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Tuxedomoon designs by Patrick Roques

Scream With A View 12″ EP (1979) by Tuxedomoon. Design credited to Belfer/Roques.

I’m pursuing a Tuxedomoon obsession at the moment so this gives me the opportunity to examine some of the group’s early record sleeves, all of which are designed by Patrick Roques. Tuxedomoon are an American group, and their early releases were on The Residents’ Ralph Records label which is where they first encountered Roques. When the group later decamped to Europe and began releasing material on a variety of European labels they still commissioned Roques for their cover designs.

Many of the independent labels of the late 70s and early 80s have been over-examined when it comes to graphic design but I’ve yet to see anything written about Ralph Records. On the Residents albums in particular the label established their own very distinctive brand of bold graphics and cartoony illustration (Gary Panter worked on some of the sleeves). Patrick Roques’ designs are less eccentric than those on The Residents’ covers, such an approach wouldn’t have suited Tuxedomoon’s music. His designs for the group are closer to the styles seen among the independent labels in the UK which is one reason I find them attractive. The following represents a small and very selective fraction of Roques’ work as a designer.

Half-Mute (1980) by Tuxedomoon.

The first Tuxedomoon album.

Dark Companion / 59 To 1 Remix (1980) by Tuxedomoon. Photography by Mark Sangerman.

What Use? (front, 1980) by Tuxedomoon.

What Use? (back, 1980) by Tuxedomoon.

Continue reading “Tuxedomoon designs by Patrick Roques”

Weekend links 213

No Tears for the Creatures of the Night (2005) by Will Munro.

• Steve Barker’s On The Wire show on BBC Radio Lancashire is one of the longest-running music shows on British radio but it’s not broadcast in London so you seldom hear it mentioned at all. (It’s also the only radio show I’ve appeared on, oddly enough.) Some of Barker’s shows, which predominantly feature dub and reggae artists, can now be heard at Mixcloud.

• “As protagonist after protagonist is undone by temptation and lust, one can’t help but divine a sinister double entendre in the book’s title – something nocturnal and obscene.” James Lovegrove on the reissue of Robert Aickman’s 1964 collection of “strange stories”, Dark Entries.

• Coil vs. Kenny Loggins sounds like no contest, and so it proved in 1988 at the Mike Tyson/Michael Spinks fight. There’s another surprising connection between Tyson and Industrial culture with the poster that Neville Brody designed for the boxer’s Tokyo bout.

• Ventriloquism: Unheimlich manoeuvres: Sarah Angliss (who performs as Spacedog) on the history of ventriloquist dummies. With a bonus appearance from the great Ray Alan and Lord Charles. Related: the Vent Haven Museum.

• I’ve been wanting to read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu for years but always hesitate over which translation to choose. As Leland de la Durantaye shows, the arguments about translating Proust into English are still unresolved.

• Music For A Good Home 3: a collection of 31 rare or unique tracks by a variety of artists including Belbury Poly, Pye Corner Audio, and Grumbling Fur. All proceeds go to Shelter.

• David Cronenberg – The Exhibition is running throughout the summer at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam showing props and other materials from the director’s films.

• “’I’m in pictures,’ John Wayne explained when Nabokov cordially inquired about his line of work.” Blake Bailey on Vladimir Nabokov’s unpublished Lolita screenplay notes.

• Original artwork for the Linweave Tarot (1967) at Sweet Jane’s Pop Boutique. As noted before, the full set of cards is probably the grooviest ever created.

• Mixes of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 118 by Ensemble Economique, and a Wyrd Daze Solstice mix from The Ephemeral Man.

• At One With Chaos & Abandonment: The Irrepressibles’ Jamie McDermott talks to Joseph Burnett about his music.

• From the Zodiacal Light, a new track from Earth with vocals by Rabia Shaheen Qazi.

• The Ultimate Chinatown Filming Location Map of Los Angeles.

• Tuxedomoon at Pinterest.

• Dark Companion (1980) by Tuxedomoon | Dark River (1990) by Coil | Dark Turn Of Mind (2011) by Gillian Welch

Pink Narcissus: James Bidgood and Tuxedomoon

Pink Narcissus (2014) by Tuxedomoon. Design by Flavien Thieurmel.

I’ve never paid much attention to Record Store Day, despite promoting it here on a couple of occasions, and paid even less attention this year now that the event has turned into an opportunity for some of the larger labels to fleece the punters. Consequently, I missed any mention of a new release from Tuxedomoon which Crammed Discs put out as part of this year’s vinyl deluge. I’ve been listening to Tuxedomoon for years so any new release is worthy of attention, especially when their last studio album, Vapour Trails (2007) was a particularly good one, with the added bonus of packaging by Jonathan Barnbrook.

Hanging Off Bed, a still from Pink Narcissus, mid- to late 1960s.

