You have to hand it to Jack White, this is the coolest thing to bring back into the world.
Records
It’s that time of year again, Record Store Day looms this Saturday and the Secret 7″ project is back for another year. Initiated by Universal Records, it presents artists and designers with the chance to create a one-off cover for one of seven different releases, both old and new.
This year’s artists are Public Enemy, Elton John, Laura Marling, Nas, Haim, Jessie Ware and Nick Drake. Over 700 sleeves have been created and each will be available on April 20th at Mother, 10 Redchurch St, London, E2 7DD at the price of £40 each with the money raised going to the charity Art Against Knives.
You won’t know who has designed which sleeve or what song you’re buying (although you can take an educated guess) until you buy it, when all will be revealed. I bought three last year and it was one of the most exciting purchases I made in recent memory.
The sleeves were on view to the public last weekend and I managed to catch the last few minutes and snap some favourites before they closed the doors, which reopen at 10am on Saturday. I spotted work by Pete Fowler, Jonathan Edwards and Felt Mistress among them but Gilbert & George have contributed this year somewhere too.
The new Demdike Stare 12″ has a nice twist to the packaging and design. It comes in a paper sleeve, housed in a second thin PVC protective cover with an A4 insert and labels that are either black or white for sides A and B. On the front are instructions that customers would see if they had ordered their own set of test pressings to approve before a release.
For those that don’t know, once a record is finished it goes to a cutting house where they make a master ‘lacquer’ of the disc on a large lathe in real time. That lacquer is then sent off to the pressing plant and a small number of ‘test’ pressings are made, usually called ‘white labels’ due to the fact that a white label is pressed onto the centre where the regular label would go. These are then sent to the artist or record label to check that ‘the cut’ was OK and that everything sounds fine before proceeding with the full run of the pressing. It would be foolish to go through such a delicate and variable process without checking a sample copy before pressing hundreds or thousands of discs only for them to all be defective.
The new release is the first in a series of ‘Test Pressings’ by the duo and the cover sets out the various steps you should take when getting such a pressing yourself. Only the catalogue number appears on the front, no titles or even the group’s name (that’s on the insert) and the same thing is repeated in German on the reverse of the sleeve. I think this is their best release in a while, dark and sinister as usual but more beat-orientated this time around, in an industrial meets jungle kind of way.
Record Store Day is only 3 weeks away and, as usual, my local used record store, Rat Records in Camberwell, will be celebrating. I had great fun playing there last year and, as is traditional, my good friend David Vallade has out done himself this year with his poster for the event. They have six separate in stores this year, lord knows where they will fit everyone!
Rat doesn’t have any of the usual RSD releases as they are a used store but they have new stock every Saturday and will be stockpiling specials for April 20th I’m sure. If you’re South of the river and don’t fancy joining the scrum uptown but want to just rummage in the unknown and support a local business in the celebration of vinyl then this is a good place to start.
They are just off Camberwell Green, nearest tube is Oval, nearest overground is Denmark Hill and there are plenty of buses from Oval or Elephant that go straight there.
On Record Store Day this year (April 20th) Ninja Tune will release a four disc vinyl repress of the EPs that made up my album ‘The Search Engine’. These are straight represses of the original three EPs (One Man’s Weird…, The Shape of Things… and Magpies, Maps & Moons) plus the Amorphous Androgynous remix 12″ from last years’ RSD (on black vinyl this time though).
The first three 12″s have been out of print for some time now and contain extra tracks and some different mixes to the CD album, with some tracks also being full length versions. If your bought these the first time round there’s nothing new here I’m afraid except the poster covers are replaced by an eight panel foldout sleeve, similar to the original limited edition ‘Paul’s Boutique’ LP.
Each disc has its own sleeve and the spine measures a tasty 13 mm in width, easy to find in the rack for sure.
In the spirit of the title and to add a little something for RSD I’ve had ten unique pieces of artwork inserted into random copies of the album. Six high quality prints of zoetropes that I made for the exhibitions last year and four unique collages as seen below. 
All are 12″x12″ in size, signed, stamped and protected by a transparent sleeve. If any readers of this blog find one, please let me know, it will be nice to see how far they go out into the world. I’m sure the Ninja Tune online shop will have copies the Monday after RSD so don’t worry if you can’t get to a store, everyone has a chance to find one of the inserts, they’re completely random and could go out to whoever orders them, not just stores participating in RSD.
