I mentioned Wilfried Sätty’s collage work last week and this album sports one of his few cover designs. A cult object for several reasons, not least Sätty’s involvement. The title lettering was by fellow psychedelic artist David Singer who I had the good fortune to meet in California in 2005 whilst researching Sätty’s career. That chunky Seventies lettering style now looks distinctly contemporary having come back into fashion over the past couple of years.
Beaver & Krause were among the pioneers of Moog-based electronic music in the 1960s and notably provided the throbs and drones which Jack Nitzsche mixed into the soundtrack for Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance. Gandharva was released in 1971 and one of the few all-electronic pieces on the album, Nine Moons in Alaska, is an outtake from those sessions. The first side is very uneven, with a blues jam and a gospel piece that don’t sit well with each other, never mind with the Moog tracks. Side two, however, is a far more successful suite of improvisations with organ, electronics, guitar, harp and saxophone (played by Gerry Mulligan) recorded live in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.
Cover photo from the Psychedelic Music Flickr pool which features many fine examples of cover design from the late Sixties on.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ginsberg’s Howl and the view from the street
• Further back and faster
• Quite a performance
• Borges in Performance
wow,
had this album back in the early seventies, but lost it.
Have been looking for it ever since.
especially for “by your grace” that never surpassed organ and sax piece.
maybe I should have used the gmail adress, which should show my face. My weblog is at http://www.queerlog.nl and the erotic art promo project is at http://www.delftboys.com
Hi Ad, thanks for dropping by. We had some correspondence several years ago after I’d been looking over Delftboys. I mentioned I was considering doing a series of homoerotic pictures, something I keep intending but never seem to get around to completing.
I should have said above that Gandharva has been available on CD for a while. I have two versions, one of them paired with an earlier album, In A Wild Sanctuary. Yes, ‘By Your Grace’ is marvellous.