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Cabaret Voltaire appeared on Spain’s La Edad de Oro music show a few months after Tuxedomoon in November 1983. This was three months after I saw the Cabs at the Haçienda in Manchester, a concert you can see yourself in terrible sound and picture quality on a Cherry Red DVD. (Granted, the Haçienda video recordings […]

San Francisco Sound (1967). Art by Wallace Studio, Seattle. • RIP gay porn pioneer Peter de Rome. BUTT posted de Rome’s surprisingly daring Underground (1972), a film in which two men have an unfaked sexual encounter on a New York subway train. That film and others are available on the BFI’s DVD collection. Related: Brian […]

I was going to post this anyway but there’s a coincidental connection with yesterday’s post in the person of Richard Horowitz whose keyboards can be heard on the soundtrack. The music is Power Spot, the opening number on the album of the same name released by ECM in 1986. Also present on the album are […]

When you’ve sated yourself on a group’s back catalogue there’s always the solo albums. In the case of Tuxedomoon there are a number of these to choose from, thanks to several of the band members being both multi-instrumentalists and talented songwriters. Some of the more offbeat solo outings may be found among the albums released […]

Subterranean Modern (1979). Sleeve art by Gary Panter. As often happens, one post leads to another, and the next thing you know there’s a themed week happening, so here’s something more about Tuxedomoon. Subterranean Modern was a compilation album released by The Residents on their Ralph Records label in 1979. The idea was to showcase […]

La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age) was a Spanish television show which only ran from 1983 to 1985 but during that time it managed to cause a considerable stir, first by showcasing in lengthy programs many musical groups that would have been unknown to the Spanish public (or the public of their native countries, […]

Scream With A View 12″ EP (1979) by Tuxedomoon. Design credited to Belfer/Roques. I’m pursuing a Tuxedomoon obsession at the moment so this gives me the opportunity to examine some of the group’s early record sleeves, all of which are designed by Patrick Roques. Tuxedomoon are an American group, and their early releases were on […]

Landscape II (1994) by Rick Wezenaar. Dutch photographer Rick Wezenaar writes that he’s now in business again after several years away from the field. Among his work there’s a substantial collection of male art photography featuring a variety of nudes and semi-nudes. Some of the models are dancers which will no doubt interest those who […]

No Tears for the Creatures of the Night (2005) by Will Munro. • Steve Barker’s On The Wire show on BBC Radio Lancashire is one of the longest-running music shows on British radio but it’s not broadcast in London so you seldom hear it mentioned at all. (It’s also the only radio show I’ve appeared on, […]

A statue of the Great God Pan looks down on the teeming chaos of Joseph Noel Paton’s The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849), one of many 19th-century paintings based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paton’s canvas gives Richard Dadd a run for his money in its wealth of incident and grotesque detail (see the […]

Pink Narcissus (2014) by Tuxedomoon. Design by Flavien Thieurmel. I’ve never paid much attention to Record Store Day, despite promoting it here on a couple of occasions, and paid even less attention this year now that the event has turned into an opportunity for some of the larger labels to fleece the punters. Consequently, I […]

Audio Arts was a British audio magazine established by Bill Furlong which appeared on vinyl LP, cassette tape and CD from 1973 to 2006. The Tate website has an archive section devoted to the magazine which allows you to listen to each of the tapes, surprisingly when much of the content on the Tate sites […]

A few more extensions of the idea, not all of which have much to do with Hinton’s concepts beyond the name. Salvador Dalí with hypercube (1952). Photo by Francesc Català-Roca. Hypercubic Metropolis (2002) by Peter Gric. HyperCube (2012) is an installation by artist Jaap van den Elzen and sound composer Augusto Meijer which combines the mirror […]

Illustration from The Fourth Dimension (1906) by Charles Howard Hinton. A slight return to the worlds of Borges. I happened to be re-reading some of the stories in The Book of Sand (1975), one of the later collections which includes the story Borges dedicated to HP Lovecraft, There are more things. Borges’ writings are nothing […]

Woman walking past a stationery shop on O’Connell (Sackville) Street. Photo by JJ Clarke. This year is the centenary of James Joyce’s short-story collection, Dubliners, so the book provides a predominant theme for this year’s Bloomsday. Not a great departure when both Dubliners and Ulysses concern the inhabitants of the same city. Dubliners would have […]

