{collage} – Page 30 – { feuilleton }

A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score

CBS 73059; construction by Karenlee Grant, photo by David Vine (1972).

A1 Timesteps (13:50)
A2 March From A Clockwork Orange (7:00)
B1 Title Music From A Clockwork Orange (2:21)
B2 La Gazza Ladra (5:50)
B3 Theme From A Clockwork Orange (1:44)
B4 Ninth Symphony: Second Movement (4:52)
B5 William Tell Overture (1:17)
B6 Country Lane (4:43)

Viddy well the stuff of obsessions, O my brothers: Kubrick, cover design and electronic music in one convenient 12-inch package. Those of us in Britain who were too young to see A Clockwork Orange during its initial run had to wait a long time for its re-release after Stanley K withdrew the film from circulation. Until bootleg VHS copies started to turn up in the 80s I knew the film mostly from the MAD Magazine parody and the soundtrack album which was ubiquitous in secondhand record shops. Having become familiar with the score, an additional layer of frustration was added when it became apparent that two soundtrack albums had appeared in the 1970s, the “official” one, which was a mix of the orchestral and electronic music used in the film, and another which contained all the music Walter (later Wendy) Carlos recorded.

The Wendy Carlos music was the principal attraction for this electronic music obsessive and I fretted for a long while trying to find a copy of her Complete Original Score album which was paraded in all its elusive glory on old CBS vinyl inner sleeves. Half the tracks are present on the official release but the omissions are crucial: Timesteps, the incredible composition which accompanies Alex’s first deprogramming session was edited down from thirteen to five minutes, there was Carlos’s Moog version of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra (an orchestral version is used in the film) and also an original piece, Country Lane, intended to accompany Alex’s police brutality session at the hands of his former droogs. The score was one of the first projects to successfully incorporate a vocoder into electronic compositions; Rachel Elkind, Carlos’s regular collaborator, provided the vocalisations. Finally securing a copy was no disappointment, in fact I was overwhelmed. This is still my favourite Wendy Carlos album and one of my top five favourite analogue synth albums. The transcription of La Gazza Ladra is nothing short of miraculous, thundering away with the power of a full orchestra yet created by laboriously recording one note at a time. (Wendy Carlos’s very thorough website goes into detail about the recording process.)

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Sculptural collage: Eduardo Paolozzi

Michelangelo’s ‘David’ (1987).

In a similar vein to the dismembered Soviet monument in the previous post, there’s the sculpture of the late, great Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005). The giant head of Invention is especially impressive when seen in situ outside London’s Design Museum, its pieces separated by the words of a Leonardo da Vinci quotation: “Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”

It should be noted, in light of another recent post, that Paolozzi was associated with New Worlds when the magazine was at its height, credited (jokingly) as “Aeronautics Advisor” even though he had little or nothing to do with the publication aside from being friends with contributor JG Ballard. There’s a great Studio International discussion here from 1971 between Paolozzi, Ballard and critic Frank Whitford, in which they talk around the subjects of Surrealism, violence in life and the arts, and other typically Ballardian concerns.

Invention.

Portrait of Richard Rogers (1988).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers
• Ballard on Modernism

The art of Stephen Aldrich

Take Me to Your Leda (2000).

The City at the End of Time (2005).

I wrote about the history of the engaving collage in Sandoz in the Rain: the Life and Art of Wilfried Sätty, an article for Strange Attractor #2 (2005). I hadn’t come across Stephen Aldrich’s work at the time, if I had I would have mentioned him as being one of the artists continuing in this style after Sätty. You can see more of Aldrich’s work at the Foley Gallery, New York, and on Artnet.

Stephen Aldrich was born in Westfield, MA in 1947. In 1989 Aldrich began to explore the possibility of making collages from 19th Century illustrations and (Fredrick) Sommer, always one to “master the advantages”, asked Aldrich to cut engraved illustrations from text books in anatomy. This made it possible for Sommer to create hundreds of collages, and the medium became his principle form of artistic expression throughout the last decade of his life. During that time Aldrich continued to make his own collages with Sommer’s enthusiastic support and encouragement, and joined in a collaborative partnership with photographer Walton Mendelson to produce “collagraphs” (collages photographed) which were first exhibited at Turner/Krull Gallery in 1992. The partnership with Mendelson ended in 2002.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Shinro Ohtake

The art of Shinro Ohtake

Shinro Ohtake is always on the attack. Whether it’s against misguided art education, against the cold treatment and economic constraints Japan puts on anyone who could dare to live differently, against the contemporary art establishment that can’t be bothered to even disguise its own incomprehension—his fight as an artist continues. Ohtake is prodigious, original, and a trouble-maker—in the sense that the work of the artist is always to create difference.

William Burroughs

Two disparate things had me looking for Shinro Ohtake‘s work this week: I’ve been doing a short interview about album cover design (more about that at a later date) in which I mentioned his collage for the cover of Seven Souls by Material (1989), then an editorial in the latest Wire describes his current retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

The Material cover is one I picked as a favourite design. It’s difficult trying to pin-point why I think this works so well without it being at all illustrational. (I’m guessing, but it’s likely that Bill Laswell picked it out of one of Ohtake’s collage books, rather than it being specially commissioned.) It may be the collage aspect that works here. The album features readings by William Burroughs set to music and for me is the best of all the Burroughs recordings (Dead City Radio being a close second). Burroughs’ work, of course, involved literary collage via his own cut-up process, and the musical content can also be seen as a collage in the way it mixes different styles and musicians—Simon Shaheen, Shankar, Rammellzee, Foday Musa Suso, Fahiem Dandan and samples of the famous Brian Jones recordings of the Jajouka pipers. It’s a shame that when the CD was reissued in 1997 (in a superior mastering, it should be noted), the original artwork was largely junked in favour of a lot of muddy Photoshop work from the usually excellent Russell Mills. I’ve a huge respect for Mills but this treatment was a serious mistake.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs book covers