{design} – Page 141 – { feuilleton }

The Rock Machine Turns You On

Discovered via the latest issue of The Wire magazine in a feature about compilation albums, The Rock Machine Turns You On (1968) was the first budget sampler album. Given the success of this release I’m sure I must have seen it over the years but that cover wasn’t familiar at all. I have to assume that the “Hey, pop kids!” title would have been enough of a turn-off to ensure the fingers kept flipping through the sleeves. Priorities change with the passing of time, however, and my attention was caught by the cover art alone, another example of the engraving-collage style whose evolution I’ve been tracing over the past few years. The only design credit on the sleeve is for the back cover photo by Wadham Artists. The front cover is credited online to Milton Glaser, some of whose album covers have already featured here. He was working for Columbia/CBS in the late 60s so it’s a possibility. If anyone out there has a copy of the vinyl then maybe they can tell me if that’s an artist credit in the lower right of the picture. A CD reissue in 1996 only copied the album credits.

As to the music, it’s a pretty good compilation, lots of familiar names together with a track from cult favourites of mine The United States of America whose one and only self-titled album had been released that year. One of the few negatives about the superb United States of America album is the cover design which isn’t bad but does nothing to reflect the extraordinary musical invention within. It’s a shame that whoever designed The Rock Machine… couldn’t have worked on that sleeve as well.

Update: Rick Poynor writes to say that this cover appears in Milton Glaser: Pop, so the Glaser attribution is accurate.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Robert Fludd’s Temples of Music

For the past week I’ve been downloading more of the books at the Internet Archive illustrated by Matthäus Merian. Among the hoard there’s a two-volume set of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (1617–1626), a remarkable work which attempts to cover all the metaphysical, scientific and artistic knowledge of the time, opening modestly with a detailed description of the creation of the universe. The illustrations for these volumes by Merian and Johann de Bry are so good they’ve been plundered endlessly, not only in later books but in the general culture; I’ve swiped details myself on more than one occasion so—once again—it’s good to see an original printing with all the accompanying text, and also all the less familiar treatises and pictures.

One area of Fludd’s study concerns music, a subject which Merian and De Bry illustrate using a variety of graphic devices, the most fanciful of which are the “Temples of Music” displaying the notes and divisions of the Pythagorean scale. The largest of the drawings was printed onto a fold-out sheet which explains the unfortunate tear in this copy. I love all the details on this one, some of which are rather unusual: who are the people underneath the temple in the room with the furnace? What are they doing, and why are they naked?

Continue reading “Robert Fludd’s Temples of Music”

Two covers

More new work of mine has been unveiled in the past few days so I can show these here. The Buried Life and Cities and Thrones are a pair of fantasy novels by new author Carrie Patel being published by Angry Robot. I was asked to provide something in an engraved style set against a black background, with imagery that reflected themes of vast, underground architecture and armed conflict.

Vast architecture of any description is something I’ve always enjoyed, the main challenge with each book came in trying to imply the architecture and events without the pictorial content becoming incoherent. Marc at Angry Robot asked for something Piranesian where the architecture was concerned. Looking over Piranesi’s non-Carceri designs didn’t turn up anything with a suitably dramatic perspective, however, so most of what you see in the first cover comes from Giuseppe Galli Bibiena’s Architetture e Prospettive (1740). The Bibienas were a family of architects and theatrical engineers who specialised in dizzying perspective views for their stage designs; Bibiena’s book was produced to preserve some of his more celebrated designs, the originals of which are now lost. I’ve had a book of these drawings for years but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to make use of them in any kind of collage.

This style of Baroque architecture doesn’t suit steampunk imagery which tends towards 19th-century urban/industrial; the plates are also rather staid scenes without the graphic flare that Piranesi gave to everything he rendered, real or imagined. But I do like those plunging perspectives, and pieces from two of the plates turned out to share both the same perspective and the same lighting direction. It’s easy to collage things into a flat view but creating a realistic sense of depth from bits and pieces can be tricky.