Getting a copy of this little release has been a mission, by the time I found out about it it was sold out on pre-order. I put it on my Piccadilly Records wishlist and hoped, badgered the label to repress it but they couldn’t afford to. Eyed up copies on eBay but didn’t want to give the flippers the satisfaction but finally succumbed when the label – Sonic Catherdral – put up one of their final copies to raise money for Red Nose Day a couple of weeks back. I think it was the most I’d ever paid for a 7″ (two actually) but it’s going to a good cause so fuck it.
‘A Psyche For Sore Eyes’ is a beautifully realised package, designed by Heretic, to house two coloured 45s, a pair of 3D glasses and a whole heap of psychedelic imagery. The paper engineering is particularly clever in the way it accommodates each component and the glasses aren’t just a gimmick. Rather than have ‘look I can touch it’ 3D the red/green balance works more in an op-art sense, similar to the 3D underground comix designs I posted two years back.
Musically I wouldn’t call it ‘psyche’ as such, – it’s a compilation that swings from indie rock to shoegazing drones to electron-noise. Lead track, ‘The Correspondent’ by Hookworms, is so reminiscent of ‘A Storm In Heaven’-era Verve that it’s hard not to imagine ‘mad’ Richard Ashcroft on vocals. The Vacant Lots have been worshipping at the alter of Suicide but in a good way and the fuzz bass and reverb of Lorelle meets the Obsolete reminds me of both the 60’s and the 90’s simultaneously (see ’60, see ’90, go! anyone?*). Even though it’s hard to find in stores you can listen and buy digitally.
*(bad Bow Wow Wow joke – sorry)
Another zoetrope picture disc – this time for Kate Bush‘s Record Store Day release of ‘Running Up That Hill’ (2012 remix). This will be on a 10″ but it’s not known yet how many copies will be pressed or how you’ll actually see this animate on the turntable. The design was put together by Peacock who also did the same for her last year – and check out the lovely homepage for Kate’s site here.
I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, it’s quite an old record now, being released in 2009 on Fonal Records. Shogun Kunitoki make epic organ-led instrumental space rock and their second album came as a picture disc which also doubles as a zoetrope. They even went so far as to issue a ‘Mystical Shogun Kunitoki Strobe Light’ with which to view the animated designs. The first edition is sold out but they have a few here, unfortunately the record is sold out though. Watch a clip of how it works and steps to build your own here. The Amorphous Androgynous included a track on one of their Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble mixes way back and you can check them out on iTunes.
Astrophonica end their trilogy of VIP 10″s with Machine Drum‘s take on ‘Jungle Juke’. It works a treat and sits alongside the other two rather nicely. Each sleeve is screen-printed in two colours, hand stamped and the whole run is limited to 300 of each disc. Fracture and Om Unit head up the first two releases and they can be bought from here.
In other news, Machine Drum just signed to Ninja Tune! 
The Trunk reissue 10″ of Tom Dissvelt and Kid Baltan‘s ‘Electronic Movements’ single with my original Philips 7″ version of the same. The reverse of the Trunk release has Daphne Oram‘s ‘Electronic Sound Patterns’, which I don’t have an original of so you get the reverse of the Philips 45. As usual with Trunk, this is pretty limited and available from the website now. Also there’s an excellent 8 page overview of everything Trunk in this months (Feb 2013) Record Collector magazine.
I’d like to bring your attention to a new blog I’ve set up about the Art of ZTT Records (or ‘Who’s Afraid of the Art of Zang Tuum Tumb’ to give it its full title).
For years I’ve been collecting everything I can find from the early 80’s incarnation of this label and tracking down the designers and photographers responsible for some of the artwork. It’s a constant work in progress, starting off as a possible magazine article then progressing to a book idea and now, finally, I’ve decided to make it a website.
Inspired by Paul Gorman‘s rehabilitation of Barney Bubbles‘ work into today’s design community I hope the same can happen for the work of ZTT as it was hugely influential on my own desire to design for the music industry. XL, Accident and The London Design Partnership aren’t exactly household names in the same way as Vaughn Oliver and Peter Saville are but I think that the work they produced for the label in their golden age is at least an equal of the Factory and 4AD portfolios.
The site will eventually feature sleeves, promo posters, print ads, photos, exclusive interviews and associated ephemera connected with the label, its artists and designers. At the very least it should be an exhaustive gallery of an innovative label with a host of rare and forgotten imagery.
