Cipher Mysteries

If you happen to like both technical-minded heavy metal and cipher mysteries, I might possibly have a hot tip for you (thanks to Phil Strahl's blog). Otto Kinzel has released an album on Bluntface Records called "I want to report a murder", where every track is based on features or events in the Zodiac Killer cipher case. Kinzel has ...

Slowly but inexorably, the Voynich curve is a-changing: as the meme continues to extend its two-way taproots into mainstream culture during 2011, more artists and novelists are seeing its unreadability and inscrutability as sources of neo-postmodernist inspiration. Simultaneously, discussion of the manuscript is sprawling into many different languages and cultures (such as Romanian, according to Google Trends): yet these forays ...

Just to let you know about a nice little cipher-mystery-themed short story just published on the Daily Science Fiction website: "The Voynich Variations" by Edoardo Albert neatly merges the Voynich Manuscript's inaccessibility with modern orchestral music's inaccessibility, with a magical flourish to tie it all up. Enjoy!

Here's another (possibly?) Voynich Manuscript-themed musical composition on YouTube you probably haven't heard of. The notes that go with it say:- Circle: N-tone Album: Side material "FLOW" Artist: ziki_7 [Dust_Box_49] (which seems to be some kind of Japanese musical fanzine?) Original: ヴワル魔法図書館 (which is Japanese for "Voile, the Magic Library", whatever that means) Make of it what you will - ...

Rather than spam your (no doubt already dangerously close-to-overfilled) inboxes with a stream of inane posts about edgy Japanese musicians producing conceptual albums inspired by the VMs' illustrations (e.g. ... Limited edition Merzbow (Masami Akita) pressed on lime green vinyl, a work inspired by the plant illustrations in the Voynich manuscript, in a bootleg style cover. ...), Cipher Mysteries will be gently ...

Here's an intriguing musical cryptogram for you courtesy of Qaiwolf on Fark.com (comment #50 at the bottom of this page). Don't know where he/she got it from, but I'm sure you'll appreciate it. Can you decipher its hidden meaning? May not be as tricky as you think! :-)

Are you a male Caucasian, 51-60, living near upstate NY, and interested in a non-speaking, "wizard-esk" (I guess "-esque") acting role in a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-related film to be filmed 15th-25th October 2009? Well... Phill Allison, a directing major at the NYC school of visual arts, is holding "auditions / meetings" in Valatie on 8th-11th October 2009 for this role, so feel ...

Here's something a little bit more interactive than usual, please feel free to add your comments. :-) I woke up this morning in a Voynich Manuscript half-dream with the chorus of Belinda Carlisle's 1988 hit "I Get Weak" (written by Diane Warren) looping round incessantly. As with most dreams it probably meant nothing (sorry Sigmund), but it did set me thinking... ...

According to a nice little 2004 New Scientist article by Kevin Jones (Professor of Music at Kingston University, my most recent alma mater), even though Elgar composed his cipher note to Dora Penny in 1897, he appears to have reused the same 24-token cipher alphabet in an exercise book 30 ...

...or, in all its prolixitous glory, "The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World's Greatest Cryptographers", by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as "Can You Crack the Enigma Code?" in 2006. You'd have thought I'd be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, ...