Received a vinyl copy of this wonderful album over the weekend from InFiné Records (thanks!) Beautiful packaging with debossing on silver card + insert and inner sleeve, rounding off an excellent record perfectly. Pretty sure this will be in the end of year top 10 album chart for 2014 for me, not a duff track on it. Get it here.
UPDATE: Finders Keepers have just put an exclusive cassette version on sale referencing the original artwork.
Love these graphics for Paper Tiger who have a mix on Solid Steel in a week or so.
No.2 – so soon? Ghost Box‘s follow up to the Study Series of 7″s continues with Other Voices and it’s the turn of Listening Centre from New York. Two tracks on a beautifully designed 45 single, available to pre-order for Sept 17th release. More info here…
You may remember me featuring the Madlib ‘Pill Jar’ album cover a while back when he put it up as a free download. Well, it’s still there but he’s added more tracks and it’s now available as a physical LP with that great cover image by Rogerio Puhl. Another couple of nice cover designs, courtesy of Jeff Jank, come for the Rock Konducta 1 & 2 LPs – taking classic Beatles and Black Sabbath sleeves and bastardizing them.
I’ve been scanning the original Welcome To The Pleasuredome artwork by Lo Cole this week and, comparing it to the existing scans I was working with, there’s quite a bit of difference. It’s tempting with Photoshop to put images through all sorts of filters and processes to make the image ‘pop’, much like compression and limiting on audio files. After a while you can lose sight of the original but having the original paintings to hand I could check on screen that they were as accurate reproductions as possible. Certain colours didn’t initially scan exactly so I made sure that I corrected them to as near as possible with the colours of origin.
It’s actually hard to tell but the lower left of the moon is a subtlely different shade to the rest. The background is a more yellow/grey tone of blue.
This is a little like remastering from the original master tapes, cleaning up any stray dust or hair particles that have got on to the surface in the process. The blurrier, more saturated images here are the working files I’ve had and the subtler, sharper ones are the new scans that will be seen on the forthcoming box set. If you get the prints from the box, rest assured that the colours on them will be as accurate as possible to the original source (as long as the printer doesn’t mess things up) and if you display them they will nearly pass for originals.
As you can see with this comparison, there’s a bit more of the image on the top and the blues are more grey/yellow.
Death Waltz Recording Company releases for Record Store Day 2014 (only 2 of the 4). Each album has a splattered colour vinyl disc, a huge 36″x36″ poster, a 12″x12″ card print of the poster plus sleeve notes, a housebag that’s both embossed and debossed and a paper wraparound with release details.
These retail at an average of £20 each – incredible when you see the prices of other releases only offering half that. Plus Spencer Hickman, the label owner, is a straight up dude, one of the soundest people I’ve come across in the music industry. 
I visited the MoWax 21 / Urban Archaeology exhibition that opened at the Southbank Centre in London, currently home to the James Lavelle-curated Meltdown season.it was stuffed with everything you could want from a visual label retrospective with memorabilia and artwork from across the label’s history and beyond into post MW UNKLE releases.
For those familiar with the label there us much here to wallow in but plenty of behind the scenes stuff too. A letter from Mike D about a planned MoWax / Grand Royal ‘Battle of the Beats’ record, working drawings and model for Futura Pointmen toys and plenty of original art that graced many a sleeve. There are toys in every kind of colourway, some still at prototype stage, flyers reaching back to the early 90’s to when MoWax was more of a Talking Loud wannabe than the trip hop and electronica powerhouse of its heyday.
It’s free but only open until June 22nd so you only have this week to catch it before it’s gone. But if you don’t manage to make it down then there is an extensive book now available with even more info and photos. Initially funded via Kickstarter, I received a copy last week and it’s beautiful to behold, a perfect visual encapsulation of the label.
Here are some concepts and designs from what would have been the Hollywood version of Akira, proposed several years ago (and in various forms years before that too). It would have starred Chris Evans as Kaneda and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tetsuo amongst others. These images are taken from the moviepilot.com site, go there for more concept images and info.
Beautiful artwork on the new Dead Cert release which is another Clone record taken from a tape of instructions for birthing! Image and text taken from the Boomkat mail out:
“Utilising the ARP 2600, ARP Odyssey, Polymoog, harmonica/synthesiser interface, Eventide Omnipressor, Roland vocoder and genuinely bizarre narration imploring the listener to “push…” over a background of retro-futuristic space-age progressions, these recordings edge the concept of extreme American outsider music to its furthest reaches.
Originally broadcast as a one-off transmission for electronic harmonicist Gary Sloane’s Import Hour show on Anchorage radio station KGOT FM, it’s one of the rarest recordings in the very limited line of Clone breadcrumbs released to date – the audio discovered by Sloan in his own time capsule of C60 compact cassettes used to document the unlikely synthesised wing of an untravelled North American micro industry.”
At 10 and 12 minutes a side it’s debatable whether this should qualify as an ‘album’ but it’s certainly one of their most intriguing releases recently. Listen and buy here.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood‘s ‘Two Tribes’ – one of the greatest pop singles of the 80’s and certainly one of the greatest 12″ mixes of all time – was released 30 years ago today. June 4th saw a 7″ and 12″ finally burst the bubble of expectation that ‘Relax’ had inflated after its 5 week run at the no.1 spot despite a BBC ban.
Six days later on June 10th ‘Two Tribes’ was also sitting at no.1 and would remain bedded in for another nine weeks with ‘Relax’ returning to the no.2 spot for a couple of those too. The 7″ and 12″ would be joined by three further 12″s, all sporting remixes of the title track or its B side, a cover of Edwin Starr‘s ‘War’, as well as 7″ and 12″ picture discs and a cassette compiling excerpts from all.
Add to that the phenomenon of the ‘Frankie Say’ T-shirts that swept the nation that summer and you had a roller coaster of pop product that no one could have predicted. Over on my ArtofZTT blog I’ve been adding sleeves, posters, adverts and picture discs daily to celebrate along with various quotes and info about the releases.
The ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’ box set I helped design is looking good at 83% funded over on Pledge Music and I’m waiting on the go ahead to post more photos from it. Over on his Failed Muso blog Rob Puricelli has written a great piece about the anniversary of ‘Two Tribes‘ and how it impacted on him as a teen in the 80’s, so much of it rings true to my experience too but he puts it so much better.
Go HERE to buy the album and download this and another Julian House-designed poster for free.
Very sad to hear that the great Swiss surrealist painter and designer HR Giger has passed away. Few people have a unique vision but I think it’s safe to say that he was one of those few and has influenced generations with his mechanic/organic images.
His work is not easily forgotten once seen and he created one of the great movie monsters of our time in the Alien. The album cover was also a natural canvas for his work with the public exposed to him via Emerson, Lake & Palmer‘s ‘Brain Salad Surgery’ LP well before Alien. His work for Debbie Harry and The Dead Kennedys saw much controversy with the latter being banned and famously brought to court with Jello Biafra defending the artist’s vision.
I remember seeing his large format Necronomicon and Biomechanics books in shops in the 80’s and wanting them so badly but they were way out of my price range at the time. I was lucky enough to visit the tiny town of Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland one time though to see many of his originals in the Giger Museum – highly recommended. Sadly missed but never forgotten. 
Kid Acne‘s ‘The Return’ solo exhibition just opened last weekend in Turin, Italy. Here are some photos from the opening and a film of him at work. The show runs until July 5th and is held at the Galo Art Gallery.
The entire exhibition focuses on his Stabby Women characters – adding new paintings, illustrations and prints to the ongoing body of work, which continues to explore the travels, rituals and mythology of these enigmatic female warriors.
Canadian Marco D’Alfonso drew this Akira / Kirby ‘What If?’ mash up cover for The Line Is Drawn blog. I’d buy that in a minute.
I can’t say too much about these because they’re not legit, but they are very good and make for an indepth journey into the back catalogue of the evergreen JAMMs / KLF etc. Collections of remasters and remixes, obscurities and hits mix with reworkings so sensitive to the originals that it’s hard to tell what’s ‘real’ and what’s not.
This is particularly excellent, extending Jimmy Cauty‘s ‘Space’ to over 72 minutes. If you do some research and a bit of digging around you can find out about and hear some of this material but you won’t find it in any shops.
Love this, see how he did it on his blog here.
Two views of Lisbon; inside my hotel and out on the street by the MusicBox club where I played on Thursday night.
Sun through the clouds in Switzerland, driving towards France on Friday afternoon.
Sound check in La Rodia, Besancon, France with our new banner featuring every artist sampled on the ‘Paul’s Boutique’ LP.
The not-quite-finished hotel in France the next morning – note the 2 stars – it was actually OK inside. Next, a fantastic view on the road back to Geneva.
Saturday night back in London – Adam & The (original) Antz do ‘Dirk Wears White Sox’ at the Hammersmith Apollo.
Beastie fans get ready for the 3-Way Mix at the Moon Club in Cardiff on Sunday night and we premiere our new picture disc controller records from 12InchSkinz during the set.
Found this online the other day, never heard of or seen the film but like the design and mood of it.
A recent edition of the Brick Journal (issue 28) has a feature on building the Police Spinner car from Blade Runner. It also has some new photos of the one-off version that Lego built for designer Syd Mead.
You can find physical copies of the magazine in Forbidden Planet sometimes or download it from their site here. The rest of the issue is heavy with insights into the Lego Movie and the various character, vehicle and set builds behind it.
