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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 [...]

Gille Lettmann pictured in 1973 flourishing some of Fergus Hall’s Tarot cards. At the time Ms Lettmann was helping run partner Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s Kosmische Musik, Pilz and Ohr record labels, and thus oversaw the release of many fine albums—and a few dubious ones—before Kaiser’s empire imploded amid much bad feeling. It’s a fascinating saga, detailed [...]

A Chinese postage stamp celebrating the Year of the Snake. • Cyclopean is a collaboration from Burnt Friedman, Jono Podmore and Can founding members Jaki Liebezeit, and Irmin Schmidt. The Quietus has a preview of all the tracks from their forthcoming EP. Great stuff. • Ten Things You (Possibly) Don’t Know About Kraftwerk. Related: a [...]

1: Nothing Is… (1966), an album of science fiction jazz by Sun Ra. What does the empty space of that ellipsis imply? 2: Strawberry Fields Forever (1967), a single by The Beatles. “Strawberry Fields / Nothing is real” Cover art by Sam Green. 3: Empty Space (2012), a science fiction novel by M. John Harrison. [...]

Walpurgis (1969) by The Shiver. An inevitable follow-up to yesterday’s post, this continues an occasional look at album cover art by people better known for their work elsewhere. Giger’s album covers fall into two categories: those with some direct involvement from the artist and those which are merely reuses of pre-existing paintings. The former category [...]

Another artist documentary only this time the artist concerned is a full participant and co-creator. Giger’s Necronomicon was filmed from 1972 to 1976 and functions as a taster for the first book collection of the artist’s work, also called Giger’s Necronomicon, which was published a year later. JJ Wittmer was the co-director. The paintings are [...]

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 [...]

Happy Cthulhumas. I found the time over the past couple of weeks to finish a piece of art begun in September 2008, something I’d half-completed then abandoned due to pressure of other work. I’d quite forgotten about this until I discovered the files when going through some archive discs. What began as a pencil outline [...]

Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems Of Color (1956). The great designer and filmmaker Saul Bass is the subject of renewed attention with the publication this month of Saul Bass: A Life In Film & Design by Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham, the first comprehensive examination of the man’s work. A post at AnOther has an [...]

Black Cat on a Chair (1850–1860) by Andrew L Von Wittkamp. • “A little bit of acid, lots of weed, and too much Castaneda and I was ready to move from the magical realm of Middle Earth into a world that was much stranger than any involving hairy dwarves and white wizards…” Too Much to [...]

Seven (1973) by Soft Machine. Design by Roslav Szaybo. You’re the great, grey man whose daughter licks policemen’s buttons clean, You’re the man who squats behind the man who works the soft machine. Mick Jagger, Memo From Turner (1968) By coincidence this month I’d been re-reading some William Burroughs when I picked up a nice [...]

Neutron Drip (2011) by Amrei Hofstätter. • The Lavender Scare is “the first feature-length documentary film to tell the story of the U.S. government’s ruthless campaign in the 1950s and ’60s to hunt down and fire every Federal employee it suspected was gay”. A film by Josh Howard based on the book by David K [...]

Polish poster by Andrzej Bertrandt for Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film of Solaris. • Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris receives its first ever direct English translation by Bill Johnston (only on Audible for the moment), all previous editions having been sourced from a poor French translation. An all-too-common state of affairs for non-English fiction where bad or bowdlerised [...]

Writing about the late Lynn Redgrave last year I picked out this film as a career highlight despite not having seen it for a very long time. Watching it again recently was an interesting experience, not least for the way it connects to more recent points of obsession, none of them evident the first time [...]

Ad Astra (1907) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. • Andres Serrano’s works are photo prints so you can’t damage an exhibition item the way you can with a painting. That didn’t stop Catholic protestors in France attacking a copy of Piss Christ on Monday. By coincidence, Dave Maier had posted an essay about Serrano’s work a few [...]

The Final Programme (1973). Philip Castle’s poster art implied the androgynous finale of Moorcock’s novel which the film itself evaded. They were musty-smelling 10p messages from the futuristic past, complete with cover designs (and content) that were unlike anything I’d seen before. I’m fairly certain that this was how I first came across Michael Moorcock, [...]

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967). I made a post a while back about the work of Bob Pepper, an artist whose illustrations from the 1960s can also be described as psychedelic and who was equally visible in the music and book publishing worlds. Howard Bernstein (not to be confused with musician Howie B) [...]

Manchester, August, 1819: yeomanry on horseback charge a crowd of demonstrators; London, November, 2010: Mounted police charge demonstrators; London, December, 2010: “…police horses have charged the crowd once and appear to be about to do so again.” Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable NUMBER! Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep [...]

Black Earth by Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. How to sustain the atmosphere of something you’ve enjoyed without flogging the work itself to death by repeated viewing? In the case of Twin Peaks, the subject of yesterday’s post, you can indulge yourself with spin-off merchandise like this Garmonbozia T-shirt. Or you could try playing [...]

Arriving in the post this week was Lovecraft Black & White, an Italian book whose contents are spelled out in the title, black-and-white illustrations based on the work of the Providence master. Among the featured works is my 1999 rendering of Azathoth. There’s more about the book here and here. Also on the work front, [...]