Poster for the recent Ballard-themed Only Connect Festival of Sound in Oslo. Design by Non-Format. • Bulldozer by Laird Barron was my favourite piece in Lovecraft’s Monsters, the recent Tachyon anthology edited by Ellen Datlow that I designed and illustrated. So it’s good to hear that Nic Pizzolato, writer of the justly-acclaimed HBO series True […]

The Wilde Years (2000), a poster by Jonathan Barnbrook for an exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London. Continuing an occasional series. Recent (and not-so-recent) Wildean links. • Sander Bink writes that Beardsley-esque artist Carel de Nerée tot Babberich was in Paris in the summer of 1900, the summer of the Exposition Universelle which has been […]

Signals (2014): vinyl front cover. Photo by Nico Hogg. Seeing as my design for the recent Signals album by Wen has been deemed one of the best covers of the year so far I thought I ought to mention some of the other albums I’ve worked on over the past few months. I tend to […]

To a cat Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences nor the arriving dawn more secretive; you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure which we can only spy at from a distance. By the mysterious functioning of some divine decree, we seek you out in vain; remoter than the Ganges or the sunset, yours […]

From a film adapted from Borges to a film co-written by the man himself. Invasion (1969) is not to be confused with the British science fiction film of the same name made three years earlier, this is an Argentinian production and a much stranger piece of work. Hugo Santiago is an Argentinian director who moved […]

The Spider’s Stratagem (1970) is Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of the Jorge Luis Borges story The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero; Death and the Compass (1992) is Alex Cox’s adaptation of the story Death and the Compass by the same author; Spiderweb (1977) is an earlier adaptation of Death and the Compass which is […]

Twelve Months of Flowers: June (no date) by Jacob van Huysum. The month of June in paintings is overburdened by bland pastoral scenes and views of battles, the summer months being favourable ones for warfare. Pastoral content is still present in the following selection albeit with an attempt to show some variety. Leighton’s Flaming June […]

Secret Bloom (2014) by Natalie Shau. Bloomsday approachs. “Reading Ulysses changed everything I thought about language, and everything I understood about what a book could do,” says Eimear McBride whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, recently won the first Bailey’s women’s prize for fiction. McBride was interviewed by Susanna Rustin last month, […]

Another collaboration between William Strang and JB Clark, Sindbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was published in 1895. The Sindbad text is from Edward William Lane’s popular (and bowdlerised) translation of the Thousand and One Nights; Ali Baba is from the translation by Rev. Jonathan Scott. The illustrations follow the same […]

The paintings and illustrations of Scottish artist William Strang (1859–1921) were much more typical of their time than the bold drawings in this 1895 edition of Rudolf Erich Raspe’s tall tales. Not all the illustrations are Strang’s work, some are by JB Clark, and there are many more in the book as a whole. Years […]

Terretektorh / Nomos Gamma (no date; late 60s) by Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis and Victor Vasarely are paired again on this album cover from the late 1960s. Given how often record companies have used abstract artwork on the sleeves of classical recordings, especially those by 20th-century composers, you’d expect there to be more examples. There may […]

I’ve always liked Victor Vasarely’s brand of Op-Art so this short film from 1960 would be of interest even without the addition of a score, Neg-Ale, by Iannis Xenakis. Considering the stature of the composer the music fails to add much at all so it’s no surprise to read at Ubuweb that Xenakis later withdrew […]

The Sixth Palace of Hell (1945). Fay Pomerance’s painting of Lilith makes a startling appearance in a book I have about the history of magic symbols, and it’s that appearance which prompts this post since I’ve never seen her work given any attention elsewhere. This seems surprising when women artists, and artists whose concerns encompass mysticism […]

Tom of Smurfland by Alessio Slonimsky. Rest assured this is about the only time anything Smurf-related will be allowed on these pages, the blue wretches having been partially redeemed for artist writer Dale Lazarov’s pin-up challenge for the month of May. Lazarov regularly proposes homoerotic redesign challenges on his Tumblr pages, something I wasn’t aware […]

Crashing Diseases And Incurable Airplanes (2014) by USA Out Of Vietnam. Artwork by Amy Torok. Amy Torok’s cover art for the debut album by Canadian band USA Out Of Vietnam is pleasingly reminiscent of the surreal and psychedelic collages of Wilfried Sätty. The music within has been described as “a cross between ELO and Sunn […]