEPSY WARNING - Contains flashing lights) The Putrified Ascetic: An abridged version of one of the scenes from my upcoming animation, The God Machine. The film has English subtitles with the spoken dialogue being in a nonexistent language comprised of backmasked dialogue. This scene in the film is heavily inspired by the theory of the limit-experience, where enlightenment is likened to the destruction and transgression of the senses. In theory, death could be taken as a morbid form of enlightenment in that context. In The God Machine, the undead haunt the living as rotting ascetics who were corrupted by their enlightenment. The idea of the putrified ascetic itself came from an essay I heard a while back that compared Bataille's philosophy with the film Hellraiser. I forgot the exact context, but it was something like this: Limit-experiences are made possible through any potential overwhelming and transgression of the senses, no matter what that sort of transgression is. To that degree, the way ascetics deprive themselves and seek enlightenment through suffering can be likened to a limit-experience. More info and production updates on the film can be found on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheEyeOdyssey https://twitter.com/i/events/1312653220502810624 I will mirror additional production logs on here down the line.

Some excerpts from the second and third chapters of my surrealist webcomic “Iron Logs”. Iron Logs started off in mid-2017 when I was observing the cartoonist circles that were active on Tumblr. Many artists in that circle that I knew were either closely following or writing their own, for a lack of a better term, “nudie cutie” comics. Essentially the same sort of stylistic traits and narratives you’d get in a Russ Meyer film, but commonly with characters who were more ‘alternatively’ (i.e. mall punk or goth) fashioned. Just around that time, I was developing an interest in Georges Bataille, following closely from my interests in surrealist collage and ero guro. Considering the nature of how Bataille published Story Of The Eye, I got the idea to make a surrealist comic that disguised itself as one of those contemporary Tumblr nudie comics to sorta disrupt the norm. The first chapter was made over the summer, while these other two I just started writing this year. The first chapter is a bit rough artistically speaking, these following chapters are closer to my initial vision. It apparently did meet my goal though. I remember in particular another artist who was writing his own comic expressed his being deeply concerned after being at a bit of a loss for words during the comic’s launch. The series is now somewhat wandering for a new home, as Tumblr’s guidelines drastically shifted in late-2018 and most of those artists had since migrated to other places. I don’t really know where though. Aside from the transgressive actions of the dysfunctional lovers that the series follows, Iron Logs is driven by the bizarre locations that it traverses. Some of the locations include a forest made out of plastic, the flesh market, a 1930s factory town riddled with murderous businessmen, a mansion of bourgeoisie complacency and perversity, the fetus of the universe, a prison camp, a ‘void room’, a prison camp and the iron woods (a forest where trees made of coagulated blood grow from the remains of detonated missiles). Just to clarify due to the sort of imagery depicted, none of the scenes in the comic reflect my personal views. My parents were animal rescuers before I was born, and the sexuality depicted is meant to be grotesque and surreal than erotic.