The latest post at Strange Flowers reminded me of some work of mine that appeared earlier this month which I can finally mention. Fenella Fielding reads Colette is another of those long-gestating recordings from Savoy’s audio division which has been released at last after a lengthy hiatus. This is a double-disc CD set of Fenella’s [...]
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 [...]
More psychedelia (there’s always more psychedelia). Listening to this Small Faces album this week I couldn’t remember whether my vinyl reissue from the 1980s had survived the vinyl purge I instituted a few years ago. It turns out I do still have the vinyl copy, a facsimile of the original circular sleeve. Ogdens’ Nut Gone [...]
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 [...]
El Banquete Magnético (2011) by Cristina Francov. • Did Vertigo Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema? asks Tom McCormack. He means Saul Bass’s title sequence which mostly uses still harmonographs but also features some animated moments by John Whitney. • Temple of the Vanities by Thomas Jorion. “Pictured here are political monuments and munitions depots, hulking [...]
Pan II (2012) by Fredrik Söderberg. • “Aubade was a surprise success, selling some 5000 copies and going into a second printing and an edition published in America. Martin was immediately a minor celebrity, being interviewed for articles that couldn’t mention what his book was actually about.” Rediscovering the works of Kenneth Martin. • “I [...]
Scena Illustrata was an Italian magazine that continued to fly the flag for Art Nouveau into the 1920s, by which time the style’s organic flourishes were looking old-fashioned when compared to the rectilinear forms of early Art Deco. This cover is from 1921 but could easily have appeared any time in the past two decades. [...]
Elektrik Karousel, a new release on the Ghost Box label by The Focus Group. “For a clue to its moods, think Czech animation, Italian Giallo, early Radiophonics, HP Lovecraft stories, 1960s underground cinema, Lewis Carroll and baroque psych.” Julian House’s package design is “heavily inspired by 1960s underground press and conceived as a kind of [...]
Le Vampire (c. 1903) by Agathon Léonard. Via Beautiful Century. • Two masters of rumbling atmospherics interviewed at The Quietus: Bobby Krlic aka The Haxan Cloak talks to Maya Kalev while Thomas Köner talks to Joseph Burnett. Discussions about the arts now have an awkward, paralyzed quality: few judgments about the independent excellences of works [...]
A post for Record Store Day, and a slight return to the work of Hipgnosis and the late Storm Thorgerson. One of the many things which impressed about Hipgnosis album designs was the way they gradually came to approach each album as a distinct package for which every component deserved special attention. The very early [...]
Wish You Were Here (outer and inner sleeve, 1975) by Pink Floyd. Whenever people ask questions about your work at some point the subject of influences always turns up. Influences for me are usually few, they’re those things which skew your perception to such a degree—or which enlarge the range of possibilities—that they make you [...]
Spotted at Beautiful Century, this scan of a postcard showing the flower shop which now occupies what was originally the Chemiserie Niguet in Brussels. The shop is in the Rue Royale, and the Art Nouveau storefront was installed in 1896 from a design by Belgian architect Paul Hankar (1859–1901). Considering this is one of Hankar’s [...]
Provocative Percussion (1959) by The Command All-Stars. You’d think that the handful of album cover designs produced by Bauhaus artist Josef Albers would have decorated something by Xenakis, or one of the composers experimenting with tape recording and electronics at the end of the 1950s. But no, it’s the easy listening cocktail music of Enoch [...]
Poster design by Mishka Westell for this month’s Austin Psych Fest. Billy Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top psychedelic outfit, The Moving Sidewalks, surprised everyone by reforming for a New York gig last month, their first performance together in 44 years. • Pye Corner Audio played the Boiler Room, London, last week, and remixed a track from FC [...]
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 [...]
01: Youth and Recreation; 02: Cycles and Seasons 03: Welcome to Godalming; 04: Familiar Shapes and Noises The Ghost Box Study Series, a sequence of occasional seven-inch singles on the Ghost Box label, is looking increasingly good as a set. The design, as usual, is by Julian House, while the music is by Belbury Poly, [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
The latest work-related research has had me browsing pages of these garish carpet designs. The photos above and below are by Chris Maluszynski, a man who’s spent some time documenting the alarmingly vivid patterns used on the carpets in Las Vegas casinos. Maluszynski spoke to the New Yorker about his project in a piece which [...]
Untitled art by Yang Yongliang. There’s more at But Does It Float. • “Newly unearthed ITV play could be first ever gay television drama“. Writer Gerald Savory, incidentally, also adapted Dracula for the BBC in 1977, still the version that’s closest to the novel. • Craig Redman and Karl Maier‘s poster designs for the Bavarian [...]
Stay updated via RSS.
