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Weekend links 687

The Peacock Garden (1898) by Walter Crane.

• “The trio [Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington & Kati Horna] became known as the ‘three witches’ for their exploration of the supernatural and metaphysical—which ranged…’from tarot readings to shamanic psychedelics to attempts to stop or slow time.'” Teresa Nowakowski on Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, an exhibition of Varo’s paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago which includes the one that Thomas Pynchon singled out for description in The Crying of Lot 49.

• Philip K. Dick giving a lecture on “orthogonal time” to a small audience at the Festival International de la Science-Fiction, Metz, in 1977. Dick’s talks and interviews aren’t exactly scarce, but this one was of interest for me since I recently designed an edition of John Crowley’s Great Work of Time, a novella which involves a similar concept. If you were at the Metz Festival in 1977 you could also see a live performance by Cluster. Lucky you.

• “Our minds remain open when the LSD wears off.” Steve Paulson on psychedelic drugs and their usefulness as therapeutic tools.

• At Cartoon Brew: Stephen Irwin’s animated films “combine the influences of David Lynch, Struwwelpeter, and the Brothers Grimm.”

• Steven Heller looked at NB3, the third book about Neville Brody’s graphic design. Elsewhere, Heller’s font of the month is Scusi.

• The glowing, prismatic nervous system of a sea star wins the Scientific Image of the Year.

• At Unquiet Things: Forgotten worlds and wonderlands from The Art of Fantasy.

• “Don’t waste my time with blood-free monster movies,” says Anne Billson.

• At Aquarium Drunkard: King Tubby And Soul Syndicate — Freedom Sounds In Dub.

• Mix of the week is DreamScenes – August 2023 at Ambientblog.

• Time Machine (1970) by Stray | Time Captives (1973) by Kingdom Come | The Existence Of Time (2012) by Monolake

Ian Miller album covers

Stolen Life (1988) by Rattus.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. Ian Miller’s career, which dates back to the early 1970s, has encompassed book-cover illustration, art for magazines and role-playing games, also the occasional film design. His credits in the music world, however, are limited to this handful of covers plus a few interiors, most of them for punk bands or metal outfits of one type or another. I still prefer CDs for my music listening but the 12-inch vinyl sleeve has always been the best showcase for cover art, especially the hyper-detailed renderings that are Miller’s speciality.

Cosmovore (2018) by Ulthar.

Lovecraftian metal band Ulthar seem to have adopted Miller recently as their regular cover artist. Their Cosmovore album uses a third (?) version of Miller’s cover for the 1974 Panther Mountains of Madness paperback. (See The Art of Ian Miller for the second version.) The original is still one of my favourite Lovecraft illustrations of all, not least for the way he turns one of the relatively small and placid Elder Things into a towering kaiju—the scale can be gauged by the tiny human figures in the background—battling what appears to be an equally gigantic and frenzied shoggoth. Or maybe they’re both shoggoths since these are shape-shifting creatures? I’ve never been sure, but whatever they may be, they’re more than a match for the frenzy unleashed at the end of Lovecraft’s story.

Bound To Mutation (1991) by Dagon.

X-Rated Fairy Tales / Superior Catholic finger (1994) by Helios Creed.

A CD reissue of two Creed albums on Cleopatra Records. This one isn’t listed on Discogs because Miller receives no art credit.

Providence (2020) by Ulthar.

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Weekend links 686

The Great Lab (2020); speculative architecture by Gytis Bickus. “This room is where the majority of the hallucinogenic substances are archived, within the walls & floors. It seems as though the architecture itself is being affected by the hallucinogenic substances stored within its fabric.”

• “They ran the recording through a vocoder, so it sounded staticky, like a voice infused with white noise, and put it at the end of the song. Then they went home.” Mark Dent on Change The Beat by Beside (aka Bee-side or Beeside), a song produced by Bill Laswell & Michael Beinhorn that includes one of the most sampled vocal lines in hip-hop. A great piece of audio-archaeology: I knew the sample but had no idea this song was its source. I only got to hear the Change The Beat very recently when I found a copy of Materialism, a collection of early Laswell productions, in a charity shop.

• At Unquiet Things: Artist, Chemist, Goofball: Catching Up With Tyler Thrasher.

• DJ Food looks at psychedelic posters created for London’s Middle Earth club.