The frame for the second cover has more of a Piranesian quality being chipped and eroded. The typography for the titles went through several changes, the versions here show a late suggestion of mine with lettering that’s probably too thin to read well at a distance (or a small size on a web page). SF Signal has a post showing the Angry Robot versions which will probably be the final ones, together with a preview of the first book.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

Weekend links 207

Chthonic Cities by David Chatton Barker. One of a series of Folklore Tapes screenprints available from Bleep.

• The original version of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, the one with the Jimmy Page soundtrack that was completed in 1973, has always been described as lost/stolen/buried or otherwise gone forever. So you’d think the news that a print had been discovered recently by Brian Butler would have received greater attention. There’s a screening in Los Angeles this Thursday. When do the rest of us get to see it?

• Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, an exhibition and series of Marker-related events at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Related: The Encounter of M. Chat & Chris Marker as Told By Louise Traon.

• The trailer for The Gospel According to St Derek, a forthcoming documentary about Derek Jarman. Related: Carl Swanson on why Tilda Swinton is not quite of this world.

Maybe there’s just something conservative at the bedrock of American fiction. […] Or maybe it’s just another symptom of the creeping conservatism that’s infected so many aspects of the culture.

Eric Obenauf talks to author Jeff Jackson whose comments about cultural conservatism could equally be applied to the UK.

• Primitive graphics, inventive graphics, budget Surrealism, and some great theme tunes; it’s Trunk TV, Episode 1: Title Sequences.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 110 by Black To Comm, and Intro To Drone For Debcon 1, almost 7 hours of music!

• Joseph Burnett reviews Ett, an album of electronic music by Klara Lewis.

• The Delian Mode (2009), a film about Delia Derbyshire by Kara Blake.

• Extracts from Tokyo Reverse by Simon Bouisson and Ludovic Zuili.

• Dan Piepenbring on The Haunting Illustrations of Alfred Kubin.

• At Strange Flowers: Photos of arcades by Germaine Krull.

• Fish, Fiends, and Fantasy: The Gothic Art of Ian Miller.

• At 50 Watts: Richard Teschner and His Puppets.

• Sonic Foam: Ian Penman on Kate Bush and Coil.

• Bits and Pieces

• Lucifer (1968) by The Salt | Experiment IV (1986) by Kate Bush | Methoxy-N, N-Dimethyl (5-MeO-DMT) (1998) by Coil

Acid albums

LSD (1966).

A handful of album covers, all for the vinyl equivalents of the books and magazines in the Acid covers post. The album-as-documentary/essay is one of those curiosities that no one would ever produce today but in the 1960s there were still many of them around. All of these albums have been plundered for samples in recent times.

Capitol Records’ LSD is in two parts: The Scene, examining the attitudes of the youthful acid trippers, and The Trip, which looks at the acid experience itself. Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Sidney Cohen offer expert testimony. Side two apparently features a 5-minute recording of a bad trip to balance the proselytising elsewhere. Discogs shows the interior art which typically depicts the trippers as looking far more freaked out than people usually do on these occasions. The drug that regularly turns people into mewling, puking, unhinged maniacs is called alcohol.

The Psychedelic Experience (1966) by Dr. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert.

The album of the book of the same name from which John Lennon borrowed some lines for Tomorrow Never Knows. The cover shown here is from the CD which slightly altered the typography. Neither CD or vinyl have a credit for that nice piece of art. Side one is Going Out, side two is Coming Back.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (1966) by Dr. Timothy Leary.

Timothy Leary’s doctor status was very much to the fore until possession of LSD was made illegal and he became public enemy no. 1. Here he talks for two sides about the drug. Typical ESP Disk cover art which tends to the cheap and perfunctory.

LSD (1966) by Dr. Timothy Leary.

And Leary again on the same subject. It’s hard to believe there might have been enough of a market for four spoken-word albums on the subject of LSD in one year alone but that’s what we have here. After 1966 there was no further need to instruct the public, acid was out in the culture at large, and no longer required support or qualification from voices of authority.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Acid covers
• Lyrical Substance Deliberated
• The Art of Tripping, a documentary by Storm Thorgerson
• Enter the Void
• In the Land of Retinal Delights
• The art of LSD
• Hep cats