A digital recreation and remix of an early Designers Republic sleeve for The Orb who are doing some sort of gig performing their first two albums at Brixton’s Electric venue on April 5th. Tickets and event page are here.
Below is a post from my ‘other’ blog – ArtOfZTT.com – where I post artwork relating to the ZTT label and interview the people who made it. 
I arrive early, at a pub just outside Hither Green station in deepest South East London, to meet Tony ‘AJ’ Barratt, renown music magazine photographer and key ingredient in the early days of ZTT image-making. His photos of spanners, statues, masks and landscapes gave an identity to (the) Art of Noise as well as gracing the first release from the label, ‘Into Battle’. He also did many live shots, promo and video stills for Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Andrew Poppy.
It’s Friday evening and the place is filling up, the only photo of Tony I’ve got for reference is 30 years old and he’s told me to look out for ‘a hairless Glenn Gregory, ex of Heaven 17 lookalike’. After about 10 minutes a guy comes in who might fit the bill and I catch his eye, ‘Tony?’, ‘Yes’, he says, shaking my hand but with a very puzzled expression on his face. ‘Tony Barratt?’ I enquire, ‘ah, no, you’ve got the wrong person, he says, ‘but my name IS Tony though’. With perfect timing, the right Tony walks through the door holding a copy of the Ambassadors Theatre program for ‘The Value of Entertainment’.
He does indeed look like Glen Gregory, albeit without hair, and is instantly warm, engaging and candid about his early experiences in the music business. We’re joined by his partner, Jan, and after a couple of pints we repair to his house nearby where I notice the 12″ picture discs for both ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’ amongst the many pictures hanging on their walls.
How did you get it touch with ZTT? Presumably you knew Paul from working at the NME or was that later?
No, it’s much more personal than that, I moved down to London with Paul’s sister, Jayne (they were an item). I knew Paul in Stockport, vaguely…
Is that where you’re from?
Yeah, and he bought out a fanzine – ‘Out There’ – sent it down to the NME and they said, ‘you’ve gotta come down and speak to us as soon as you can’. He went down and started off his career, this must have been early eighties so that kind of fits in. I moved down to London with Jayne in ’83 and I was a photography student at Harrow. In my second year there, obviously Paul Morley was (at) the NME and he was doing all this great stuff, (so) I took my stuff to the NME. This was before the Art of Noise or whatever. I was shown the door.
I went to the Melody Maker and started doing work there, concert stuff and photos and things, and then as time went by, Paul suddenly started to get involved with… I’ve no idea how that whole thing came to be – that he met with Trevor Horn, you might know a bit more about it or it might be mythologised by Paul or whatever.
The accepted story is that he interviewed Trevor when he was in the Buggles…
Yeah I remember that.
…he slated them, but when Trevor got the opportunity from Chris Blackwell (head of Island records) to start a label, he remembered Paul and got in touch. That would have been at some point in ’82 or ’83 presumably so you would have done those Art of Noise photos in the summer?
(Laughs) It’s awful to say but I have no memory of when or how, you have to remember that I was coming to the end of my photography course, I don’t think I’d actually left and there was this vague idea of some vague photos that might be needed for this vague idea of a group. And it was never something that was kind of like, ‘here’s a brief, we would like you to go out and do this’. The record label started and there’re all very exciting PAs at the Camden Palace with the Frankies, all sorts of bands were signing and people were interested and it was going to be the artist event of the… which it turned out, in some ways, to actually be.
AJ (with cable release), Paul Morley (with phone) and friends circa ’83 – AJ: “I took this from across the room with the cable release, if I remember, Paul was on the phone to Trevor sorting out the ZTT thing.”
But I can’t actually remember. I remember it being a great time, I’d moved down to London, I was on the guest list of these great parties and it was free drinks and I thought, ‘oh my god I can’t believe this’. And then there was this record label and there was the Frankies and this vague idea of this thing called The Art of Noise and it was never like a… Because the members were so busy all the time, it was never like, ‘the group are going on tour now, etc.’ So there was no real sense of urgency.
They weren’t a group in the classic sense were they? They were producers, studio engineers and arrangers, which is commonplace today, but back then… They were ‘the music’ and Paul was ‘the image and the words’ and he knew how to present them.
