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Piranesi record covers

Title page for the Carceri d’Invenzione (second state), 1761.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) is a cult figure here so this is an inevitable post even if there isn’t a great deal to look at. Many of the record covers that use Piranesi etchings are for classical releases, which isn’t so surprising. The prints that comprise the Vedute di Roma were Piranesi’s most popular works, and remain so today despite their exaggerations of the true size of Rome’s monuments and ruins. But I thought the Carceri d’Invenzione (aka The Prisons) might be more popular, especially in the metal world where dark and gloomy imagery is de rigueur. There may be more examples, of course, since I’m having to rely on Discogs which doesn’t always note the work of uncredited artists. I suspect that architecture alone isn’t attractive enough for the metal hordes, however vast and tenebrous that architecture might be. The covers I’ve done for metal bands have always had to incorporate figures—human or otherwise—or some kind of occult symbolism. The most prominent musical piece based on Piranesi’s Prisons is also a classical work, one of the Bach cello suites recorded by Yo-Yo Ma in 1998. Ma’s album, Inspired By Bach, was accompanied by six films from different directors; the film for Suite No. 2, The Sound of the Carceri by François Girard, shows Ma playing the piece inside a CGI rendering of Piranesi’s colossal spaces. Copies of Girard’s film come and go on YouTube so this one may not stay around.

Luigi Dallapiccola: Il Prigioniero (1975); National Symphony Orchestra Of Washington DC, Antal Dorati.

Palestrina: Missa Aeterna Christi Munera / Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae / Motetti (1976); Pro Cantione Antiqua, London.

Tartini: Concerti Per Violino E Orchestra / Sonate (1981); P. Toso, I Solisti Veneti, C. Scimone, E. Farina.

Captivation (1994) by Tefilla.

Continue reading “Piranesi record covers”

Weekend links 556

Captain Edward St. Miquel Tilden Bradshaw and his Crew Come to Grips with Bloodthirsty Foe Pirates by S. Clay Wilson, Zap Comix no. 3, 1968.

• RIP S. Clay Wilson, the wild man of American comics. The scene of mayhem above is typical in being barely coherent at a small size; click for a larger view. Patrick Rosenkranz at The Comics Journal describes Wilson as “the most influential artist of his generation…creating an extensive body of work that will defy authority and offend propriety until the end of days”. When Moebius was writing in the 1980s about the founding of Métal Hurlant he had this to say about the American undergrounds: “They were the first in the world to use comics as a means of communication, to express real emotions. Before, comics were used only to do stories, entertainment. They had some great moments but they were all very conventional. The American Underground showed us in Europe how to express true feelings, how to tell something to the reader through the comics. They blew the minds of the few professionals in Europe who saw them.” Also at TCJ, the S. Clay Wilson Interview. Wilson sent me a postcard once. I wish I knew what the hell I’d done with it.

• Michael Hoenig, synthesist for Agitation Free and (briefly) Tangerine Dream, plays one of the pieces from his debut album of electronic music, Departure From The Northern Wasteland, on a radio show in 1977. Hoenig’s album is long overdue a remastering and re-release.

• “My job, which the BBC has tasked me to do, is to provoke people and ask them, ‘Have you thought about looking at the world this way?'” Adam Curtis talks to Michael J. Brooks about his new TV series, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.

{ feuilleton } celebrates its 15th birthday today. Monsieur Chat, the mascot of this place, is happy about that but then Monsieur Chat is happy about most things.

• At Greydogtales: Opening The Book of Carnacki. A call for contributions to a collection of new stories about William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective. I’d be tempted if I didn’t already have more than enough to keep me occupied.

• “I’m being asked to talk about it a great deal at the moment, with the pandemic.” Roger Corman and Jane Asher on filming The Masque of the Red Death.

• New music: Cygnus Sutra by Mike Shannon, “a soundtrack to a fantasy/sci-fi epic not yet written”.

• A trailer for The Witch of King’s Cross, a documentary about occult artist Rosaleen Norton.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Hans Bellmer & Paul Eluard The Games of the Doll (1949).

• RIP also this week to Rowena Morrill, fantasy artist, and to Chick Corea.

• “Computers will never write good novels,” says Angus Fletcher.

• DJ Food on Zodiac posters by Funky Features, 1967.

• Mix of the week: Fact Mix 794 by Lutto Lento.

• Annie Nightingale’s favourite music.

• Zodiac (1984) by Boogie Boys | From The Zodiacal Light (2014) by Earth | Zodiac Black (2017) by Goldfrapp

A Can pin

I’ve always liked badges, and I especially like the enamel pin variety even though I tend to buy them then not wear them very much for fear of losing them. This handsome item arrived a couple of days ago from an eBay seller, and is the first Can-related pin I’ve come across. After Kraftwerk, Can were the most popular of the German groups in the Britain of the 1970s but I’ve never seen any Can badges or anything else related to them from that decade aside from the records. The resurgence of interest in German music—Krautrock, if you must—has prompted the badge manufacturers who populate eBay, Etsy and elsewhere to create a number of items based on the record covers of Can, Neu!, Harmonia and others. The quality isn’t always very good but then badges in the 1970s were often crude designs as well. You can’t go wrong with a simple logo but shrinking an album cover down to 25 mm isn’t always a good idea. A couple of years ago I bought three Can badges from another eBay seller; two of them, with logo designs taken from sleeves, were okay but the third, based on the Future Days album cover was poorly printed. This pin equivalent is much better, as well as being one of the few Can sleeves you could transform in this manner. The raised gold lines are a good match for the Art Nouveau-styled design by Ingo Trauer and Richard J. Rudow which was embossed on the original German pressing. The group may have been popular in Britain but UA gave British Can-heads a flat sleeve.

