May 23, 2013

Catching up with more recent work, this was a quick collage for Fatality, a single by US musician OCTiV. This has been out for about a month. The main track—a kind of dubstep/metal hybrid—can be heard here. The request was for something on the cosmic horror spectrum which would also incorporate geometric elements, hence the [...]
May 19, 2013

Collage by Jeneleen Floyd. • “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars. • Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members. • Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her [...]
May 15, 2013

Kokoro No Uramado (1969) by Asaoka Ruriko. A few examples of Tadanori Yokoo’s earlier cover designs which are the ones I prefer. Although he’s continued to produce collage art for music releases, the CD format does his work few favours. I lose interest musically in Santana after about 1970 so I’d not looked properly at [...]
Apr 24, 2013

Philippe Lemaire is French, and another engraving collage artist who I’d have to include in the list of post-Ernst practitioners if I ever get round to updating my Strange Attractor essay about Wilfried Sätty. Like Ernst and Sätty, Lemaire seems to use paper-and-scissors techniques, although Sätty also made use of print processes in order to [...]
Apr 7, 2013

Collage by Chloé Poizat. • Xenis Emputae Travelling Band plays the Music of John Dee, and free at Bandcamp: Victorian Machine Music by Plinth, the “creaking, winding, piping, chiming and wood-knocking of Victorian parlour music machines”. • Jeremy Willard on Mikhail Kuzmin, “the Oscar Wilde of Russia”. Related: Conner Habib on the Disinfo podcast discussing [...]
Mar 31, 2013

Scarfolk, as was noted here last month, is a home from home, especially if you grew up in the 1970s. The mayor of the rabies-afflicted town, Richard Littler, talked to Creative Review about his unheimlich design project. • Ensemble Pearl, an album stream of “cosmic psychedelic space-doom minimal drone soundscapes” by Atsuo, William Herzog, Eyvind [...]
Mar 24, 2013

Light Moves on the Water (2010), a collage by Alexis Anne Mackenzie. “[She] stated, emphatically and more than once, that pornography cannot and should not be linked to LGBT rights…When a gay man lives somewhere where his identity is threatened, it’s clear how sex – including pornography – and sexuality are intertwined. His sexual imagination, [...]
Nov 30, 2012

Yes, it’s all happening this month… Unlike other work that’s surfaced recently the cover art for issue 41 of How It Works magazine was completed less than a month ago. Headlines obscure much of the artwork but the picture is also run full-page inside, something I wasn’t expecting. How It Works has major newsstand distribution [...]
Nov 13, 2012

Predicadors del be i del mal (c. 1928–1930). My thanks to Will at 50 Watts for sending these experimental photos by Spanish artists Eduardo Chicharro (1873–1949) and Gregorio Prieto, neither of whose work I’d looked at before. Prieto is of most interest here (that’s him in photo five with the metalwork wrapped around his head) [...]
Nov 11, 2012

Technological mandala 02 (The beginning) (2012) by Leonardo Ulian. • The Yellow Magic Orchestra really were the Japanese equivalent of Kraftwerk in 1978. I’d not seen this video for Firecracker before. Same goes for the Technopolis and Rydeen videos. Related: YMO’s synth programmer, Hideki Matsutake, showing off his modular Moog on a Japanese TV show. [...]
Sep 19, 2012

Labirynt. One of the links at the weekend was to this post about the favourite Polish posters of the Brothers Quay, a piece which included an example by designer and illustrator Jan Lenica (1928–2001). Lenica, like the Quays, was also a filmmaker who started out by producing short animations, Labirynt (1963) being one of these [...]
Jul 22, 2012

The Garden of Urban Delights (2010) by Marcin Owczarek. His protagonists are misfits: alienated, implicitly gay, longing for love, frequently hard to be around, always fixated on small pleasures that compensate for an essential feeling of not belonging. [...] His patroness Edith Sitwell termed him “that rare being, a born writer.” William Burroughs dedicated The [...]
Jul 6, 2012

So here’s a strange thing: having spent another working week sifting through scanned books at the Internet Archive what do I find but scans of album booklet art by Wilfried Sätty only a couple of days after writing about his album covers. The album in question may be familiar to some readers but it was [...]
Jul 3, 2012

Gandharva (1971) by Beaver & Krause. Cover art by Sätty, lettering by David Singer. There aren’t many, unfortunately, and half the ones here have already featured in previous posts, but since I’m often referring people to Sätty’s work it seems worthwhile gathering them together. His album cover art shows he was equally adept at working [...]
Jul 2, 2012

Interest in the work of collage artist Wilfried Sätty (1939–1982) increases by slow degrees, and did so again last year although I completely missed the occasion. Better late than never. Nature Boy is a 12-inch single by Jesper Ryom on the Berlin-based Power Plant label which comes adorned with this Sätty collage of a tattooed [...]
Jun 12, 2012

Detail from Assassination in the Night (c. 1600?) by Monsù Desiderio. Yesterday’s post looked at some of the past cover designs for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books. This post makes a few suggestions for how they might be presented in the future. Since these are mostly covers that I’d like to see they’re not necessarily [...]
Apr 3, 2012

Invariancia. The workload has increased recently so posting here may tend to laziness for a while. I think I first saw the hyper-detailed digital collages of Luis Toledo aka Laprisamata at Form is Void where Thom has a knack for spotting the good stuff. I was reminded of them again last week thanks to Dressing [...]
Feb 16, 2012

The Hay Wain (1973) by Jacques Brissot. Another post intended to encourage further investigation. Searching for Jacques Brissot’s art is a problem since the French artist (born 1929) gets confused with the French writer Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754–1793). Details about Brissot the artist are also scant: Jacques Brissot lives and works in Paris. He began [...]
Jan 16, 2012

La femme 100 têtes: L’immaculée conception (1929). Salvador Dalí never lacked for attention from filmmakers, as has been noted here on several occasions. Max Ernst, on the other hand, received far less attention despite being an actor and collaborator in two of the most significant Surrealist films, L’Age D’Or (1930) and Dreams That Money Can [...]
Nov 20, 2011

Group I (Convertible Series, 2010) by Monir Farmanfarmaian. The four albums recorded by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis under the name Dome are being reissued by Editions Mego together with Gilbert & Lewis’s Yclept album. I always preferred Gilbert & Lewis in their Dome incarnation (and Colin Newman solo) to the punk and post-punk stylings [...]