Yeah, I’m not sure how you’d describe it, and he would chuck things in, he really did chuck things into the mix there, but there was never any sense there of… a plan. I got the impression that the music they made was at the end of a hard day producing whoever the hell it was.
The initial ideas for the Art of Noise apparently came from producing Yes, they stole a drum track which was going to be wiped, which then became the basis for ‘Beatbox’.
Well, if you listen to ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’ by Yes, there’s a bit in the middle where it kind of flips up and I remember that being crucial to the Art of Noise. I think that’s when Morley kind of went, ‘that’s what the Art of Noise should be’.
When you took all the images like the hand with the rose and the spanner, that was just you on your own or did Paul come with you, did he give you those props?
My memory of that is that, at that time, I would just go out and take photos. When Paul was talking about the Art of Noise, what kind of came into my head was like Russian Constructivism, Futurism… The Human League did an EP called, ‘The Dignity of Labour’ and I always thought of this idea of labour being a fantastic idea to get into, you know, the ‘strength through joy’ kind of thing.
I know what you mean, like SPK, imagery of spanners and hammers, almost acting out Russian Constructivist posters.
So, I would just go out on a Saturday afternoon, go down to parts of London that I didn’t know and I’d just wander about, climb into things and take photos of things and mess about. Where those photos were taken, where that crane was that I climbed into, the same place as the van (from the ‘Close Up’ sleeve). It has obviously been a scrap metal yard at some point but you can see Tower Bridge in the background and when you think about London 30 years ago, there’s a piece of scrap land that you can see Tower Bridge from, that’s unbelievable.
It’s fascinating for me to see the contacts for the original Art Of Noise spanners etc., just seeing the outtakes or different shots. (AJ had provided me with original contact sheets for some of these shots).
The spanner photo (above) is my favourite of all time because it’s my arms, I set the shot up and I judged how high up I should put the spanner and I did the cable release with my foot. Strange but true, when I saw it, I just thought, ‘wow’. It’s very rare that, you know yourself as a graphic designer, that you do something and…‘bosh’, it works. I was fairly pissed off when Morley didn’t put it on the cover. The one with the van is at a completely different time when I took my mate Phil down.
I’d figured that, I was going to ask, who was that in the mask?
(Laughs) In those shots it’s a friend of mine from college called Phil Priestman, where is he now?
Because you’d assume it was Paul.
Really? Do you think so?
Well, if there’s an image of the group, he was presenting that so you’d assume (that). It doesn’t matter who’s behind it though. Was that the same with the figure on the beach?
No, that was Jayne (laughs)
I’m not sure I want to explode any of these myths (laughs). This is the thing, I’m very aware that by explaining all this stuff it could just sort of pop the bubble. I don’t necessarily want to do that.
Well, I think it’s all well and good actually, the shots on the beach were at a place called Birling Gap, up between Brighton and Newhaven, very nice because of all those rocks and things. Me and Jayne went for a nice day out and…
“Put this cloak and mask on love…’ (laughs)
It was a cape actually, Jayne used to work at the National Theatre as a dresser and she borrowed it (laughs). If memory serves I was given the mask at ZTT and we took it down with us, or Paul dropped it around to where we lived back then. It had never crossed my mind that people would take for granted that that was Morley.
Well, who could it be? No one knew who it was… it was The Art Of Noise in some respects.
(raucous laughter from Tony) Trevor Horn?
You would assume he’s the guy in the cloak, you know? ‘Don’t look behind the screen’, kind of thing. So there’s me thinking it’s Paul and it’s actually his sister!
That’s great.
I didn’t know who it was, there’s one on the back of ‘Close Up’ and there’s someone holding the mask and you can see some slicked back hair…
Yeah, that’s Phil Priestman (laughs). Who happened to have the same kind of haircut but that’s really interesting, I’d never thought of that.
In all the Art of Noise sleeves – their greatest visual asset (to my mind) was the masks and they dropped that completely once they’d moved to China records.
‘Close Up’ is my favourite Art Of Noise 12″ bar none. For everything about it – the music, the cover, the photos, the colours – that epitomizes them for me.
