It came from outer space | Cosmic disco. Haven’t we had this before? Yeah but now it’s new again…
Tag: Kraftwerk
End of the road for Kraftwerk founder
End of the road for Kraftwerk founder | Florian Schneider leaves Kling Klang.
Speak & Spell
Before speech synthesis became a standard feature of home computing there was this crude device for teaching children spelling, now emulated in Flash by Kevin St. Onge. Anyone who’s heard Kraftwerk’s later music will recognise the tones generated by the top row of buttons which Ralf and Florian used on the track Home Computer for the Computer World album. Speak & Spell voices turned up on many recordings throughout the Eighties and Nineties. Fun as this emulator is I’d much prefer an EMS VCS3 to play with.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• The genius of Kraftwerk
Design as virus 7: eyes and triangles
Continuing this occasional series. The above motif is the Golden Dawn’s Wedjat or Eye of Horus emblem as reproduced in the hardback edition of The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, an “autohagiography”. Crowley was under discussion here a few days ago and the eye in a triangle symbol can also be seen on the sleeve of the single featured in that posting, forming a part of the seal of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the occult order which Crowley joined in 1910. Crowley’s use of the eye in a triangle caught the attention of writer Robert Anton Wilson and the first part of his Illuminatus! trilogy (written with Robert Shea) is titled The Eye in the Pyramid. That latter symbol appears on the reverse of the American dollar bill, of course, and some of the conspiracy theories surrounding that usage are explored in the novel. Wilson went on to make the eye in a triangle something of a personal symbol and his obsessive use of the motif caught my attention in turn when I began reading his books.
All of which leads us to Hawkwind and a person whose name keeps turning up on these pages, designer Barney Bubbles.
Hawklog cover (detail) by Barney Bubbles.
The booklet which BB designed for Hawkwind’s second album, In Search of Space (1971), featured a version of the dollar bill symbol on its cover. This is the only eye in a triangle design I’ve seen among Barney Bubbles’ work although he was so prolific there may well be others. When I began producing my own significantly inferior Hawkwind graphics in the late Seventies I incorporated eyes in triangles partly as a way of avoiding having to draw hawks all the time but mainly because of Robert Anton Wilson. BB had already established a precedent and it so happens that the eye in the Golden Dawn/Crowley version is the eye of a hawk-headed Egyptian god.
Old music and old technology
Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who should know better. Several of the CD releases I’ve designed recently have also been brought out in vinyl editions. Meanwhile the audio cassette really is on the way out: “Sales of music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to about 700,000 in 2006” says Wikipedia. I certainly won’t mourn its passing; portability aside, I always hated these things. Music sounded shitty unless the tape was chrome or some other high-quality format, and whatever the quality they were all subject to mangling by cheap cassette players.