The same eBay seller also makes these Kraftwerk pins which I bought a while ago. I’d still prefer to have the traffic cone without the band name—something that only aficionados would recognise—but it was good to find a pin based on the early years of the group’s career, the period which Kraftwerk themselves have long disowned. The seller recently added a new design with the same traffic cone in green as it is on the Kraftwerk 2 album cover, but the green cone was only a variation on a theme, the orange leitkegel is the ubiquitous and definitive icon of the pre-Autobahn years.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Holger’s Radio Pictures
• Jaki Liebezeit times ten
• Can esoterics
• Can soundtracks
• The kosmische design of Peter Geitner
• Reworking Kraftwerk (again)
• Leitkegel
• German gear
• Autobahnen
• Ralf and Florian
• Can’s Lost Tapes
• Reworking Kraftwerk
• Autobahn animated
• Sleeve craft
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• Old music and old technology
• A cluster of Cluster
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk

Weekend links 555

I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth.

• “Reading the new edition in 2021, I’m struck by his dismissal of CD-ROMs, of VR, of interactivity; how he anticipates contemporary debates about algorithmic bias…his prescient exhaustion.” Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Brian Eno’s diary for 1995, A Year with Swollen Appendices. Meanwhile, Eno himself says “Artists like me are being censored in Germany—because we support Palestinian rights.”

• “Kink is often pathologized in popular culture: it’s shamed, used as a punchline, and, on the whole, relegated to the margins of desire.” Greg Mania interviews R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell about Kink a collection of new stories about unorthodox desires.

• “This album is the king of hauntology. From where I’m sitting, I’m going back to the past, listening to an album imagining the future, imagining the past.” Tom Herdman on the fabulous Time (1981), a science-fiction concept album by the Electric Light Orchestra.

Cavafy, the ultimate Alexandrian, gave us an Alexandria that was already not quite there in his own lifetime. It kept threatening to disappear before his eyes. The apartment where he had made love as a young man had become a business office when he went to revisit it years later; and the days of 1896, of 1901, 1903, 1908, 1909, once filled with so much eros and forbidden love, were already gone and had become distant, elegiac moments that he remembered in poetry alone. The barbarians, like time itself, were at the gates, and everything would be swept in their wake. The barbarians always win, and time is hardly less ruthless. The barbarians may come now or in a century or two, or in a thousand years, as indeed they had come more than once centuries earlier, but come they will, and many more times after that as well, while here was Cavafy, landlocked in this city that is both the transitional home he wishes to flee and the permanent demon that can’t be driven out. He and the city are one and the same, and soon neither will exist. Cavafy’s Alexandria appears in antiquity, in late antiquity, and in modern times. Then it disappears. Cavafy’s city is permanently locked away in a past that refuses to go away.

André Aciman on the poetry of Cavafy and the Alexandrias of memory

• DJ Food on the package design for The Superceded Sounds of…The New Obsolescents, which uses a similar foil card to the “Héliophore” stock used by Philips in their cult series of electroacoustic compositions, Prospective 21e Siècle.

• Onlyou by Can, is “A relaxed studio session, recorded on a mono taperecorder in 1976 at the Innerspace”. Released in 1982 on a 34-minute cassette sealed inside a can (geddit?), and limited to 100 copies.

• Olivia Rutigliano ranks 45 films containing prison escapes. I’d put the Bresson at number one but otherwise, yes.

• “…some kind of future unrealised time…” Mix of the week is a mix for The Wire by Muqata’a.

• RIP Christopher Plummer. Never mind the musical, watch him in The Silent Partner (1978).

• At Ubuweb: short films by Erkki Kurenniemi soundtracked by his own electronic music.

• New music: Neurogenesis by Robert Rich.

• Kinky Boots (1964) by Patrick McNee & Honor Blackman | David Watts (1967) by The Kinks | The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (Dominant Mix) (1984) by Dominatrix

Weekend links 554

Tadanori Yokoo Emphasizes Deliberate Misalignment in Contemporary Woodblock Series.

• Another week, another Paris Review essay on Leonora Carrington. This time it’s Olga Tokarczuk exploring eccentricity as feminism. At the same publication there’s more eccentricity in Lucy Scholes‘ feature about the neglected novels of Irene Handl, a woman best known for the characters she played in many British films and TV dramas. I’ve long been curious about Handl’s writing career so this was good to see.

• “The denial of our participation in the world, [Fisher] implies—the disavowal of our desire for iPhones even as we diligently think anti-capitalist thoughts—is incapacitating. It leads to a regressive utopianism that cannot envision going through capitalism, but only retreating or escaping from it, into a primitive past or fictional future.” Lola Seaton on the ghosts of Mark Fisher.

• More ghosts: Paranormal is the latest collection of spooky, atmospheric electronica from Grey Frequency, “an audio document exploring extraordinary phenomena which have challenged orthodox science, but which have also grown and evolved as part of contemporary culture and a wider folkloric landscape.”

• “Items billed as THE BEST EVER can stop us cold, and even cause us to take them for granted, never reassessing them, as we instead gesture, often without thought, to where they sit in the corner, under a halo and backdrop of blue ribbons.” Colin Fleming on Miles Davis and Kind Of Blue.

• “Diaboliques and Psycho both achieve something very rare: a perfect plot twist but an unspoilable movie,” says Milan Terlunen.

• Richard Kirk returns once more as “Cabaret Voltaire” with a new recording, Billion Dollar.

• Even more Leonora Carrington: some of the cards from her Tarot deck.

• DJ Food on Zodiac Posters by Simboli Design, 1969.

• Kodak Ghosts (1970) by Michael Chapman | Plight (The Spiralling Of Winter Ghosts) (1988) by David Sylvian & Holger Czukay | The Ghosts Of Animals (1995) by Paul Schütze