I’d say you’re right actually.
I would stare at that record, like many other ZTT sleeves, and just try and find clues because that was what ZTT was about, it never gave you the answers it just posed the questions and that was half the fun of it.
Well that was part of Morley’s…mystic.
Because he got so much stick over other things, he hasn’t really gotten the credit for the art direction.
Having known him since… when I first met Paul he had hair parted down to here. Tangerine Dream, Nick Drake, reggae, he loved all that. I have the utmost admiration for him, but having said that, I have watched him chance it and throw it out there so much, actually to the detriment of his health. Like all his heroes, he believed that if he kept that up, he could keep throwing out those great ideas, ‘their fourth number one’, let’s put sperm on the cover, this’ll go. And it got to the point where actually, Jill Sinclair and Trevor were saying, ‘well look, we need to make some money here’.
You can kind of see that in the sleeves and such, that playfulness, ridiculously indulgent whilst the coffers are filling up from Frankie’s success. He had a couple of years of ‘the dream’, the honeymoon period, if you like, and then he was reeled back to reality.
The cemetery pictures for ‘Who’s Afraid of the Art Of Noise’, was that Highgate with all the statues?
I don’t know which one because there are a few, I think the cover is Anton‘s (Corbijn), that’s nothing to do with me. I used to get really pissed off at it actually because I’d be ‘Art of Noise photography: AJ Barratt’ and then there’d be this image that wasn’t mine – Anton Corbijn. Because there was no real brief… there’s a photo of a statue holding up a mask, I can’t remember what it’s on? (Moments In Love 12″ sleeve). That’s in a Paris cemetery, I thought, ‘mask, statue, that’ll do for me’ and off you go. There’s another one in Paris from the same time where there’s a wall and a bit of graffiti and a statue behind, that’s at the Eiffel Tower, it was the same time. But the whole thing with the Art Of Noise was, if you see a little image like that, from my point of view, ‘take it’ and take it to Paul who would say, ‘I like that, we’ll see what we can do with it’. And the next week it’d be on a sleeve and you’d go, ‘er, alright Paul, should I chuck an invoice in?’, ‘yeah’, ‘alright, thanks’.
So, what would happen with this? Would you ever meet the designers or would you give the stuff to Paul and he would sort it?
I didn’t have much contact with designers – I was a photography student at the time. I remember going to a design studio in Soho in, maybe, Carnaby St. and I’d take stuff in and talk to them about it. They were really nice actually.
That would have been XL
It was XL, it wasn’t Tom though (Watkins) because he was the manager. I remember taking some stuff in and them saying, ‘what was the brief with this?’, and I said, ‘hey, this is ZTT, Paul Morley’..., you know? See if you like it and work around that.
He was famous for coming in with little things like beer mats with scribbles on and then working from that.
He directed the ‘Moments In Love’ video and I remember doing the stills on that and getting a picture of JJ (Jeczalik) who had the make up on, holding a rose. And then going round to Paul’s house once when he was sick to get permission to use it and him shouting, ‘AJ, what were you thinking?’.
You did the shot of the three of them and they’re made up as, almost clown / marionettes? It looks like it’s in a hairdressing salon.
No, no, that’s backstage at The Tube (80’s TV music show) when they were on it, I did take those, yeah. We flew up to Newcastle, it was a horrible flight, bumpy all the way.
I love that photo, that’s the nearest they came (whilst on ZTT) to ‘being the group’, Anne and Gary have face paint and JJ has a mask. It’s interesting that when the Art O Noise signed to China records they made lots of records with guests – Tom Jones, Max Headroom, Duane Eddy – and they needed a front man because Paul had previously provided that.
I think they suffered from that, there was no guiding voice.
Who has these negatives then? ZTT?
Um, you see, when we moved abroad a lot of stuff got destroyed and lost but I would love to say that everything was filed up beautifully from A to B, but it isn’t. But yes, they did go to ZTT and they might well have disappeared.
At this point we have to disappear too so we’ll end part 1 here having sampled AJ’s memories of the Art Of Noise. Part 2 will be along shortly where we conclude with tales of Frankie tours and frustrating videos shoots.
All photos except the backstage of the Tube scanned from AJ’s negatives, © AJ Barratt. All sleeve and picture disc art scanned from my personal collection, © ZTT. All text © ArtOfZTT 2013.
Postscript: “Trevor Horn once told me, every studio in the land has a cupboard, where they’ve nicked all his samples” (laughs).
‘Metal Made Flesh’ is the start of a new series from Subversive Comics, a new independent publisher who emerged with ‘Bearlands’ last year. Created and illustrated by Simeon Aston and written by Jeremy Biggs, it’s the first of 3 books that will separately showcase a trio of assassins whose stories will later intertwine. The first concerns Phaeon who, in order to get close to his next, heavily guarded target, goes to the extreme measure of having his body swapped into a child’s.
The layout is text with illustrations rather than your regular panels and speech balloons and they’ve chosen to start with part 3 – ‘Flesh’, rather than publish the initial arc in sequence as each is self-contained. Don’t go thinking you’ve missed 1 & 2 – you haven’t, they’re not publishing them in order, I just hope this doesn’t work against them.
The mood is gritty, adult sci-fi with few punches pulled and the art is nicely handled with a heavy palette of blues and greens. A lot of the illustrations are one page affairs that lend themselves more to covers and the weakest moment is a splash page with the nearest thing to the sequential art of a regular comic which seems overworked and messy. But it’s early days yet and I wouldn’t be posting about it here if I didn’t think it was worth looking out for.
The influences are worn on their sleeve; Blade Runner, Total Recall, Ghost In The Shell, District 9, Gibson and P.K. Dick – cyberpunk with great hardware, no complaints here. I look forward to seeing what happens in the next two installments (1 – ‘Metal’ and 2 – ‘Made’, see what they did there?) and then how the three tie together once the stage is set. Check out the art here or see more on Ashton’s Deviant Art page and find the comic direct from Subversive. If supporting your local comic shops is more your thing then it should be available in Dave’s comics, Brighton, Moving Pictures, Devon and Killer Bunny, London (Camden Market). Issue 3 is out now with issue 2 due around May.
Hope all the fantastic Mothers out there have a great day today (and every day).
It’s been a little quiet on here of late due to illness, work and having builders pulling my house apart. Lots going on though, Record Store Day is coming up next month with some special Food treats dropping around the same time. I’ve also been working on a very special item for another Ninja artist that I can’t wait to reveal…
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.
Posts are slowly but meticulously being added over at artofztt.com
AJ Barratt: “I remember going into the NME offices one day and I saw this poster on their wall, and someone had added a third line to the bottom of it. ‘Noise Is Golden, Silence is a Dead Giveaway… and Bullshit stinks’, that’s what it was! (Laughs) That’s what somebody had written.”
‘Into Battle’ promo poster from the archive of AJ Barratt, digitally restored by artofztt.com. Also included is the original photo for this design, scanned from the negative. The quote above is from a forthcoming interview with AJ which contains more exclusive images from his collection.
artist: Art Of Noise title: Into Battle With Art Of Noise format: A2 promo poster design: XLZTT photography: AJ Barratt cat. no: ZTIS100 date: 09/83 art of notes: The red crosses are identical to the ones on the ‘You Can’t Suck The Same Piece of Sugar…’ poster and continue the trend for ephemeral symbols hovering in the top right corner.
The Solid Steel 25th anniversary continues and this week I’m in the first slot with a mix of /4 electronica both new and old. Modular experiments, deep house grooves, classic electro and a touch of acid. Ninja & Big Dada artists Falty DL and Dobie feature, oldies from Air, Eon and Hashim appear and a fantastic new track from Natural Self features near the end that I just can’t stop playing. His album, ‘Neon Hurts My Eyes’, drops next week on Tru Thoughts and it’s quite a departure being all-vocal led, most of it sung by the man himself including a great cover of Laurie Anderson‘s ‘O, Superman’.
In hour 2 we have The Light Surgeons with a very different mix taken in part from their new show ‘SuperEverything*’, a narrative about cross cultural identity. They tour in the UK in March and play a London show in April. The last half hour has a mix from Meat Beat Manifesto‘s Jack Dangers, showcasing his collection of electronic record made by children in schools, see some of the sleeves below and be prepared for something different.
