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 [...]
Another gem of experimental filmmaking, Scott Bartlett’s short from 1967 hits all the buttons of psychedelic imagery: disembodied eyes, moiré patterns, solarisation, dancing figures, naked women, oil effects, oversatured hues, and superimposition. The difference between this film and others of the period is that OffOn is largely a product of video techniques, some of which—video [...]
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 [...]
It’s unlikely that many people have been crying out for yet another Donovan compilation but that’s what EMI released earlier this month. Breezes of Patchouli (His Studio Recordings 1966–1969) is the prime psychedelic material, and for me looks tempting since I only have one of those albums. The latest Shindig! magazine gives the collection a [...]
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 [...]
House of Usher (1960): Vincent Price and Mark Damon. This post ought to have followed the one in January about the sinister portraits glimpsed in Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. I still don’t know who was responsible for those paintings but the artist who created the equally outré family portraits in Roger Corman’s House [...]
Roger Dean’s album cover art extends further than his sleeve illustrations for Yes. His earlier designs for the Vertigo label showed his visual invention to good effect, and a couple of those designs have had their imitators. The cover art for Dedicated To You, But You Weren’t Listening by the Keith Tippett Group is one [...]
L’amour des âmes (1900) by Jean Delville. Another of the many connections between the Symbolism and psychedelic poster art, the mystically-inclined Jean Delville (1867–1953) may at least have approved of the addition of a yin-yang symbol to his painting of drifting souls. I was originally going to post Delville’s Pour L’art poster design since I’ve [...]
The Sin (1894). Some pictures in honour of the Chinese year of the Water Snake which begins this Sunday. Paintings of women with snakes are legion, even after you winnow out all the Eve and the Serpent pictures, so you need to narrow the field of view. Artists of the 19th century must have been [...]
Ruins 3 by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith. “Dan wanted to do something on a really large scale and was looking at a lot of Piranesi and started talking to me about ruins. I then started looking at modern interpretations of this idea, I was obsessed with the post modern architecture of SITE, Disney [...]
From the Beautiful Faces series (2012) by Tran Nguyen. • “What possessed a generation of young European artists, and a few Americans, to suddenly suppress recognizable imagery in pictures and sculptures? Unthinkable at one moment, the strategy became practically compulsory in the next.” Peter Schjeldahl on the birth of abstraction. • “A profanely mystical work [...]
It’s those calendars again. I’ve had requests recently to put my Lewis Carroll-themed psychedelic designs back on sale but the past few months have been pretty work-heavy, and since I deleted the original product pages it was going to require some effort to make new ones. This weekend I finally found the time to tackle [...]
Lower Manhattan (1999) by Lebbeus Woods. RIP Lebbeus Woods, an architect and illustrator frequently compared to Piranesi not only for his imagination and the quality of his renderings but also for the way both men built very little from a lifetime of designs. Lots of appreciations have appeared over the past few days including this [...]
Japanese poster (1982). At The Quietus Steve Earles looks back at John Carpenter’s visceral and uncompromising The Thing which exploded messily onto cinema screens thirty years ago. It’s always worth being reminded that this film (and Blade Runner in the same year) was considered a flop at the time following bad reviews and a poor [...]
Illustration by Bob Peak. Further examples of those things you find when you’re searching for something else, these posters for Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) are a good example of just how differently the same film can be presented by its advertising materials. Petulia (“the uncommon movie”) is a fascinating, unjustly neglected gem, a serious adult [...]
Seven-inch sleeve design by Savage Pencil for Wrong Eye (1990) by Coil. • “Can you use sensory deprivation to explore ESP? And then make music from the process?” Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt of Matmos decided to find out for their new EP. Related: Occult Voices—Paranormal Music, Recordings of Unseen Intelligences, 1905–2007 at Ubuweb. Details [...]
Mala Reputación (1991) by Dogo Y Los Mercenarios. Cover art by Nazario Luque. Artist Nazario Luque was Spain’s first gay comic artist who’s also known for the drawing which appeared (without permission) on the sleeve of Lou Reed Live – Take No Prisoners in 1978. On his website Nazario says he’s been described as “Exhibicionista, solidario, [...]
Transmitter Crowbar Discharge Unit, Bates Linear Accelerator. Photo by Daniel Jackson from his Dark Machines series. The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely [...]
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