{music} – Page 279 – { feuilleton }

Les Ondes Silencieuses by Colleen

I haven’t heard this album, the most recent by French musician Colleen (although YouTube has a couple of tracks), it’s being posted here for the Beardsley-esque art. Or is it Bradley-esque, since the bold outlines perhaps owe something to the great Will? Whatever the inspiration, the artist responsible is Iker Spozio whose other music-related commissions can be seen on his Flickr pages, including the original drawing for this CD minus the text boxes.

For earlier examples of the Beardsley influence in album design there’s this post from a couple of years ago. I’d still like to know the artist responsible for the cover of the Gabor Szabo album, Dreams. If anyone has a clue, please leave a comment.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bradley does Beardsley
• Aubrey Beardsley’s musical afterlife

Weekend links 26

The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue.

• Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à Londres, TV interviews with the Glimmer Twins from 1968 with some remarkable footage in the second half of Jagger filming the penultimate shot of Performance. That French video site requires further exploration. Also there is a short film from 1961 with Jacques Lasry demonstrating the Cristal Baschet. Related: Jacques Doyen & Jacques Lasry play their Cristals while Arlette Thomas and others read French poetry. I wrote something about the mystery of the Cristal two years ago this week.

• Two great album cover blogs from Jive Time Records: Project Thirty-Three is “a shrine to circles, dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and the designers that make them come to life on album covers” while Groove Is In The Art “celebrates the era when psychedelic graphics and pop art met the mainstream”.

• At A Journey Round My Skull: Night Hallucinations: illustrations by Jaroslav Šerých for Tales of the Uncanny (Prague, 1976); Snark, Strangeness and Charm, Mahendra Singh’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll and others.

Laurence Chaves illustrates De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

• Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary at the Cuming Museum, Southwark, London in September, “will be the largest showcase of [Spare’s] work in a public museum since his death in 1956.” Jerusalem Press are publishing an expensive monograph to accompany the exhibition.

• Freeing “Pale Fire” From Pale Fire; “the next big Nabokov controversy”. Probably not but the thesis is an interesting one.

• Quintessential ‘topiary’ in Gandalf’s Garden: Barney Bubbles, head shops and Op Art graphic design.

• Monster Brains discovered some more paintings by Thomas Häfner.

• Spaceweather’s Northern Lights gallery.

• The passion of Krzysztof Penderecki.

• More Bookshelf porn.

• White peacocks.

• Sussan Deyhim: Daylaman | Desert Equations (for Brion Gysin) (with Richard Horowitz) | An interview at WorldStreams.

Several links this week via Adrian Shaughnessy’s Twitter feed. Thanks!

The Epigenesis by Melechesh

This new piece of work, a cover illustration for metal band Melechesh, was still in progress only a month ago but the album in question, The Epigenesis, has been announced so I can post it here. This follows a design I produced for an earlier Melechesh album, Emissaries, in 2006, both of which refer to the Sumerian mythology which powers the band’s music. There’s some vague Parajanov influence in this piece which isn’t the kind of thing that usually extends to the metal world but Sergei Parajanov’s films were one of the reference points the band offered. The suspended carpets at the top left are the most obvious allusion to the director but for the composition as a whole I also had in mind the tableaux scenes he creates in The Colour of Pomegranates and other films.

The Epigenesis will be released on the Nuclear Blast label on October 1st, 2010.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Short films by Sergei Parajanov
• New things for October

Weekend links 25

A commemorative Borges coin.

He says, “Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment’s objectivity or the individual’s psychic history.” There, of course, he sums up all of realism, no? “Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.” That’s Borges.

• The Borges Behind the Fiction: Colin Marshall talks to translator Suzanne Jill Levine. Related: The Garden of Forking Paths.

• From The Quietus: Blondie in Conversation with William S. Burroughs by Victor Bockris, 1979; An Interview with Laurie Anderson by Robert Barry, 2010.

In 962 Abd-er Rahman III was succeeded by his son Al-Hakim. Owing to the peace which the Christians of Cordova then enjoyed […] the citizens of Cordova, Arabs, Christians, and Jews, enjoyed so high a degree of literary culture that the city was known as the New Athens. From all quarters came students eager to drink at its founts of knowledge. Among the men afterwards famous who studied at Cordova were the scholarly monk Gerbert, destined to sit on the Chair of Peter as Sylvester II (999–1003), the Jewish rabbis Moses and Maimonides, and the famous Spanish-Arabian commentator on Aristotle, Averroes.

Entry for The Diocese of Cordova from The Catholic Encyclopedia (1917).

• Professor Newt’s Distorted History Lesson. A riposte to the ignorance of the wretched Gingrich. Related: the Mezquita de Córdoba.

Jorge Luis Borges and a cat. Via.

• Joseph and His Friend—A Story of Pennsylvania (1870) by Bayard Taylor, America’s first (?) gay novel. Related: 20 classic works of gay literature.

• Elegies For Angels, Punks and Raging Queens at the Shaw Theatre, London, from 10–28 August 2010.

• Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony is released later this month. Café Kaput’s first release, Electronic Music in the Classroom by DD Denham, appears in September.

• “Just relax and enjoy it.” k-punk on the ambition and vision of David Rudkin’s Artemis 81.

• Chris Watson explores Alan Lamb’s The Wires: three audio recordings to download.

• Jonathan Barnbrook: Tuxedomoon fan, 1988, and Tuxedomoon designer, 2007.

• Rob Young’s Electric Eden reviewed by Michel Faber.

• Brian Eno gets the Warp factor.

• No Tears (1978) by Tuxedomoon; Atomic (1979) by Blondie; Everything You Want (1980) by Tuxedomoon; Next One Is Real (1984) by Minimal Compact; Hologram (2010) by These New Puritans.

Design as virus 12: Barney’s faces

Sleeve for I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass (1978), a 7″ single by Nick Lowe. Design by Barney Bubbles.

Continuing an occasional series. Designer Vic Fieger had a guest post at Reasons To Be Cheerful earlier this week examining Barney Bubbles’ use of the human face in his graphic designs. This is one side of the Bubbles work I really enjoy, he had a remarkable facility for demonstrating a versatility with abstract shapes—or found objects, as in the piece above—while playing games with our pattern recognition. A recurrent playfulness was one of the many notable things about his approach to design.

Story title from The Best of Michael Moorcock (2009).

Fieger’s focussing on the faces in Barney’s work struck a chord for me since I’d deliberately tried something similar last year, taking a cue from Barney’s example. The Colour piece above is one of the story titles from The Best of Michael Moorcock published by Tachyon. For each story I designed a different title in a style which complemented the subject; Colour is a science fiction piece in which card games figure, hence the symbols. Mike Moorcock was friends with Barney during the 1970s so there was an additional reason for the reference.

I don’t know whether anyone has noticed the face on the cover of Booklife but it is there, with the two flowers at the top forming the eyes and the book’s title standing for the mouth. Once again, this wasn’t strictly necessary for the success of the design but it gave a rationale for the arrangment of the flowers. There’s also the hope when something is this subtle that the attraction of the pattern impells a browser to pick up the book in a shop without quite knowing why.

Booklife and The Best of Michael Moorcock are both available from Tachyon. Paul Gorman’s Barney Bubbles book, Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life & Work Of Barney Bubbles, will be relaunched later this year in a new edition.