Having handled a fair bit of Henry’s artwork over the past few years it’s always interesting to see that he’s entirely un-precious about it, many pages arriving with other doodles or even finished images decorating the reverse sides.
I started scanning some of these as they were really quite good and I knew that I’d have to give the artwork back at some stage (these were mainly pages from ‘Broadcast’).
When I put the idea of showing some of these to him he promptly sent me a folder with a load more! So, here for your perusal, is a peek over the page, literally, at the other side of Henry Flint‘s work.
For more like this, see the aforementioned book, ‘Broadcast’ or check Henry’s site. He recently had an operation and used his time to draw his surroundings whilst in hospital.
Frenchbloke & Son – ‘Bruit Dans L’internet De Musique’. 2 x cassette tapes, USB stick, 4 x badges and other inserts housed inside a hardback book with outer wrapping. Seed Records, 2010.
Each book is unique to the edition of 10 copies, this is No.5 with a further 55 cassettes with USB.
Dottores Kranky Disco Band – ‘Street Beat ’79’ (Space Disco Craftworx Inc.) 2006. 12″ picture disc in PVC sleeve, bargain bin find.
What I like about this is that most of the picture just looks like a normal record but then you have a woman lying across it and a fly on the reverse.
Various oddities clipped from vintage comics past: ‘Cassette Adventures’ – don’t remember these? ‘This Could Be Your Head’ – hmmmm, indeed. Some great original Star Wars toys ads, love the way they’re already billing it as, ‘the greatest movie of all time’. Check the Spidey-warns-against-sexual-abuse ad! Love the design of the Timewarp logo and the spread of vehicles on the ‘Vrrroooooomm’ ad.
Aids Wolf – Dustin’ Off The Sphynx – 7″ with fold-out screen-printed cover, insert and tape inlay flyer, Skin Graft Records, 2009. Bargain bin find.
*I’ve decided to start a new offshoot of the Artifacts section just for records called Record Roulette. Increasingly I find myself buying records for their sleeves or packaging, regardless of the music, most of which I don’t know until I get them home. RR will be a showcase for these finds with Artifacts for all the other non-vinyl bits and bobs.
I’ve just finished reading this – King City by Brandon Graham – and it’s the best £15 I’ve spent on a book in a while. Graham’s style is a mix of Manga, sci-fi and playful punning gone mad. There are more ideas nestling in one page of Graham’s work than in some whole comic strips, he seems to shed them ten to the dozen, not only in the story narrative but also in the background details, graffiti and incidental characters who just so happen to be sharing a panel at any given moment.
King City is about a cat master called Joe, a cat master being someone trained to use their personal cat in any number of incredible ways in any number of different situations. He’s an expert lock-picker who gets coerced into secret missions by Beebay, the mysterious leader of the street gang, the Owls. He’s also pining for his ex-girlfriend, Anna, who has her own story going on across town involving a new boyfriend who’s addiction to chalk is slowly destroying him. Joe also hangs out with his best friend, Pete, who goes on similar covert missions in a range of masks and has his own problems. The stories intertwine but also meander along, taking breaks to flashback to events past or just take time out for incidental scenes that flesh out the characters or the city.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg though, what you get is a sense of a fully formed world that will be rewarded by repeated reads and could be infinitely expanded outside of these characters. As well as the wealth of detail in the city streets it occasionally throws up a crossword, a join the dots panel or a full double page game spread complete with cut out characters. Graham’s style is unique to me although I’m guessing that if I was well read in the Manga department then I would be able to draw some frames of reference. The overall tone feels like a perfect composite of American, Asian and Alien (is that a triple A rating?) and it’s truly a breath of fresh air, much the same as his ongoing sci-fi series, Prophet, which similarly blew my mind last year.
King City is a lighter affair though, similar to his recent Multiple Warheads 4-issue run for Image, largely due to being shot through with punning wordplay in almost every panel (seriously, if you find puns the lowest form of wit then stay away). Once you get used to the way he structures things though it’s a definite page turner and, weighing in at over 400 pages, you definitely get your money’s worth with all the original single issue covers, back up stories and such to add to the mix.
