This is just stunning and beautiful to see the sounds connect with the shapes. In the 70’s, Rainer Wehinger created a visual listening score to accompany Gyorgy Ligeti’s ‘Artikulation’. Donald Craig scanned the pages and synchronized them with the music, check his YouTube channel for more.
The slipmat has long been a part of Ninja Tune‘s merch lines, alongside the T-shirt, record bag and Ninja Skinz. The last one I designed for them was back in 2007 for mine and DK‘s ‘Now, Listen Again’ Solid Steel comp. At the time sales of vinyl were seriously in freefall, Serato and Tractor were taking over and people were looking at digital as the way forward, slipmats weren’t exactly flying out the door.
By the end of the decade I don’t think the label even considered making any for their 20th anniversary, they just weren’t on the radar anymore. But things have a habit of coming back again and, nearly a decade on, here’s a new twist on an old design – available now from the Ninjashop.
This fantastic mixtape by Arandel comes from the InFiné Music podcast – 55 tracks layered up for 45 mins by 35 female electronic pioneers. More details and full tracklist at the link above.
For all those who won’t see the updated posts further down the feed; here’s last night’s new Resonance FM show, Near Mint, that I featured on with some highlights of my collection. Plus here’s the 45Live Radio Show I had an all-45s guest mix slot on with Greg Belson last Friday night/Saturday morning on Dublab.
Some of the recent Kosmischer Debris experiments from my Instagram – not sure about these, there are a couple of interesting ones but nothing I’m super happy with. These images are all generated from one piece, collaged elements of the Musée des Confluences that I took in Lyon last year. I want to see how far I can push them before they look like visual soup. The lower right one is pretty much there I’d say.
Absolutely love that logo by Fiona Barlow, shouldn’t work but it does. To celebrate 150 of Alice In Wonderland there’s a small exhibition at the British Library with art from various versions of the book over the years, including John Tenniel’s original illustrations as well as examples from Ralph Steadman, Salvador Dali and morel.
And still the tributes come… this is really quite excellent, if hypnotic and slightly sinister. No idea who did it, if you know, please post their name in the comments. Here’s all 21 Bowies
UPDATE: Seems it’s by Butcher Billy and it’s a work in progress, he’s already added more
Tonight at 8pm US PST (tomorrow 4am UK time) I’ll be the featured guest mixer on the 45 Live Radio Show, hosted by Greg Belson on Dublab in LA. The hour-long mix takes in Rock, Pop, Psych, Hip Hop, Electronics, Breaks, Funk and more. My mix starts 32 mins in but Greg drops some ridiculously rare gems too.
I’m doing / have done a couple of things for Resonance FM – London’s great station of the weird, wonderful and avant garde. Last week Robin The Fog, aka Howlround, came errrr… round and we spent a hugely enjoyable three hours going through the odder ends of my collection. It rapidly descended into, ‘have you heard this? you haven’t? oh my god, check this out’ etc. etc. We’ve all been there but Robin’s and my tastes are quite acutely tuned to a specific end of the musical spectrum marked ‘miscellaneous’. This is all for a new series on his and station cohort, Hannah Brown‘s ‘Near Mint’ show about ‘excessive record collecting’.
He left with over an hour of audio and a lot more of me wittering on about German concept albums about the body, a children’s alphabet in space LP, one-off record booth finds and cut up psychoanalysis experiments. We touched on old favourites like Ken Nordine, John Rydgren and Marshall McLuhan too but our shared love of Sesame Street‘s more experimental side wasn’t discussed. Below are some examples of some of the delights we explored and you can hear the show next Tuesday, February 9th at 6pm. NOW! (Well, part 1 anyway)
The week after that I’ll be joining both of them. as well as host of the station’s Luck Cat show, Zoe Baxter, at the West Norwood Book & Record Bar to help raise money for the station as part of their annual funding drive. There will be a raffle with prizes, some from my own collection, but most of all, there will be great music (see flyer above for details).
Pete Fowler aka The Monsterist has started a crowd funding drive to publish a book of the best of 25 years of his sketchbooks called ‘Decades of Lead’ via Unbound. There are various levels from eBook to hardback, signed, sketched and ever an option to go for a curry and have a studio tour with Pete.
And they keep coming, looks like there’s a lot of mileage in the Kylo / Han / Leia / Darth family unit. More here…
The last nine examples of my daily ‘Kosmischer Debris’ series over on Instagram – random artwork ideas, design experiments and more
French promotional catalogue / magazine for the CBS / Epic labels from 1969, comes with a 3 track 7″ of Spirit, Al Kooper and Sly & The Family Stone tracks.
You’ve probably seen this doing the rounds, it’s justifiably so. So many words spring to mind… NSFW too.
The second of my ‘Freaky Formats’ features just went up on The Vinyl Factory site. This second installment focuses on Op Art sleeves which speak for themselves really. Check it out and there’s a link to the first one about 3D covers too, there are more in the pipeline so look for them roughly monthly…
Only two and a half weeks until the Big Fish Little Fish ‘Out of this World’ Mini Vault event in Waterloo. Saturday 6th February | 11am – 2pm. Robin Hexstatic played this last year and I’ve been looking forward to it for ages because it has a space theme. If you’re unfamiliar with the BFLF concept it’s a day time party for families with under 10 year old children that goes under the banner ‘2-4 hour party people’. Kids have lots of activities to get involved in, can get dressed up, there’s a parachute dance and the parents can relive tunes from their clubbing heydays.
They’ve got a whole heap of extras at this one including Korg synth and gadget workshops. Info and tickets here
The last one I did at the (admittedly free) Southbank was a roadblock that had to be stopped halfway because of the number of people trying to get in. It all ends mercifully early and you emerge, blinking into sunlight to realise it’s not breakfast time but not long until dinner.
Love this poster for ‘Valley of the Sasquatch’ by Brandon Schaefer. Definite ‘The Wicker Man’ overtones.
Malcolm McLaren would have been 70 years old today, here’s a collection of articles surrounding his seminal ‘Duck Rock’ album release in the early 80s from Sounds. Click to enlarge
I’ve added a small news piece about the Double Dutch girls to the interview above to fill space. Big interviews were frequently cut up and placed at different points of the paper and I’ve cobbled this one back to a double page spread.
Above: The Garry Bushell-penned review of ‘Duck Rock’ which is rather damning – see the three ads below that were run in the paper the next week, all deftly extracting a rather different angle using quotes from the piece. There’s a definite whiff of Paul Morley on the tagline at the bottom and this would have been around the time when he and Trevor Horn, the album’s producer, would have been setting up their ZTT label.
It quickly became common knowledge that McLaren had ripped off several compositions and taken writing credits on the album (something he had already done with Bow Wow Wow and would do again with ‘Fans’). Not even two months after the album’s release the writs were already flying.
Back in 1981, Fred Vermorel – never one to mince his words and badly burned by his experience with Malcolm over the extremely dodgy ‘Chicken’ magazine – laid into him over two pages. It’s hard to justify what McLaren was intending with this publication (and I wouldn’t try) and thankfully we’ll never find out. There’s also a piece about the pirate fashions McLaren and partner Vivienne Westwood created that they launched Bow Wow Wow with.