His last commissioned work for Radio Berlin was a fantastical play he had composed himself. The transcript, titled “Lichtenberg: A Cross-Section,” ranks among the strangest things that he ever wrote. Beings who live on the moon are charged with the task of investigating the career of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a prominent physicist of the German Enlightenment. The moon beings have uncanny names—Labu, Quikko, Sofanti, and Peka—and they convene as the Moon Committee for Earth Research, which deploys odd contraptions for its work, each of them “easier to use than a coffee grinder.” There is a “Spectrophone,” which permits them to hear and see everything that happens on Earth; a “Parlamonium” that translates human speech into music; and an “Oneiroscope” that allows the researchers to observe human dreams. With the aid of these devices, the moon beings seek to understand why humans are so afflicted with misery. Their investigations finally reach the tentative conclusion that even if humans are unhappy, “perhaps it is their unhappiness that allows them to advance.” To honour the scientific achievements of Herr Lichtenberg, they conclude by naming a crater in his honour, a crater from which shines a “magical light that illumines the millennium.”

Peter E. Gordon on Walter Benjamin’s radio years

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Brigid Brophy In Transit (1968).

• 15 lighthouses from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest.

• Sathnam Sanghera’s favourite songs.

• RIP William Friedkin and Jamie Reid.

• New music: The Long Song by Drøne.

• Lighthouse (1978) by Tim Blake | Walk To The Lighthouse (1980) by John Carpenter | The Lighthouse (1994) by Hector Zazou ft. Siouxsie

Weekend links 685

Art by Naoyuki Katoh, 1982.

• RIP Paul Reubens. Here’s Steven Heller on Pee-wee Herman and his clinically hyperactive playhouse (not forgetting Gary Panter’s involvement); Bruce Handy on Paul Reubens’ preposterous grace; and David Hudson on Paul Reubens before and after Pee-wee.

• Three Thousand (2017), a short film by Asinnajaq in which “a riveting collage portrays a century of Inuit history, and envisions a vibrant future”.

• New music: Velocity Of Water by Suki Sou; The Blue Beyond by Jana Winderen; and Jäi mieleen by Aki Yli-Salomäki.

• DJ Food posted a handful of psychedelic LP sleeves for non-psychedelic artists. There’s a lot more to be found.

• “We had no rules. Song structure didn’t exist. It was nihilistic.” It’s Bush Tetras again.

• “Infrared light reveals hidden portrait beneath 1943 René Magritte painting.”

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Gakuryu Ishii Day.

• Tequila (1958) by The Champs | Tequila (1958) by Perez Prado | Tequila (1972) by Hot Butter

The exposition moiré

Logos designed by QWER, Iris Utikal and Michael Gais.

Hannover’s Expo 2000 wasn’t very successful as expositions go but it had an attractive logo, a combination of bold sans-serif type with a moiré background pattern which ideally had to be seen in its animated form. World expositions tend to be concerned with technical innovations and novelties, and this animated design was certainly novel, if impossible to replicate in print. All the static versions of the logo are essentially screenshots of the moving version, with the moiré image frozen at a various places to generate many shape and colour variations. Not all of these are satisfactory. I think it was Matisse who said that anyone can put two colours together; the real challenge is putting three together in a harmonious manner.

The pattern was a little more animated on the original exposition website, albeit reduced to this tiny gif. The site is mostly intact and browsable at the Internet Archive, a primitive thing by today’s standards but Expo 2000 was the first world exposition with a dedicated website, something which really did set it apart from its predecessors. Many of the exposition’s buildings and exhibits would have seemed bizarre or alarmingly ugly to the people who attended the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 but much that was on display in Hannover would at least have been comprehensible to a visitor from the past. Trying to explain what “a website” was to someone in 1900, even a futurologist like HG Wells, would have required considerable effort.

Video for Expo 2000 by Kraftwerk.

Ephemerality is a distinguishing characteristic of world expositions, all those splendid pavilions and eye-catching constructions don’t last very long even though the events themselves involve years of planning. A list of exposition features that have managed to survive would be a disparate collection, taking in well-known landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, Seattle’s Space Needle and the Atomium in Brussels, architectural projects such as the Grand Palais in Paris and the Biosphere in Montreal, and one-off oddities like the Unisphere in Queens and the cement dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park. If Expo 2000 is remembered for anything today it’s the one-off song that Kraftwerk wrote for the occasion, Expo 2000, which arrived with graphics and visuals based on the expo logo. Kraftwerk had been hired at great cost to create the jingles in different languages that accompany the animated logo. This is turn led to the song, the group’s first new studio composition in 14 years.

I thought these abstract images were a good match for Kraftwerk, I prefer them to the other designs for the single which show the four computer-generated figures that later appeared on the cover of Minimum-Maximum. The CD case at the top left was made with lenticular plastic which imitated the moiré effect of the animated logo. I didn’t buy this one when I had the chance, choosing instead the “enhanced” version which came with a minuscule copy of the video in a CD-ROM section. Like most CD-ROM singles, the audio tracks still play but the enhanced section no longer works. Welcome to the future.

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