For me the weirdest thing about King City is that I hadn’t ever seen or heard of it on my regular trips to comic shops before. This is so up my street but until last year when the collection was released it had completely gone under my radar, Had I seen a copy on a shelf it would have immediately been the sort of thing I’d have picked up. Considering the first issue debuted in 2009 and the last in 2010, with this collection arriving nearly a year ago I really need to be a bit more alert.
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.
Hunt Emerson was probably the first ‘underground’ cartoonist I discovered. I was kind of aware of Robert Crumb from the Keep On Truckin’ images that did the rounds in the 70’s, Gilbert Shelton‘s Furry Freak Bros. comics were around and I’d been reading Mad magazine for a few years (not really the same league though). In my early teens my family would go shopping in Crawley, a large-ish town South of Gatwick airport, much bigger than the one I grew up in and with a better class of book shops. One such shop had early ‘graphic novels’ – more collections of comic strips back then – and one day in ’84 I found ‘The Big Book of Everything’, an early collection of Hunt’s work.
It was weird, surreal and the style was cartoon-y, like the Whizzer & Chips, Buster and Cheeky comics I’d read years back. But the humour was adult in places, definitely not for kids. The backgrounds changed in each scene and some strips broke the fourth wall and drifted off altogether. I’d never seen anything like it before and I loved it, my nearest frame of reference being Leo Baxendale‘s ‘Willy The Kid’ books which are the missing link between the aforementioned kids comics and Hunt’s work.
It was also the first use of the phrase, ‘comix’ I’d ever seen, thereby alerting me to the fact that there was a difference. I’d go on to find the whole Knockabout line of books from here which then led me to the US equivalent of Zap Comix with Crumb, Shelton, Griffin, Moscoso, Williams and many more. But this was British, pure luck that I found that first, and there was Hunt on the back cover, staring down at me with a cocked eyebrow. Looking back at it now I see Alan Moore wrote the introduction, no big deal at the time as he was still a rising writer, a few years away from making his mark but his northern humour perfectly suited Hunt’s style.
Now there’s a new collection of Emerson’s work, 30 years after the ‘Big Book of Everything’ (96 pages for £3.95), and this one’s available for the iPad via Panel Nine at £2.99 for 200 pages (some mistake there, surely?). ‘The Certified Hunt Emerson’ contains 27 strips, covers, notes and an audio commentary from Hunt plus a panel mode that means you can zoom into each individual panel and read it like that if you wish. If you want an intro to his work, an overview of one of the UK’s premiere underground comic artists with material that would cost you hundreds of pounds to track down then this is a steal. If you like humorous strips that deal with jazz, sex, TV, rabbits, unexplained phenomena, sin, cities, cats and some of the world’s great classics reinterpreted then this is for you.
P.S. Hunt also did the ‘Beat Girl’ logo for The Beat back in the late 70’s as well as their Go Feet label identity, first LP cover and this little Beat-mobile.
The Light Surgeons go out on tour this March for a brief stint around the UK before a London show on April 19th – they’ll be performing ‘SuperEverything*’ for the first time in the UK here:
09/03/2013 – WARWICK ARTS CENTRE – COVENTRY
10/03/2013 – COLSTON HALL – BRISTOL
11/03/2013 – STUDIO THEATRE – BRIGHTON DOME
12/03/2013 – THE SAGE – GATESHEAD
19/04/2013 – HACKNEY EMPIRE – LONDON
The ‘SuperEverything*’ performance is a mix of live music, visuals and performance, commissioned by the British Council and created by The Light Surgeons in collaboration with Malaysian artists. Filmed on location across Malaysia, it explores identity, ritual and place using documentary narratives to create an audio-visual portrait of the diverse cultural landscape of Malaysia and how our complex identities are connected.
This is live cinema performance exploded across multiple projections with an electronic score combining traditional South East Asian instruments, western classical compositions and field recordings. I’ve heard so much about this over the last year and finally it’s coming to London. Few do AV as beautifully and intelligently as The Light Surgeons, this will be something to experience and discuss later rather than the usual ‘ooh!, ahh!’ spectacles so many audio-visual shows seem to fall into these days.
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.