The new album, Pink Narcissus, is a recording of the group’s live soundtrack performance for the film of the same name by James Bidgood, a luscious micro-budget, homoerotic labour-of-love filmed in the 1960s on 8mm in the cramped confines of Bidgood’s New York apartment. The original soundtrack comprises selections of romantic classical music by Mussorgsky and Prokofiev so the replacing of the score isn’t as much of an imposition as it can be when bands co-opt old films. I already liked Bidgood’s film a great deal so Tuxedomoon’s score is like a marriage made in heaven (and they once recorded their own version of In Heaven). Having watched the film synched to the new album I was impressed by how well the group matched the shifting moods. From their earliest releases Tuxedomoon’s music has tended towards the cinematic so you’d expect them to provide a sympathetic treatment; they’ve also recorded a few scores in the past, including one for their own ambitious film/stage performance, Ghost Sonata. But Pink Narcissus matches the scenes much more effectively than the classical selections, the group even work in a pause then a shift to a new style when Bidgood’s star boy, Bobby Kendall, puts a record on his wind-up gramophone. The only drawback in running the music with the film is that the album is 10 minutes short, possibly because of the limitations of the vinyl format. YouTube user bigniouxx has a few brief clips of the live performance at the L’Etrange Festival in Paris.

Blue Boy, a still from Pink Narcissus, mid- to late 1960s.

If the BFI ever reissues the film I hope they consider using the full Tuxedomoon score as an alternative soundtrack the way they did on the Peter de Rome porn films, some of which are scored by Stephen Thrower. Bidgood’s film is still available on DVD with a detailed booklet and a great interview with the director; the BFI also has it on their video-on-demand service. Despite its age and its campy glamour Pink Narcissus is still pretty pornographic in places, not as much as Peter de Rome’s films (or today’s porn, for that matter) but there’s enough wanking and erections to keep it off many TV networks. The album, housed in a great sleeve designed by Flavien Thieurmel, may be bought direct from Crammed Discs.

• James Bidgood’s photography at ClampArt

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William E. Jones on Fred Halsted
• Flamboyant excess: the art of Steven Arnold
• James Bidgood

Audio Arts

Audio Arts was a British audio magazine established by Bill Furlong which appeared on vinyl LP, cassette tape and CD from 1973 to 2006. The Tate website has an archive section devoted to the magazine which allows you to listen to each of the tapes, surprisingly when much of the content on the Tate sites is fenced about with copyright restrictions. The contents are as varied as any regular arts magazine: reviews, interviews and so on. An interview with Marcel Duchamp from 1959 is one of the featured highlights. Of greater interest to this listener is an interview from 1981 with Laurie Anderson discussing her epic stage work, United States Parts 1–4. This would have been around the time that one of the songs from that show, O Superman, turned her into a UK pop star for a few weeks.

In addition to a great deal of talk some of the tapes contain recordings of sound pieces or performances. One tape from 1985 features nine works by the Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Ann Bean, Richard Wilson and PD Burwell. The Bow Gamelan Ensemble were at the arty British end of the 1980s’ vogue for making music with industrial detritus, a trend developed and popularised by Z’EV, Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Department and others. I never got to see the ensemble but their pyrotechnic live performances always looked like fun. The tape gives an idea of their uncompromising sound. (Tip via The Wire.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• ICA talks archived

Weekend links 212

Poster for the recent Ballard-themed Only Connect Festival of Sound in Oslo. Design by Non-Format.

• Bulldozer by Laird Barron was my favourite piece in Lovecraft’s Monsters, the recent Tachyon anthology edited by Ellen Datlow that I designed and illustrated. So it’s good to hear that Nic Pizzolato, writer of the justly-acclaimed HBO series True Detective, is among Barron’s readers. True Detective, of course, created a stir for referencing Robert Chambers’ weird fiction in a police procedural. The series is out now on DVD and Blu-ray, and I can’t recommend it too highly.

• Citation-obsessed Wikipedians don’t believe Hauntology is a genuine musical genre, a sentiment which will probably surprise some of its practitioners. Whatever the merits of the argument, I rather like the idea of a musical form that resists strict definition.

• “This year, in order to do things differently, I will make a conscious effort to separate the man from his writing.” Giovanna Calvino, daughter of Italo Calvino, remembers her father.

With ideology masquerading as pragmatism, profit is now the sole yardstick against which all our institutions must be measured, a policy that comes not from experience but from assumptions – false assumptions – about human nature, with greed and self-interest taken to be its only reliable attributes. In pursuit of profit, the state and all that goes with it is sold from under us who are its rightful owners and with a frenzy and dedication that call up memories of an earlier iconoclasm.

Alan Bennett delivers a sermon.

• Zarina Rimbaud-Kadirbaks, aka Dutch Girl In London, reviews the Chris Marker exhibition that’s currently running at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

• Exteriorizing the Inner Realms: Christopher Laursen talks to Phantasmaphile and Abraxas magazine‘s Pam Grossman about occult art, past and present.

• The Beast is back: Erik Davis talks to Gary Lachman about his new book, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World.

• The body as factory: anatomy of a New Scientist cover image. Rick Poynor on the recurrent use of a familiar visual metaphor.

• Mix of the week without a doubt is FACT Mix 445 by Stephen O’Malley, a three-hour behemoth.

• Jennifer in paradise: Photoshop developer John Knoll on the story of the first Photoshopped image.

• The trailer for Grandfather of Gay Porn, a documentary about Peter de Rome by Ethan Reid.

• Giorgio’s Theme is a new piece of electronic music by Giorgio Moroder.

• Agender, a series of androgynous photo-portraits by Chloe Aftel.

• RIP Little Jimmy Scott

• Evil Spirits

• Chase (1978) by Giorgio Moroder | Call Me (1980) by Blondie | The Apartment (1980) by Giorgio Moroder