{design} – Page 8 – { feuilleton }

Pin culture

In the mail this week, a pair of new pins from the pin-maker and seller who made the exquisite Future Days pin. (eBay shop | Etsy shop) The Ege Bamyasi pin isn’t as effective as the earlier Can design but I feel compelled to encourage the effort, especially when most of the designs from this maker are for punk or post-punk bands. I also enjoy the novelty of seeing things like this at all. The years when I was discovering German music via secondhand releases (late 70s, early 80s) coincided with a period when I spent a lot of time scouring local shops for unusual badges. Growing up in a holiday resort gave me access to a greater quantity of cultural ephemera than you’d find in nearby towns, yet during this time I never saw any badges related to the German groups, not even Kraftwerk. As for prestige enamel items, you seldom saw these outside concert merchandise stalls where hardcore fans could be relied upon to pay more for their memorabilia.

Official pins from Hawkwind, Magma and Ghost Box Records.

The recent emergence of a cottage industry devoted to enamel pins means that these aren’t the only such items you’ll find on eBay or Etsy, but most of the others I’ve seen are either substandard (like another attempt to rework the Future Days cover) or are from North American sellers who want you to pay £25 or more for postage. Nein danke. But wherever the pin makers are located they all face the problem of how to create something related to groups who didn’t have a graphic identity that can easily be converted to metal and enamel. Where Can are concerned you could at least do this with their name as it appears on the Tago Mago cover. (Maybe such a thing exists already?) And I was amused to see that one pin maker has managed to reduce Manuel Göttsching’s chessboard cover for E2–E4 to pin size. What I’d really like now is a Neu! pin in black and white like the design on the cover of Neu! 75. Here’s hoping…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Can pin
• Rock shirts

The Atropine Tree

My latest piece of cover art is for Doug Murano’s new imprint, Bad Hand Books. I designed the cover for the Behold! collection that Doug edited a few years ago, a book which included the author of the present tale of Gothic horror, Sarah Read:

Aldane Manor is an ancient home of low-beamed ceilings, crumbling walls, poison gardens, and deadly secrets. When Alrick Aldane returns to his family’s house, he expects to simply inherit his father’s land and title. Instead, he discovers that he is also heir to the property’s disturbing history—one full of witchcraft—and a ghostly mystery that could condemn him to a fate worse than death.

The cover for this one had a specific brief which required a family tree presented as two flowering stalks of Atropa belladonna or Deadly Nightshade, with both stalks growing out of a blue-glass poison bottle. Other details follow from the author’s mood board samples: hollow-eyed ghost children and loops of hair. The medical tone of these elements sent me looking at old pharmacy labels which is what I’ve used as a basis for the general design. Old pharmacy labels and medical documents were often just as fancy as any other 19th-century print designs so all the fine details around the title lettering are what printers referred to as “combination ornaments”, tiny typographic embellishments that form detailed patterns when pieced together. The ones seen here have been copied by hand from an old page design. You can scan these things from books, or try working up a vector shape from an Internet Archive scan, but the results are never as sharp or as clear as those you create yourself. For anyone who runs across this post hoping to find a good collection of combination ornaments, the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan type catalogue of 1892 is a favourite of mine.

The Atropine Tree will be published in July 2024.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• BEHOLD! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders

Weekend links 723

Flags of the Undiscovered Planets: 3 (1985) by César Manrique.

• “That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie.” Ray Newman goes looking for a typeface that immediately says “Britain in the 1950s”. I used to refer to one of its relatives as “the launderette font”, although it was also a common sight on shopfronts, public buildings and other mid-century signage. Today I know it as the slab serif named Profil (aka Decorated 035), although as Newman demonstrates, this is only one of several slab-serif variants popular in the 1950s and 60s.

• The Man Who Killed Google Search is a deep dive by Ed Zitron into why Google’s search has turned to shit. I recently changed the search option for all the browsers on my machines to DuckDuckGo. It’s not perfect but it’ll do for now.

• New music: Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie, music by Sun Ra performed by Laraaji and the Kronos Quartet; Chroma by Loscil / Lawrence English; Homage To Hennix (The Electric Harpsichord Reinterpreted) by Dave Seidel.

• At Colossal: Tune into your own brain waves with Steve Parker’s suspended constellations of salvaged brass.

• At Bajo el Signo de Libra: Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840): Icono del Romanticismo Alemán.

• At Public Domain Review: Maria Catharina Prestel’s Printed Cabinet of Drawings (ca. 1780s).

• At Unquiet Things: The teeming, tumbling, tangled cosmos of Madeline Von Foerster.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by FUJI||||||||||TA.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 77 planetariums.

• Planet D (Portishead Remix) (1994) by The Sabres Of Paradise | Planet Munich (1998) by Add N To (X) | Planet Vega (2000) by Air

Weekend links 721

Incomparable Pleasure (1952–3) by Judit Reigl.

• Steven Heller’s Font of the Month is Atol. Heller’s other haunt, The Daily Heller, looked this week at the incredible calligraphy and illuminated graphics of Arthur Szyk.

• Okashi, an exhibition of Japanese art and photography at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London. Hoppen talks about the exhibition here.

• At Unquiet Things: A Vibrant Rascality of Shenanigans: The Fantasticalicizm of Anna Mond.

• At Public Domain Review: Signs and Wonders: Celestial Phenomena in 16th-Century Germany.

• New music: Alchemia by Scanner, and Disconnect by KRM And KMRU.

• Mix of the week: Artificial Owl Recordings Mix by Niko Dalagelis.

• At Bandcamp: Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Luminous Sounds.

• DJ Food found some Victor Moscoso poster originals.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Luis Buñuel Day.

• Meow.camera

• Alchemistry (1991) by Jon Hassell | Surrealchemist (1992) by Stereolab | Alchemagenta (1996) by Zoviet France

Marian Zazeela album covers

Drift Study 4:37:40-5:09:50 PM 5 VIII 68 NYC (1968) by La Monte Young.

One of the links at the weekend was to the late Marian Zazeela’s poster designs of the 1960s and 70s. She also designed a number of album covers around the same time, mostly for recordings by her husband, La Monte Young, and for associated groups and individuals like Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music—in which Zazeela played the tambura—and raga master Pandit Pran Nath. Some of the albums shown here haven’t always been easy to find thanks to Young’s refusal to reissue his earlier recordings (although he did relent recently and allow digital reissues), but the music has nevertheless been influential. Artists as diverse as the early Velvet Underground, many electronic musicians, and metal bands such as Earth and Sunn O))) owe debts to Young’s compositions.

31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta (1969) by La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela.

This is about Marian Zazeela’s cover designs, however, not her husband’s music, designs which are immediately recognisable for Zazeela’s calligraphy and the abstract decorative elements which resemble tiles or fabric prints. The calligraphy is the consistent element, present even when the cover is mostly photographic. This degree of consistent aesthetic attention is unusual in the world of avant-garde composition where the packaging of a composer’s recordings is often little better than the perfunctory appearance of classical albums. Without Marian Zazeela’s involvement it’s unlikely that La Monte Young’s albums would look as good as they do.

Ragas (1971) by Pandit Pran Nath.

Dream House 78’17” (1974) by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, The Theatre Of Eternal Music (front cover).

Dream House 78’17” (1974) by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, The Theatre Of Eternal Music (back cover).

Continue reading “Marian Zazeela album covers”