Over on the Dust & Grooves website (which really is a must if you like vinyl collections of each and every kind) there’s a fascinating feature on Rutherford Chang‘s exhibition of his collection of The Beatles’ ‘White’ album.
Similarly to Christian Marclay‘s appropriation and customisation of the same album many years ago, Chang has taken it to the next level. He has nearly 700 numbered copies now, all filed in order of issue, and is exhibiting until March at the Recess gallery in New York.
What I love about this is the cultural anthropology side of vinyl collecting, much like Jive Time Records‘ Deface Value or the Bargain Bin Blasphemy blog each sleeve has been customised, sometimes unintentionally, by the previous owner. Vinyl-lovers always talk about the sleeve as a large canvas for artwork and no album is more that than ‘The Beatles’. We’ll never know the hows or whys, only that each copy has now found a new home amongst some of its siblings 45 years later.
For more beautiful images, an interview and a recording of 100 copies of side one of the album playing simultaneously go to Dust & Grooves.
For more on the exhibition:
We Buy White Albums
January 8 – March 9, 2013
Recess, 41 Grand Street, New York
http://www.recessart.org/activities/6753
http://rutherfordchang.com/
Customised Parade of Pops compilation LP inner sleeve, as found, 2013.
After visiting Dusseldorf last month and being introduced to the Themes For Great Cities vinyl-only label from the city I can’t get enough of certain releases from them. Wolf Muller produces the kind of afro-centric beat driven electronica I’m sure exists but never seem to find. His ‘Lagerfeuer Tanz EP’ is a fantastic 4 track trip into an undiscovered land where shamanic drum rituals have been picking up broadcasts of minimal techno mixtapes and weaving them into their own groove.
The multi-artist ‘Mogul 2’ 12″ has a motorik mix of retro electronica courtesy of four different bands and comes in a striking Neu! 2-homaging sleeve. A mysterious 10″ under the title ‘Edits Des Amateurs’ features three rhythm tracks oozing pure funk but never much deviating from their mission to stay in the pocket until they reach their destination.
The sleeves are screen-printed and stamped in collaboration with the local Slowboy record store, which has one of the finest collections of music old and new I’ve ever seen. Check out some of the releases below and visit their Soundcloud for more.
Op-Art seems to be back in a big way in 2013. After seeing the odd example over the years (Trevor Jackson‘s Soulwax sleeves spring to mind) the floodgates seemed to open last year. Chris & Cosey‘s ‘Transcend’ sleeve was the one in all the end of year lists and I think I’ve featured more op art in the last year than ever before.
Drums of Death was one of them and his Waves trilogy of EPs (red, blue and black) are getting the remix treatment on the Civil Music label. Above are the cover of the remixed versions of red and blue with the original blue and black below. Whilst the music isn’t all my bag I can highly recommend ‘Bang The Drum’ from the Red Waves EP. The Blue Waves Remixed 12″ is released on March 4th.
Kol Nidrei by Max Bruch, 7″ dedicated to Ilse Joseph’s four children gassed in Auschwitz. Present from a fellow record collector.
Two Systems 7″ picture disc with music by Wrangler and Scanner, Static Caravan Records 2008.
I was lucky enough to receive this fantastic book for Xmas this year after the first printing in 2008 disappeared and started going for silly money. Luckily this 2nd edition has extra info and images so waiting paid off and I can’t recommend this book highly enough for fans of music design in general. Until the middle of the last decade the name Barney Bubbles wasn’t widely known or recognised aside from music business associates from back in the day or the odd rabid fan.
The reason for this is not because his work was hidden away on obscure releases – he designed covers for several classic albums as well as a fair few hit singles in the 70’s and early 80’s. It wasn’t because the work wasn’t good, most of it is stunning, all the more so when you read into the detail he put in each and every one. It was more to do with the fact that Barney often didn’t sign much of his work, and when he did it was under some super-coded pseudonym only a few close to him would recognise. He also didn’t go out of his way to publicise himself and suffered from bouts of depression which, sadly, caused him to take his own life in 1983, thus halting what could have been a groundbreaking career in design.
I say this because Bubbles was that rare thing in that he spanned two very distinct generations and worked seamlessly within both of them, a rarity these days and hard to pull off as most designers get associated with a particular style or genre and become known for that only. He started in the midst of the 60’s and became a full blown hippy, journeying to San Francisco in the summer of ’68 . He returned to produce graphics for the scene in London – the name Barney Bubbles was given to him after he started his own psychedelic light show mixing inks on overhead projectors. A long association with Hawkwind followed and he designed some of their most innovative sleeves such as ‘Space Ritual’ and ‘X In Search Of Space’ – both fold out wonders the likes of which were abundant in the 70’s.
But come the year of punk, when all this was to be washed away and the reset button pushed, Barney fell in with the newly hatched Stiff label with Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe among others and seamlessly altered his style(s) to fit with the times, coasting through into the 80’s unscathed. He was the first person to mimic the Penguin book covers now so ubiquitous, parodied Blue Note sleeve design nearly a decade before it came back into fashion with Acid Jazz and took De Stijl and Cubist designs as inspiration before many others. He even dipped his toe into furniture design and early video promo making before he passed (did you know he directed The Specials‘ ‘Ghost Town’ video? no, me neither).
Until the publication of the first edition of this book, tirelessly put together by journalist Paul Gorman, who has since helped curate displays at the V&A of famous pop memorabilia, the design world had largely ignored Bubbles even though many pieces have featured in Record Cover collection books over the years. The drawing together of his output and the joining the dots between the various phases, pseudonyms and uncredited work has finally shone a spotlight on him, something it’s doubtful he would have gone out of his way to do had he still been alive.
I certainly wasn’t aware of how far he reached with his work but plenty of his sleeves and designs were familiar to me even though a lot of the music wasn’t something I listened to. The logo for the NME paper from 1978 through to 2010 – that was Barney, the Stiff Records logo, Billy Bragg‘s ‘Life’s A Riot With Spy vs Spy’ sleeve, Elvis Costello‘s ‘Armed Forces’ LP package, The Blockheads‘ logo, the first Depeche Mode LP cover, the first Damned singles and albums…
An incredible body of work and an amazing book, lavishly illustrated that chronologically treads the paths that Bubbles did with plenty of input from the artists and friends that he worked with. My only nitpick with it is that the images are almost always out of synch with the text, the illustrations always seemingly several pages behind which is frustrating when you’re trying to get a sense of a sleeve being described only to find it 6 pages later.
His death is also almost a minor entry in the narrative and, having heard Mark Hodkinson‘s harrowing ‘In Search of Barney Bubbles’ documentary on BBC Radio4 it’s all the more tragic when you see everything he’d achieved up until that point. Treat yourself to this book and revel in his work as he finally takes his place among the greats of music design in the 20th Century.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about buying a fifth copy of The The‘s ‘Infected’ album upon finding a test pressing secondhand. Whilst record shopping in Montreal this summer I found a new copy of the Nonesuch vinyl reissue of Eno & Byrne‘s ‘My Life In The Bush of Ghosts’ – another of my all time favourite albums. The CD reissue in 2008 with the bonus tracks is already in my collection but the double vinyl version added multi-track parts to two album cuts on the fourth side as well so I couldn’t help but pick it up.
Add to the bonus audio that the whole package was housed in a beautiful, heavyweight card gatefold sleeve with notes and it was an instant sale. Around the time of the reissue a special website was created with additional content such as extra sleeve notes by Paul Morley, recording session photos and discarded screen captures from the original artwork. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated and now all you can get is the home page (possible out-dated Flash plug-in is my guess) so here are some of the artwork outtakes.
I now own five versions of this seminal record – the original vinyl (with the track, ‘Qu’ran’ which was later removed), original CD, Nonesuch reissue CD and vinyl. There’s also an Italian bootleg CD called ‘Ghosts’ with demos and original versions before samples were removed or tracks reworked which features a couple of things not on the reissues. I also have the two 12″ singles that were released originally in the early 80’s but not the ‘first edition’ vinyl bootleg of demo versions.
Apparently above is a scan of an earlier version of the album sent to the record label. Because of ‘sample-clearance’ issues (this was 1980, such a thing was unheard of) the record was delayed and later some of it was reworked by Eno and Byrne. Some tracks were dropped or titles changed, some mixes were redone and some new tracks were added. Most of the dropped tracks were reinstated on the reissues on Nonesuch. I never tire of this record and the reissue is the rare exception of the bonus material actually adding to an enhancing the original rather than just padding it out.
Much like Malcolm McLaren‘s ‘Duck Rock’ album this record is a product of its time and exists almost in a vaccuum, barely dating in the 30 years + since its release. You can hear echoes of the sounds Eno & Byrne created here on either side of their respective discographies around the time but they never fully reached the other-worldliness achieved on this album