Category: {music}

Music

New things for April II

squid.jpg

By an odd coincidence my work manifests in two different forms in Finland this month. Above is the Finnish reprint of ‘King Squid’ by Jeff VanderMeer, part of his City of Saints and Madmen fantasy novel which I designed as a self-contained work. SF magazine Tähtivaeltaja has produced this as a supplement to their latest issue and done a great job of maintaining the look of the original printing.

turisas.jpg

And in the music world there’s a new CD design for Finnish metal band Turisas. This is their second album, The Varangian Way, a concept affair that describes the journey taken by Viking explorers from the Gulf of Finland to Byzantium via the rivers of Russia. Very bombastic stuff, with choir and orchestra backing the band so it’s probably fitting that I again referenced (ie: swiped) the bloated sun from Bob Peak’s Apocalypse Now poster for the cover.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• New things for April
• City of Saints and Madmen

Heinz Edelmann

edelmann.jpg

edelmann2.jpg

Yellow Submarine art direction and character design by Heinz Edelmann. No dedicated website, unfortunately. XTC (among others) swiped the style for the sleeve of their excellent 1989 album, Oranges & Lemons.

xtc.jpg

Update: Edelmann is ambivalent about being known as the Yellow Submarine designer but he talked to Baltimore’s 21st Century Radio about working on the film here. And the same site has a look at the film’s production process.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The L.S. Bumble Bee
• Joe Orton
• Please Mr. Postman
• All you need is…

Adolph Sutro’s Gingerbread Palace

cliff_house1.jpg

The Cliff House in a storm by Tsunekichi Imai (c. 1900).

The Cliff House Project has a wealth of information and ephemera about the late Victorian incarnation of the Cliff House restaurant in San Francisco. There were several Cliff Houses but the one built by Adolph Sutro in 1896 was the most spectacular, partly for the lack of other buildings around it but mostly for its typically Victorian take on a Gothic style which gave it the nickname “the Gingerbread Palace.”

cliff_house2.jpg

I’d never seen this building before until comics writer Tom Veitch sent me a picture postcard of it in the early Nineties. Given its age I’d always assumed it must have been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake but it turns out that the building survived that disaster only to perish in a fire the year after. The Cliff House site has many wonderful photographs, nearly all of which convey the impression that the building was about to slide into the sea at any moment—or maybe set sail if the tide was up. There’s also a short piece of film from 1903 showing a slow pan around a throng of beach revellers which eventually comes to light on the house. Long-vanished buildings often possess an air of unreality in photographs; this one seems more unreal than most due to its unlikely appearance.

Update: Nephilim2038 reminds us that Blue Öyster Cult used Imai’s photograph of the Cliff House on the cover of their Imaginos album in 1988. This seems to have eluded my attention despite my having a CD-single from that album (although in truth I bought it for Don’t Fear The Reaper which was included as a bonus track).

boc.jpg

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passages 2
• Hungarian water towers
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris