Shades of Toho: the city of San Francisco encounters its octopoid nemesis on this gig poster from DKNG. Via OMG Posters!

• Related to the above: Godzilla Haiku.

• View from Another Shore: a fantastic (so to speak) and overdue interview with Franz Rottensteiner, writer and editor of landmark studies of fantasy and science fiction.

• Ronald Searle: a life in pictures: an appreciation by Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell.

• 832 masks: The Maskatorium at Flickr.

• The Cult of the Theremin: lots of theremin links including this page of scans from a beautiful Art Deco theremin brochure. (Thanks to Kara for the tip!) Related: the DIY IKEA lamp theremin.

• Music & Science Fiction, an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs.

• Nathalie found a stoned angel in Rome.

• EVB’s Boy of the Week is a Spanish guy in his underwear drawn by Jacobo Labella.

• Film of the month: Sally Potter’s Orlando on DVD, featuring the luminous enigma of Tilda Swinton.

It’s a curious feeling when a drawing which is nearly 26 years old makes it out into the world. The image above is the cover of a new 7″ single release, Dominion of Avyaktam by metal band Orator, the picture being something I drew in 1984 entitled Mahakala after the Tibetan deity which it depicts. The inspiration was the cover of another recording, a Nonesuch Explorer album, Tibetan Buddhism – Tantras Of Gyütö: Mahakala, and also the track Mahakala by 23 Skidoo from their 1983 album The Culling is Coming. The skull is drawn from a real one I was given. Looking at this today none of the elements seem to work together—and the landscape stuff looks like a lazy way of filling in space—but it’s nice to see it find a home. Dominion of Avyaktam is out now on the Legion of Death label.

• Surprise of the week: two books I’ve worked on were nominated for Nebula Awards, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, and Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand whose interior I designed.

• More music: a recording of Paul Schütze’s Third Site played live in 1999 (with Clive Bell, Raoul Björkenheim, Simon Hopkins & Thomas Köner’s voice) is now available as a free download on his website. More Schütze: Paul Schütze & Simon Hopkins playing a set at the Horbar in Hamburg on December 28, 2009.

• The incredible pinscreen animations of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker are finally available on DVD. Also new to DVD, Alan Bennett at the BBC, a four-disc set of some of his TV plays including a particular favourite of mine, his Kafkaesque drama The Insurance Man.

• More Ghost Box business: Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle has a blog. And Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp was interviewed recently by Peter Bebergal at Mystery Theater. Related (forgot to mention this last week): The ASDA Mix, a great mixtape of spooky retro weirdness by Moon Wiring Club available for free at The Wire.

• The trailer for Mellodrama, a documentary about the Mellotron by Dianna Dillworth.

• The Parajanov Festival will be screening some of the director’s films in London and Bristol.

• Lots of weird and wonderful exhibits at the ~Wunderkammer~.

Good things come in fours: the mighty Kraftwerk performing Numbers on the Minimum-Maximum DVD (2005).

Yes, the day between Darwin Day and St. Valentine’s Day is this blog’s birthday. I continue to be surprised that I’ve kept this going for so long since I never managed to keep a diary. Doing work that chains you to a computer is a help, although the past year was so busy that many entries were little more than picture posts. 2009 saw this site receiving more traffic than ever with the result that the server resources are now regularly overloaded for a couple of hours each day. I’ve been intending to move to a new webhost for a while but doing so is a time-consuming and technically complex business over which the current hectic workload continues to take priority.

The three most popular posts of the last twelve months were the following:

• The gay artists archive. Always a popular page but now it’s the most popular destination by a long margin, helped by continual visits from Stumbleupon users.

• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar. Links on Boing Boing, Trendhunter and elsewhere helped make this year’s calendar a big success. My thanks again to everyone who bought a copy, I’ll be doing a Through the Looking-Glass follow-up in September.

• Alan Moore interview, 1988. Another Stumbleupon hit, this magazine interview was one of my earliest posts and it remains curiously popular, more so than the very long Watchmen round table discussion which followed.

As always, thanks for reading and for all your comments!

John x

• Two covers from a new range of Penguin reprints for the Aids awareness fund (RED), all of which are based around quotes from the books in question. Non-Format’s stylised extract concerns the blazing red of the Count’s eyes while Coralie Bickford-Smith plays some Tom Phillips games with the text of The Secret Agent. The random circles no doubt relate to those which the doomed Stevie Verloc occupies his time in drawing. More at Caustic Cover Critic.

• Artspeak? It’s complicated. Jon Canter at The Guardian makes a blazingly obvious point which few in the art world would ever admit: that the specious pronouncements of many galleries and contemporary artists are the worst kind of bullshit.

• I helped judge the Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition whose winners were announced last week.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook enjoys Neu! and Wendy Carlos.

• Nuit Blanche, a short film by Spy Films.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

A reminder that the Manchester District Music Archive’s Queer Noise event (for which I designed posters and flyers) takes place this Saturday.

Join us on Saturday 23rd January 2010 at The Deaf Institute for a one-off celebration of gay music in Manchester.

The line-up includes:
DJs: Dave Kendrick (Paradise Factory) • Jayne Compton (Club Brenda) • Philippa Jarman (Aytoun/Homo Electric) • Wes Baggaley (Terrorist)

Live Music: (hooker) • The Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus

Discussion: Jon Savage • Dave Kendrick • Liz Naylor • Jayne Compton • Gerry Potter aka Chloe Poems

Tickets are £6 are now available from Piccadilly Records.

ONLINE EXHIBITION
We will follow this event with an online exhibition scheduled for March 2010, curated by Jon Savage. If you have any flyers, posters, photos, footage or info relating to gay music in Manchester from the 1940s onwards, do get in touch at: info@mdmarchive.co.uk

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Queer Noise and the Wolf Girl

The Düsseldorf maestros are treated to some animated illustration in this 1979 film by Roger Mainwood which takes Kraftwerk’s Autobahn as its soundtrack. Mark at Strange Attractor provided the tip and he compares the animation style to René Laloux and Roland Topor’s Fantastic Planet (1973). The purple humanoid floating through surreal landscapes is certainly reminiscent of Laloux’s film, but Autobahn also reminds me of Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro non troppo (1977) and, given that Mainwood’s animation comes a couple of years later, it may well have been inspired by it. Bozzetto’s film is a feature-length “adult” response to Walt Disney’s Fantasia which takes the Fantasia format—well-known classical themes illustrated by animated sequences—but does so in a slightly more grotesque or risqué fashion. Much of Bozzetto’s film seems less daring today than it was in 1977 but the best sequence still works well and happens to be as science fictional as Mainwood’s Autobahn, an entire cycle of planetary evolution set to Ravel’s Bolero. Follow the links below.

• Roger Mainwood’s Autobahn pt. 1 | pt. 2
• Ravel’s Bolero from Allegro non troppo

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sleeve craft
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• Old music and old technology
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• The genius of Kraftwerk

Kjendalskronebrae, Nordfjord, Norway (c. 1900). From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division via Wood s Lot.

Are you suffering list fatigue yet? I certainly have been, especially from the apparently endless “best ___ of the decade” catalogues which would have you believe that the significant cultural products of the past ten years have been thoroughly sifted, reviewed and appraised. So yes, there’s a degree of hypocrisy in adding to the list surplus but, as with the Halloween music lists, it’s difficult to write about an area of listening without compiling something like this. As it happens, my Halloween playlists proved briefly popular this year when they were noticed by Stumbleupon users so someone appreciates them.

The present selection is music to complement the season and its chilly weather which in our part of the world has been colder than usual and laden with snow. It might also serve as a suggested alternative to the dreary plague of Christmas songs. This isn’t definitive, of course, and I could have added more than ten. I kept the choices in the electronic spectrum but there’s a whole other list which could be made of winter-themed folk songs, folk music of all kinds being sensitive to the changing seasons.

Sonic Seasonings (1972) by Wendy Carlos.
Between her electronic transcriptions of Baroque music and the score for A Clockwork Orange, Wendy Carlos released a collection of four long pieces of electronic atmospherics blended with natural sound recordings, with each track dedicated to a different season. The album may not have had the formal intent of Brian Eno’s ambient albums but ambient it certainly is, preceding Eno’s Discreet Music by three years whilst predicting much of what would become over-familiar during the 1990s. The Winter track is the one which concerns us here, a droning Moog landscape of echoed notes, tinkling ice, distant wind and Rachel Elkind’s lupine howls. Carlos and Elkind carried the synthesised chill into their opening music for The Shining a few years later, and Carlos returned to the theme with the digital improvisations of Land of the Midnight Sun, included as a bonus on the Sonic Seasonings CD.

Eskimo (1979) by The Residents.
A conceptual masterpiece, and an album which still sounds as strange and timeless as it did when it first appeared. Eskimo is the first and (one presumes) only example of what might be labelled “Eskimo exotica” since the whole work is more Eskimo-esque than an authentic musical rendering of the world of the Inuit people. Like Wendy Carlos’s Winter, these are shifting soundscapes augmented by ritual chants and synthesised animal sounds. For those who found the album to be musically inaccessible the group released Diskomo, a segue of the musical themes matched to a thumping dance beat.

Iceland (1979) by Richard Pinhas.
Another far north concept album and the third solo release from the Heldon guitarist who subdues his Robert Fripp impersonations in favour of synth arrangements. The CD version includes a 22-minute bonus, Winter Music.

Victorialand (1986) by Cocteau Twins.
Much of the Cocteau Twins’ chiming and reverb-drenched output would suit the colder months but Victorialand in particular takes its title from a region of Antarctica, and many of the track titles—Whales Tails, How to Bring a Blush to the Snow—point in that direction. Another timeless work.

White Out (1990) by Johannes Schmoelling.
Schmoelling was a member of Tangerine Dream in what I consider to be their last worthwhile incarnation from 1980 to 1986. His third solo album also takes Antarctica as its theme and while some of the music tends to a jaunty blandness at its best it manages to evoke the isolation of the continent through lengthy synthesiser pieces. When the Polydor release went out of print, Schmoelling re-worked the album slightly for reissue on his own label.

Songs from the Cold Seas (1995) by Hector Zazou.
Many of the late Hector Zazou’s albums were concepts of some kind, often involving a roster of guest artists. Songs from the Cold Seas follows this pattern with singers from around the world delivering a variety of songs from the world’s colder regions. For a contrast to the Residents’ ethnological forgeries, Song of the Water is a chant by Inuit artists Elisha Kilabuk and Koomoot Nooveya. Among other highlights there’s Björk who restrains her vocal gymnastics for once with a delicate Icelandic lullaby, Vísur Vatnsenda-Rósu.

Polar Sequences (1996) by Higher Intelligence Agency & Biosphere.
A collaboration between Bobby Bird of HIA and Biosphere’s Geir Jenssen, recorded live with sounds sourced in and around Jenssen’s home town of Tromsø at the Arctic Circle. I much prefer this to the other HIA releases which lack its detailed textures. One track, Meltwater, sounds just as you’d expect, all running water and crackling ice.

Substrata (1997) by Biosphere.
Still one of the finest Biosphere releases (although Nordheim Transformed is probably my favourite) and included here for its chilly and mostly beatless atmosphere which includes further samples from the far north.

La Marche de L’Empereur (2005) by Emilie Simon.
I still haven’t seen La Marche de L’Empereur (March of the Penguins) but the soundtrack for the original French release is a fantastic collection of songs illustrating the survival struggles of the film’s penguins. Emilie Simon is frequently described as “the French Björk”, a lazy label which only connects the pair because they’re female singers who also happen to be “foreign” and users of unorthodox electronic arrangements. The recordings here feature glitch-inflected rhythms and glass instruments which means they were far too interesting for the American release of the film. The Hollywood version dropped the songs in favour of a traditional orchestral score.

Alaska Melting (2006) by Monolake.
The latest album from Monolake, aka Robert Henke, was released earlier this month. Silence has a winter scene on the cover and a track entitled Infinite Snow but winter isn’t a predominant theme. While the music is up to Henke’s usual high standard, it’s a lot less urgent than Alaska Melting, a one-off release on 12″ vinyl with two slices of vibrant techno that foreground Henke’s environmental concerns. The most uptempo and abrasive work on this list.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• A cluster of Cluster
• Fragment Endloss by Robert Henke
• Another playlist for Halloween
• Thomas Köner
• A playlist for Halloween

The Million Volt Light & Sound Rave (1967).

More psychedelia as Paul Gorman at The Look alerts me to an exhibition of work by Pop artist Dudley Edwards running this month at 3345 Parr St, Liverpool. Edwards was a part of the Binder, Edwards & Vaughan design collective in the 1960s, renowned for their light shows and psychedelic murals. BEV were Beatles favourites for a while, the photo below shows Edwards painting the piano upon which Paul McCartney wrote Getting Better. They also painted vehicles, including a Cobra sports car for doomed Guinness heir Tara Browne whose crash death was immortalised in A Day in the Life. And their Million Volt Light & Sound Rave event at the Roundhouse was distinguished by a unique Beatles sound collage, Carnival of Light, which McCartney was talking up last year, saying it ought to be given a proper release.

A Journey Into Vision & Sound will focus on Edwards artistic output from this halcyon period and will feature a selection of images that have been archived for over forty years including photography by Lord Snowdon and the mural Edwards painted for Ringo Starr in 1967. (More.)

A Journey Into Vision & Sound runs until November 30, 2009. There’s more about the work of Dudley Edwards and BEV at The Look.

Dudley Edwards painting Paul McCartney’s piano.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through the Wonderwall
• Psychedelic Life
• Psychedelic vehicles

In which the Buddha Machine returns as a bespoke instrument/greatest hits package from Industrial music outfit Throbbing Gristle. Having been a TG aficionado for many years, and being the proud owner of a Buddha Machine, this item looks like an essential purchase.

Thirteen original TG loops: a mix of experimental noise, industrial drone, and classic melodies and rhythms.
Built-in 50mm speaker, volume control, pitch-shift control and loop selector switch.
Features more loops and almost twice the frequency range of the original Buddha Machines.
Powered by two AA batteries.
Palm-Sized: W 67mm x H 69mm x D 35mm
Available in three colours: Black, Chrome and Red
UK Retail Price: 19.99 GPB
Designed by: Throbbing Gristle & Christiaan Virant
Concept by: Christiaan Virant
Manufactured by: Industrial Records Ltd
Music by: Throbbing Gristle

While we’re on the subject of music/noise and musical noise, there’s a couple of other recent discoveries worthy of mention. Inudge is another music-making web toy using loops and a grid system. Very easy to use and fun to play with. Less frivolously, the British Library opened its Archival Sound Recordings to the public earlier this month. I grew up by the sea, and still miss being near it, so the lapping wave soundscapes are a pleasant balm.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N
• Uncopyable
• Buddha Machine Wall
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• Generative culture

A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N is a collaboration between artist Cerith Wyn Evans and Throbbing Gristle, the once notorious Industrial music act now enjoying a resurgence of activity and attention. Evans and TG have an earlier connection via Derek Jarman, for whom Evans worked as an assistant. Given how much I enjoy seeing mirrors used in art, I’m very taken with these, and knowing that they function as drifting speakers transmitting specially recorded TG audio makes them doubly interesting. The mirrors-plus-audio aspect is reminiscent of Josiah McElheny’s recent Island Universes with Paul Schütze but that’s not to imply any influence, both artists have been following their individual paths for some time.

The title of this work comes from a poem by Stephan Mallarmé (1842–1898), a poet closely associated with the Symbolists. Looking at an English translation, the piece ends with the line “a snow of white bouquets of perfumed stars”; that final, impossible flourish—perfumed stars—is a very Symbolist touch. Claude Debussy, who took the title of his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune from Mallarmé, set Apparition to music in 1884.

A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N can be seen at Tramway, Glasgow until September 27, 2009.

• A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N test run on Chris Carter’s Flickr pages.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
• The art of Josiah McElheny

Moldover’s CD case: a working theremin.

In May this year, Brian Eno was writing in Prospect magazine about the current state of the music business as it continues to be assailed by digital technology. Among the things Eno discussed was the packaging of music:

The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable—so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. … That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living. So, as one business folds, several others open up. (More.)

Having started out as an album cover artist (I wasn’t a designer back then), and working still as a CD designer, this is naturally an attractive thesis. Earlier this week John Walsh in The Independent wrote a potted history of the album cover and noted that the big record companies are also realising again that contemporary music as an artform is more than merely a collection of audio tracks:

Apple, creator of the iPod and the iTunes store—the sworn enemies of commercially-packaged music—is getting into bed with the four largest record labels, to help them stimulate album sales. They’re working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music Group on something called “Project Cocktail” that will produce all manner of extras to go with albums: interactive booklets, sleeve notes, photographs, lyric sheets, even video clips. Buyers will be able to call up album tracks through the interactive booklet, while leafing through pictures of the band and trying to make sense of the lyrics.

This, however, seems to be missing the point. Absolutely anything digital can be copied and passed on, and that applies equally to album extras as to the tracks themselves. What can’t be copied, of course, is a desirable object which contains the music. The lavish album sleeves of the 1970s were very much desirable objects which contained music, and no end of facsimile CDs of Physical Graffiti will match the impact of Peter Corriston and Mike Doud’s design for the vinyl release.

Which brings us to Moldover’s extraordinary light-operated theremin-in-a-CD-case, a beautiful design and a really clever use of the wretched jewel case box. The music on Moldover’s accompanying CD may be swapped around illicitly but no one is going to copy the hardware. The “Awesome Edition” of this work costs $50 and can be ordered here.

Moldover’s theremin is only an adjunct to his music, albeit a delightful one. Tristan Perich, on the other hand, like Fm3’s Buddha Machine, makes the case and the instrument one, and in Perich’s case (so to speak) possibly takes the 8-bit/chiptune thing to a definitive extreme. This is the kind of invention we could use more of, not some lazy Flash applications appended to a pop release then dumped onto the iTunes Store as an “exclusive”. It’s notable that the one thing all these works have in common is that they’re the inventions of no-budget independent artists, not big record labels.

While we’re on the subject of the Buddha Machine, the guys at Mountain*7 noted this YouTube loop work which extends the drone-loop idea into the audio/visual realm.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buddha Machine Wall
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• Generative culture

In Spaces Between from The Great Old Ones (1999).

Some noteworthy pieces of news as the month draws to a rain-sodden and dismal conclusion.

• Frank Woodward was in touch this week to let me know that his excellent HP Lovecraft documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, will at last be appearing on DVD in October. This is a feature-length appraisal of Lovecraft’s life, work and influence, and includes contributions from Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Guillermo Del Toro, Caitlin R Kiernan, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell and Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi. A number of my artworks are included throughout and they’ll probably also be featured in a gallery section on the disc. The film was shot in HD so it’s being released on Blu-ray as well as regular DVD.

• Also Lovecraft-related, and also due out shortly, is DM Mitchell’s follow-up to the landmark Starry Wisdom anthology of Lovecraft-inspired texts and graphics. That volume was acclaimed in some quarters and condemned in others; I don’t doubt that this new work, Songs of the Black Wurm Gism, will manage the same. Contributors include David Britton, Grant Morrison and yours truly. The cover is Alan Moore’s splendid portrait of Asmodeus.

• Last but not least, Paul Schütze was also in touch this week with news that two more audio works have been added to his online catalogue. Soundworks 01 is his atmospherics created with with Andrew Hulme from the recent TV drama series Red Riding, while Tokyo/Osaka Live is two pieces of improvisation with Simon Hopkins. Both releases are available through iTunes.

Elly Jackson of La Roux in the recent video for Bulletproof. I’ve been enjoying La Roux’s debut album a great deal in the past week. The jacket she’s wearing is designed by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and features the black stripes and primary colours used by Piet Mondrian (1874–1942) in his Neo-plasticist paintings of the 1920s.

Castelbajac’s jacket (above left) is from a collection his website calls JC in the sky with diamonds!!!, a collection which also borrows Jackson Pollock’s paint drips and Disney’s Mickey Mouse for some bold Pop Art effects. Further Mondrian inspiration is in evidence on other outfits but the Dutch painter’s influence on the fashion world goes back at least as far as 1961 with a dress design by Ann Klein, followed shortly thereafter by Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian day dress (above right).

Twenty years later, French bicycle racing team La Vie Claire used Mondrian as an inspiration for their distinctive jersey designs. This flourishing in the Eighties makes Elly Jackson’s choice of clothing particularly apt since La Roux draw so much on Eighties’ music and style. The sight of the racing jacket reminds me of Eighties’ band Age of Chance who liked to wear similar cycling gear and whose video for Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Noise incorporates some Mondrian background patterns, possibly via The Designer’s Republic who were designing their record sleeves at the time.

You can still buy replica copies of La Vie Claire clothing even though the racing team no longer exists. The woman’s dress above was another derivation produced a couple of years ago by Urban Outfitters.

Mickey Mondrian (1976).

I’m sure these aren’t the only clothing designs to be found. Tracking the full extent of Mondrian’s influence today is an impossible task, as well as being a great painter he’s inadvertently become one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century. Those abstract patterns get everywhere; Mondrian Espresso, anyone? So I’ll end with a witty painting by artist and designer Mick Haggerty whose Mickey Mondrian managed to collide the Dutch painter with Disney’s mouse three decades before Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #8: Keep Calm and Carry On
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

Out again to Trinity Church in Salford for an evening of musical performance from the Miasmah label. “Miasma” was a fitting word for this event since all three artists proved very adept at filling the humid air with great clouds of treated guitar chords, loops and electronic noise.

The aural miasms created by The Sight Below, aka Rafael Anton Irisarri and Simon Scott, reminded me of favourites Main whose Hz album I’d been playing earlier in the day. Main were among the first musicians in the 1990s to extend the sound of the electric guitar through samples and other processing, and everyone at the Trinity tonight was following a similar path, albeit with very distinctive, individual styles. The Sight Below add a pulse of heavy rhythm to their sheets of distortion. Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin of Deaf Center) meanwhile, played some great bowed Stratocaster then some even better squalls of Strat feedback. Very impressive all round and the combination of volume plus environment (old church carefully lit and perfumed by clouds of incense) showed again why these kind of intimate performances often trump their recorded equivalents; sometimes you just have to be there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Deaf Center in Manchester
• Machinefabriek in Manchester
• Trinity rendezvous
• Main

Extending the recent pagan theme, Ubuweb posts Derek Jarman’s determinedly occult and oneiric film, In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), notable for its soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle. This was the longest of Jarman’s films derived from Super-8 which he made throughout the 1970s between work as a production designer and his feature films. He never saw the low resolution, grain and scratches of Super-8 as a deficiency; on the contrary, for a painter it was a means to achieve with film stock some of the texture of painting. Michael O’Pray described the process and intent behind the film in Afterimage 12 (1985):

In 1973, Jarman shot the central sequences for his first lengthy film, and most ambitious to date, In the Shadow of the Sun, which in fact was not shown publicly until 1980, at the Berlin Film Festival. In the film he incorporated two early films, A Journey to Avebury a romantic landscape film, and The Magician (a.k.a. Tarot). The final sequences were shot on Fire Island in the following year. Fire Island survives as a separate film. In this period, Jarman had begun to express a mythology which he felt underpinned the film. He writes in Dancing Ledge of discovering “the key to the imagery that I had created quite unconsciously in the preceding months”, namely Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Seven Sermons to the Dead. He also states that these books “gave me the confidence to allow my dream-images to drift and collide at random”. The themes and ideas found in Jubilee, The Angelic Conversation, The Tempest and to some extent in Imagining October are powerfully distilled in In the Shadow of the Sun. Jarman’s obsession with the sun, fire and gold (which spilled over in the paintings he exhibited at the ICA in 1984) and an ancient mythology and poetics are compressed in In the Shadow of the Sun with its rich superimposition and painterly textures achieved through the degeneration “caused by the refilming of multiple images”. Jarman describes some of the ideas behind In the Shadow of the Sun:

“This is the way the Super-8s are structured from writing: the buried word-signs emphasize the fact that they convey a language. There is the image and the word, and the image of the word. The ‘poetry of fire’ relies on a treatment of word and object as equivalent: both are signs; both are luminous and opaque. The pleasure of Super-8 is the pleasure of seeing language put through the magic lantern.” Dancing Ledge p.129

Ubuweb also has some of the short films which were used as raw material for the longer work: Journey to Avebury (1971) (with an uncredited soundtrack by Coil), the Kenneth Anger-esque Garden of Luxor (1972), and Ashden’s Walk on Møn (1973).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Derek Jarman at the Serpentine
• The Angelic Conversation
• The life and work of Derek Jarman

A visit to Baked Goods distribution this week brought me a haul of new releases, all items I’ve either designed or overseen the production of. Among the new CD designs I’ve already mentioned the Tectonic Plates compilation, a really excellent collection of dubstep singles with a bonus disc of mixes by Pinch. Related to Tectonic’s Bristol underground is a compilation of singles from the Caravan label mixed by DJ October. I’ve put together the labels for Caravan’s vinyl over the past year and assisted with the layout of this, their first CD. The other new design (which I’ve yet to add to the site) is a collection of live improvisations by Mojo-tipped Liondialer (influences: Supersilent, Talk Talk, Ornette Coleman, Tony Conrad, Stars of the Lid, Jandek, Loren Connors, Ben Frost, Shearwater…), aka Greg Haines and Danny Saul. This is another release on the White Box label and was recorded, edited and sequenced by my good friend Gav whose knowledge of music esoterica has been drawn upon for previous posts here.

Also new: a clutch of recent vinyl (I really need to add a vinyl section to my pages), a Tectonic promo T-shirt (!), and two releases which I helped guide through the production process, Cloaks Versus Grain and The Sleeper by The Leisure Society, the latter being a very well-received release which was nominated earlier this year for an Ivor Novello award.

Meanwhile, there’s more book work turning up but I’ll talk about that when I’ve had a chance to further update the site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Plates: Volume 2

One of the drawbacks with recommending Paul Schütze’s music lately has been a lack of availability, with most of his CDs being out of print. That changes this month with his back catalogue returning via iTunes sporting a range of impressive new artwork (above) created by Mr Schütze himself.

Schütze’s electronic music stood out for me in the mid-Nineties for a number of reasons: firstly, and most obviously, it wasn’t always tied to the rigid metronomic pulse which governed the rest of the dance world. There were 4/4 beats at times—and he even had an album on Belgian dance label Apollo under the anagrammatical pseudonym Uzect Plausch—but his music was equally subject to unusual time-signatures with chiming timbres borrowed from gamelan orchestras.

Those timbres and their attendant tropical atmospheres were a second point of distinction. Like Jon Hassell, to whom he pays homage on Stateless (1997), there’s an acknowledgement of non-Western music without any falling into pastiche. This realises one aspect of Hassell’s Fourth World concept, whereby a meeting of the First World and the Third World creates an exclusive temporary zone that nonetheless can’t exist without the contribution of either party.

A third distinction would require a detailing of Schütze’s notable collaborators—Bill Laswell and Raoul Björkenheim among them—and his inventive track titles, many of which sound like Surrealist paintings. But describing music is always a poor thing compared to experiencing it. If you want a place to start, I’d recommend New Maps of Hell II: The Rapture of Metals (1993; reissued 1996) or Abysmal Evenings (1996), two constant favourites.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Josiah McElheny
• The Garden of Instruments

My third CD design for the Tectonic label is another piece of relative minimalism which once again features photos by Liz Eve. All the backgrounds on this occasion are microscope close-ups of vinyl records, very fitting for a double-CD collection of recent 12″ releases.

The Tectonic logo (which predates my involvement with the label) is based on the Technics logo and for this release I tidied the label logo slightly, a process which led to the discovery that the Technics design used a variant of the Clarendon typeface for its letter shapes (it’s not an exact match). This in turn led me to use Clarendon in various weights across the packaging, something which made a change from the usual sans serif or monospace font. The great Saul Bass frequently used Clarendon for his title sequences; if it’s good enough for Saul, it’s certainly good enough for me.

Tectonic main man Rob Ellis talked to Fact magazine about the new release earlier this week.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aerial by 2562
• New things for November

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

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ginsberg’s Howl and the view from the street
• Further back and faster
• Quite a performance
• Borges in Performance

From HP Lovecraft to another writer of weird fiction, Gustav Meyrink. Das Haus zur letzten Latern is a tribute to Meyrink by Silence & Strength and the package I designed late last year for Horus CyclicDaemon has just been released. I’ve mentioned before that Horus make a particular effort with all their CD productions, choosing their materials carefully, and this release is no exception. An envelope of green textured card has two of my designs embossed on either side. Inside this there’s another envelope containing the disc and an 8-page A5 booklet of dark green ink on heavy paper with a grainy texture. The music is suitably dark and atmospheric and would work very well as a soundtrack to Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920). Seeing as Wegener’s film is the most famous Meyrink adaptation I borrowed the shapes of Prague buildings from one of the original film posters. The rest of the graphics are done in a very spare, quasi-Expressionist drawing style which was a pleasure to do since it’s quite different to my usual work. The background of the booklet pages show an old map of Meyrink’s city, Prague.

When people have asked me recently what I think about the proliferation of music downloads I tell them that the best way for record labels (and book publishers for that matter) to continue to attract purchasers is to make beautiful objects which people feel compelled to own. The content is always endlessly reproducible, the packaging isn’t. As far as this argument goes, Horus CyclicDaemon has been ahead of the game for some time.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for November II
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Nosferatu
• Barta’s Golem

Regular readers will know I’ve enthused before over the electronica of Robert Henke, aka Monolake. The Monolake site recently resumed its monthly free downloads and the offering for this month is a 9-minute piece of abstract video by Dutch artist Tarik Barri. Fascinatingly immersive, this is like a 360º view of the Star Gate from 2001: A Space Odyssey accompanied by ambient drones and rumbles. Henke and Barri are planning on touring this audiovisual experience with a couple of dates already announced on Barri’s website.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moonlight in Glory

Another authorless design: Vertigo #6360 616 (1973).

Things we did (or didn’t) learn about album cover design this week.

• The jury is still out as to whether Barney Bubbles designed the covers for the UK releases of Kraftwerk’s third and fourth albums, Ralf and Florian and Autobahn. BB experts Rebecca & Mike did clarify a few points with Kraftwerk designer and collaborator Emil Schult, however. This matter requires further research if only to satisfy my own curiosity.

• The Guardian finally caught up with the CD Cover Meme which was discussed here last year. “Labels spend fortunes on what you lot have managed in minutes” says the paper. By the same rationale anyone who keeps a blog is, de facto, a journalist because all that either involve is writing down a few words. Clever.

• Taking the DIY theme one stage further, Figment is a site where you can invent your own band and promote them via imaginary album sales on the site. You can also create your own cover art, of course, and Figment have asked me to judge an album cover contest with the very real and worthwhile first prize of the latest edition of Photoshop and a copy of Paul Gorman’s excellent Barney Bubbles monograph, Reasons To Be Cheerful. The contest is running now until April 3rd, 2009, if you’re interested.

Update: Cover versions: How Hipgnosis created some of the most memorable images of the Seventies. The Independent on the new Hipgnosis book.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• The CD cover meme

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.

Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me earlier, namely his belief that Barney Bubbles designed the UK release of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album in 1974. I thought this unlikely at first but the more I’ve been thinking about it the more possible it seems. So here’s a quick run through the evidence in the hope that someone out there may have more information to either confirm or deny the theory.

The 2004 version from the unreleased The Catalogue.

Firstly it should be noted that the original German sleeve was a painting by the group’s regular designer, Emil Schult, who also helped write the title track. Schult’s painting/collage seems at odds with the group’s later rigorous aesthetic and it’s surprising that the design has persisted alongside the UK design. Something which complicates the theory here is that the German painting and cover design exist in several variations, with a car dashboard visible in the early pressings and—crucially—the German autobahn symbol (similar to the UK motorway symbol on the UK release) superimposed on the painting. I have one of the later vinyl reissues with Schult’s painting on the cover and the motorway bridge printed on both sides of the inner sleeve. But someone in the UK still made the decision to make the appropriated road sign the focus of the design for its first UK outing. The previous Kraftwerk album, the wonderful Ralf & Florian, also has at least two different cover designs while their first two albums—featuring their distinctive traffic cone trademark—were repackaged as a double set by Vertigo in 1972. That design takes their stencil lettering and applies it to an oscilloscope wave. Like the Vertigo Autobahn sleeve the design is uncredited, as were a number of other Vertigo releases.

Kraftwerk on stage in 2005.

So where does Barney Bubbles fit in?

1) He was one of a number of designers working for Vertigo in the early Seventies. Marcus Keef produced many of the covers for the folky/prog side of things while Hipgnosis and Roger Dean were among the other talents given an early start by the label. There are two covers credited to BB under his Teenburger name, the first album by Cressida in 1970 and, more significantly, Gracious! by Gracious, also 1970. The stark simplicity of the latter’s giant italic exclamation mark runs counter to anything else on the label at that time.

2) The Gracious! design is printed on bubble-textured card while the white areas of the Autobahn design are embossed onto the sleeve. Texturing isn’t unique to the Gracious album, however, so this factor is circumstantial. Vertigo’s designers used a number of elaborate effects from die-cut sleeves to packaging which opened out to a much larger size, a trick BB famously used later for his Space Ritual and Armed Forces sleeves. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album was designed by the Bloomsbury Group and that cover uses a similar embossing.

3) The typography. This is probably the clincher for me. The title design for Autobahn is a very odd variant of a Herbert Beyer Bauhaus-style typeface although ITC didn’t produce their Bauhaus face until 1975. It isn’t the earlier Beyer-derived Blippo either, several of the characters are different shapes and several have also been extended slightly. The Bauhaus reference is a clue for me simply because it fits with Barney’s knowledge of design history and also his sense of humour—Germans! The type layout on the back of the sleeve is even more telling. Typography is often like a signature and BB was very sharp with his use of type; he was also very fond of using Futura and the album credits are indeed set in Futura (another German type design incidentally). After this release Futura became the default Kraftwerk typeface until they began using computer-styled designs. You want more? It’s difficult to tell from a low-res jpeg but the word Gracious! on his earlier sleeve looks to me like it was set in the bold condensed oblique weight of Futura.

The Autobahn titles as reproduced on the UK cassette release.

ITC Bauhaus Heavy designed by Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso (1975).

Why does this matter? For a start there’s still more of Barney Bubbles’ work to be brought to light, so this can be considered one part of an ongoing investigation. It’s an important piece of graphic design which nonetheless remains uncredited. Peter Saville has frequently mentioned this sleeve design as a formative influence. In #231 of The Wire magazine he said:

Not only did the music have a profound influence on me, the sleeve made a lasting impression—the appropriated road sign symbolising the excitement and romance of travelling through Europe. It was my introduction to semiotics, and inspired a use of visual codes that I would develop later through Factory Records.

The person who introduced Saville to Autobahn was designer Malcolm Garrett who later worked with Barney Bubbles. Both Garrett and Saville acknowledged the importance of Barney’s work in Paul Gorman’s recent book, Reasons to be Cheerful. Saville was later designing sleeves for OMD whose music owes a huge debt to Kraftwerk. It would be surprising if all these disparate threads could be traced back to a single design source.

As always, if anyone has any further information please leave a comment.

• Vertigoswirl.com | A very thorough guide to all the original Vertigo releases.

Update: added the 2004 CD version.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

From Eonism back to Eno with Imaginary Landscapes, a 40-minute documentary from 1989, directed by Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo. As usual it’s good to see BE discussing his ideas about music and art although I’d have preferred less of the atmosphere shots and more talk. The film is available to view in a streaming version here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• Moonlight in Glory
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• Generative culture
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Cover painting by Tom Phillips, design by Russell Mills.

A post for a Thursday.

Brian Eno’s ambient music receives a lot of playing time here, especially Music for Airports, On Land, The Shutov Assembly and, when something really minimal is required, Neroli. But it’s Thursday Afternoon which receives the most attention. Recorded at the request of Sony Japan in 1984, Thursday Afternoon is a single piece which originally accompanied seven of Eno’s “video paintings”, each of them showing Christine Alicino warped and blurred by ultra-slow motion and video noise. Like his earlier static views of the New York skyline, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan, filming vertically means that proper viewing can only be achieved by turning the TV on its side. The soundtrack is a beautifully rendered composition which uses Eno’s customary process of letting a number of looped phrases form a shifting musical moiré.

Compositionally, Thursday Afternoon belongs to the family of works which also includes Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Like them it is an even-textured, spacious and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less regularly. Each event, however, recurs with a different cyclic frequency and thus the whole piece becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters. Eno has characterised this style of composition as “holographic”, by which he means that any brief section of the music is representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any fragment of a hologram shows the whole of the holographic image but with a lower resolution. (From the album notes.)

Daniel Lanois, Roger Eno and Michael Brook were all involved in the creation and production of Thursday Afternoon and the piece works as well played very quietly as it does at louder volume. When played louder more of the background detail becomes apparent, including some very faint birdsong which is most discernible at the end when much of the music has faded away. Perfect for colouring the atmosphere of a room whilst reading, working or talking with friends. It’s also a favourite of mine for playing in the bedroom with someone special.

Thursday Afternoon was released on video cassette then appeared on CD in 1985. As a single track of 61 minutes, this was one of the first original recordings which made specific use of the extended running time of the CD format. The cover painting was by {feuilleton} favourite, artist Tom Phillips, with design by artist and designer Russell Mills. Ten years earlier, Eno had used a detail of Phillips’ painting After Raphael on the cover of Another Green World.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you can now see the original sound and vision version of Thursday Afternoon at Ubuweb. Not ideal by any means but it gives you an idea of the complete work rather than the trunctated versions on YouTube. Eno’s video paintings, Thursday Afternoon included, are now available on DVD should you require them in higher quality. Just be prepared to turn your TV on its side.

Update: Eno’s ambient processes have now reached the iPhone with the Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers app, Bloom.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
• Generative culture
• Exposure by Robert Fripp
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts