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Tadanori Yokoo album covers

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 their triple-live set Lotus before, an album which is one of those worth having for the cover alone. Worth having for the cover and the music is Miles Davis’s thundering jazz-rock monolith Agharta which for some reason was given a different cover by Elena Pavlov on its US and European release. For Yokoo’s more recent cover art see his Discogs page.

Lotus (1974) by Santana.

Continue reading “Tadanori Yokoo album covers”

Weekend links 159

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 concrete forms that marked the edges of empires.” Related: Paintings by Minoru Nomata.

• Musical reminiscences: Matt Domino on the Small Faces’ psychedelic magnum opus Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Richard Metzger on the sombre splendours of Tuxedomoon.

Harrison is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF, but to my mind he is among the most brilliant novelists writing today, with regard to whom the question of genre is an irrelevance. To read his work is to encounter fiction doing what fiction must: carrying out the kinds of thinking and expression that would be possible in no other form. I pass through his novels feeling a mixture of wonder, calmness and disturbance; I end them brain-jarred and unsettled. Metaphysical echoes persist for days afterwards. It feels as if I have had a strabismus induced, causing illusions that slowly resolve into insights.

Robert Macfarlane on M. John Harrison and the reissue of Climbers.

• Divine Machinery: An Interview with Paul Jebanasam. Arvo Pärt, Cormac McCarthy and Algernon Blackwood are folded into his new album, Rites.

• Autostraddle shows the evolution of twelve queer book cover designs. As is often the case in cover design, latest isn’t always best.

• “My Definition Of Hell? It’s Other People, At The Cinema!” Anne Billson on the very thing that finished me as a cinema-goer.

• “London in the 1830s was a truly weird and terrifying place.” Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London.

• At Scientific American: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens.

• Van Dyke Parks: “I was victimised by Brian Wilson’s buffoonery.”

• Colour film of London in 1927.

• Abandonedography

• Social Dead Zone

• Tuxedomoon: Tritone (Musica Diablo) (1980) | Desire (1981) | Incubus (Blue Suit) (1981)

I:MAGE: An Exhibition of Esoteric Artists

El Trigono de las lesiones (2010) by Cristina Francov.

I:MAGE is an exhibition of occult-inspired art which opens a week on Sunday, 19th May at the Store Street Gallery, Bloomsbury, London. As exhibitions go it’s modest in scale but with an impressive roster of contributors old and new: Agostino Arrivabene, Ithell Colquhoun, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, Steffi Grant, Orryelle, David Chaim Smith, Michael Bertiaux, Andrew Chumbley, Cristina Francov, Barry William Hale, Francesco Parisi, Austin Osman Spare, Jesse Bransford, Peter Dyde, Rik Garrett, Noko, Residue, and Michael Strum. A few examples of the work on display are shown here, some of which will be available for purchase.

The event is being organised by Fulgur Esoterica, and their website has details of some related events including John Constable’s one-man play, Spare (about artist Austin Osman Spare), a one-off performance which will be held at Treadwell’s, London, on the 24th. This catches my attention because Constable was responsible for the acclaimed theatre adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast which David Glass and company staged in the 1990s. It’s always good to find one’s favourite people joined through these lateral connections.

The Earth Magic Series (2012) by Rik Garrett.

Steffi Grant.

Demon by Denis Forkas Kostromitin.

Dream Boats and Other Stories by Dugald Stewart Walker

As is often the case, I keep intending to post various lengthy pieces but pressure of work is preventing that for the moment. So here’s another illustrated book courtesy of the Internet Archive. I linked to this in an earlier post about Walker’s work but hadn’t looked at all the illustrations until now. Dream Boats and Other Stories (1920), a collection of fairy tales, was written and illustrated by Walker, and while the prose is too twee for my jaded palette I do like his drawings. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.

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Weekend links 158

Pan II (2012) by Fredrik Söderberg.

• “Aubade was a surprise success, selling some 5000 copies and going into a second printing and an edition published in America. Martin was immediately a minor celebrity, being interviewed for articles that couldn’t mention what his book was actually about.” Rediscovering the works of Kenneth Martin.

• “I can’t stand covers which imitate other covers, or which slavishly look like whatever their designated genre is supposed to look like.” Ace cover designer Peter Mendelsund is interviewed.

• At The Outer Church Isablood & Henry of Occult Hand are interviewed about their mixtape.

I’d decided to pay my respects in an unorthodox way, by time-travelling into the period of Thatcher’s pomp, when she occulted the light, alchemised the bad will of the populace and did her best to choke the living daylights out of the awkward, sprawling, socially coddled essence of metropolitan London. Hers was a tyranny of the suburbs operating from a position of privilege at the centre: she might have invested in a Dulwich retirement property, but she couldn’t sleep in it.

Iain Sinclair visits Tilbury on the day of the Thatcher funeral. Related: Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades in Conversation, Oxford Brookes University, March 2013.

• Ormond Gigli’s best photograph: women in the windows in Manhattan. See it full size here.

• Balzac and sex: How the French novelist used masturbation to fuel his writing process.

• At Dangerous Minds: Kenneth Williams and John Lahr discuss Joe Orton in 1978.

• Yet more Bowie: Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Ziggyology by Simon Goddard.

• The Spectacular, Wild World of Tenjo Sajiki and its Posters.

• In 1967 Susan Sontag made lists of her likes and dislikes.

• Stephen Sparks on fin de siècle author Marcel Schwob.

• Day Jobs of the Poets by Grant Snider.

• James Turrell’s Ganzfeld Experiment.

• The Pan Piper (1960) by Miles Davis & Gil Evans | Panorphelia (1974) by Edgar Froese | Pandora (1984) by Cocteau Twins