01 First (1985). I’ve linked to so many publications at the Internet Archive I’m a little surprised it’s taken me this long to find something featuring my own work. Abrahadabra was a Dutch periodical covering subjects familiar to readers of the esoteric magazines of the 1980s (RE/Search, Rapid Eye, etc): Industrial music of the TG/Psychic [...]
Along with Elemental 7 by CTI, this was another Doublevision video release that I never got to see in its original videocassette form. Seven Songs is the first and arguably the best of the 23 Skidoo albums, released in 1982 on Fetish Records in a great sleeve by Neville Brody. Production was by “Tony, Terry [...]
Design by CTI and Kevin Thorne. Yet another of those things I’ve known about for years but have only seen recently thanks to YouTube. Elemental 7 was an early music + video release by Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti following the split of Throbbing Gristle in 1981. They’d already recorded under the Chris & [...]
Lord Horror (after Klaus Barthelmess). (No, not Pete Murphy and co.) Now that the Reverbstorm book is at the printers I have an excuse to discuss a few of the art and design appropriations that run through the narrative. I wanted to use some Bauhaus-style design back in the early 1990s when we were putting [...]
Funeral In Berlin (1981) by Throbbing Gristle. British artist and musician Val Denham was mentioned in yesterday’s post so I thought it worthwhile following up with a selection of the painter’s record sleeves. Denham’s art stood out for me when I first saw the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s Funeral In Berlin album. For its visceral [...]
It’s taken me a while to see this but the long search for a genuinely psychedelic feature film is over. That’s genuinely psychedelic not in the debased sense of a handful of garish or trippy visuals, but in the full-spectrum expanded-consciousness sense for which Humphrey Osmond invented the term in 1956: I have tried to [...]
Amy Brenneman. In which Neville Brody’s early record sleeves lurk in the midst of a Michael Mann crime drama… I picked up some cheap DVDs last week, among them a copy of Mann’s Heat (1995) which I hadn’t seen for over ten years. I like Mann best when he’s doing his high-tech thriller thing (although [...]
Coil, circa 1984. John Balance (left) & Peter Christopherson (right). Photo by Lawrence Watson. The depths of the night sky Reflects in his eye He says “Everything changes And everyone dies.” Coil, Blood From The Air (1986) Yes, everyone dies but you don’t always expect it this soon, six years after the sudden loss of [...]
Red Quechquemitls (2010) by Sylvia Ji. • The Blackout Mix, a pay-what-thou-wilt 49-minute mixtape, “specially designed to accompany (or simulate) a human-plant interaction”. Art by Arik Roper, music selection by Jay Babcock. • An ode to the many evolved virtues of human semen: “the penis is capable of dispensing a sort of natural Prozac” says [...]
One of a series of illustrations by Vera Bock for A Ring and a Riddle (1944) by M.Ilin and E. Segal. Via A Journey Round My Skull. • The Creator of Devotion: Photos from a Vogue Hommes Japan feature by Matthew Stone. And also here. • Dressing For Pleasure: Jonny Trunk gets out the rubber [...]
A Secret Wish (1985). Design by the London Design Partnership. The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns — William Blake It’s a hallmark of musical obsession when you find yourself buying the same album over and over. Propaganda’s meisterwerk from 1985, A Secret Wish, was finally released in a definitive double-CD version this [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little [...]
A follow-up to last year’s list. Seeing as Joy Division are very much in the news at the moment with the release of Control and the re-issue of the albums, I thought a post-punk theme would be appropriate. The period which immediately followed punk in the late Seventies saw a lot of doom being imported [...]
No, not the school of Japanese architecture, we’re concerning ourselves here with a UK band from the early 1980s. There’s still a number of important albums from this period that remain caught in a curious limbo between the end of the time when vinyl was the prime carrier for new music and the start of [...]
The event booklet, designed by Neville Brody. William Burroughs’ reading in the city of Manchester took place on the 4th of October, 1982, at Factory Records’ Haçienda club, as part of the Manchester “edition” of The Final Academy, a Burroughs-themed art event put together by Psychic TV (Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson) and others. [...]
Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo, FM 2008, 1982. Since I made a post earlier about bad album design, it’s only right to redress the balance somewhat. Neville Brody has long been a favourite designer and something of an influence since it was looking at his work during the 1980s that made me think seriously about [...]
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