Earlier this week I finally got my hands on the recent Blu-ray reissue of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977). Having only ever seen the film on the travesty of a DVD that appeared in 1998 I’m going to enjoy watching this at the weekend. Brits ought to know that (for now) the only edition available seems […]
• No Tears (1978): A song and 12″ EP by Tuxedomoon. Sleeve design by Winston Tong. • An artwork from 2005 by Will Munro. • A make-up portfolio from 2012 by Belinda Betz. Photographer : Erwin Tirta. Model : Jesy Love. Make-Up Artist (Special Effects) : Belinda Betz. • A badge design at Zazzle. • […]
Le Petit Journal, June 16, 1912. Via Beautiful Century. • Occult art by Nicomi Nix Turner, Daniel Martin Diaz, Amy Earles and William Crisafi. Related: Illustrations by Ernest M. Jessop for The Witches Frolic by Thomas Ingoldsby. • “Our definition of ‘Industrial’ then was a very broad one, it’s definitely not so much now.” Chris […]
Beck-Ola (1969) by The Jeff Beck Group. Painting: The Listening Room (second version, 1958). An inevitable post considering the shape of the week, and also a continuation of an occasional series about paintings used as album cover art. Given Magritte’s continuing popularity I’m sure these can’t be the only examples, especially when his work had […]
Julian House artwork for Other Voices, a new singles series on the Ghost Box label. Other Voices 01 is a collaboration between Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas and Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle. Last week I linked to a copy Zadie Smith’s new introduction for Crash by JG Ballard. That piece could only […]
French poster by Michel Landi for the ill-fated Jodorowsky film. There’s more to French music than Air and Daft Punk, and there’s more to cosmic French music than Magma, although you wouldn’t always know it to read Anglophone music journalists. I’ve been championing the electronica recorded by Bernard Szajner for a long time, and even […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Wolf City (1972) by Amon Düül II. Behold another favourite album cover by a favourite band, one of several superb designs for Amon Düül II by Falk-U Rogner who was also the group’s keyboard player. Rogner’s suitably hallucinogenic cover images are worth a post of their own but this one requires attention today since I […]
Another month, another exhibition catalogue. Steampunk: The Art of Victorian Futurism is still running at Artcenter IDA in Seoul with a selection of my book covers on display among a great variety of mechanical sculptures, costumes and other creations. The catalogue is a suitably lavish affair, so much so that it puts to shame many […]
This is a strange and beautiful book, a loving paean to a dead boy-poet from another poet, Stefan George (1868–1933), published in 1907. The “Maximin” of the title was Maximilian Kronberger (1888–1904) who was around 14 when he met George; the older man was 34 at the time. George was apparently smitten by the boy, […]
Discovered via the latest issue of The Wire magazine in a feature about compilation albums, The Rock Machine Turns You On (1968) was the first budget sampler album. Given the success of this release I’m sure I must have seen it over the years but that cover wasn’t familiar at all. I have to assume […]
For the past week I’ve been downloading more of the books at the Internet Archive illustrated by Matthäus Merian. Among the hoard there’s a two-volume set of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (1617–1626), a remarkable work which attempts to cover all the metaphysical, scientific and artistic knowledge […]
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