{typography} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Do You Have The Force? Volume 2

Cosmic background by John Harris.

Three years have passed since the release of Do You Have The Force?, Jon Savage’s compilation of space disco and post-punk recordings. The collection proved popular enough to prompt a follow-up which arrived here last week. I enjoy Mr Savage’s curatorial instincts so a second dose was irresistible even though I already own more of the tracks on the new album than I do with the earlier collection.

Data 70 for the win. Dee D. Jackson opens the new collection with a pulsing paean to robot sex.

I was thinking recently that the value of the historical compilation album—those collections that contain previously released material—has been diminished considerably by the rise of the internet mix. Before Mixcloud et al the home-made cassette compilation was a youth-culture staple (I made lots of them) but cassette collections seldom travelled beyond their maker’s immediate circle of friends. Official compilations had the advantage of wide distribution, access to quality sources and scarce recordings. The better ones also featured authoritative sleevenotes, an essential thing where those scarce recordings where concerned. One of the drawbacks of the home-made tape was brought to my attention in the late 1980s when a Dutch friend sent me a mix he’d made for a group of acquaintances who staged live art/occult performances. The contents were a soup of dialogue and music recorded from TV layered over borrowings from record-library albums which included a particularly haunting snatch of something that he only remembered as being “music from Ancient Egypt”. I spent the next ten years searching for this whenever I was in a record shop with a decent international section. I did find it eventually (it’s the funeral music from this) but without persistence and a chance discovery I might never have known what it was. One thing we don’t lack today is information, so the chances of being nonplussed in this manner are much more remote. The erosion of the former strengths of the compilation album have only placed more emphasis on the person of the compiler; all those Back To Mine collections have turned out to be models for the future.

Do You Have The Force? Volume 2 follows the form of Savage’s earlier collection by starting out in the disco/dance zone before sliding in the second half into the post-punk world, an area conterminous with disco yet seen at the time as being in opposition to any rock and pop that was regarded as too commercial, too trivial, etc. I’ve never been someone who needed to reappraise disco, there was more than enough in its cosmic and futuristic excursions to engage my interest at its peak of popularity. Not being a club-goer, however, the good stuff wasn’t always easy to find so I’m still learning from collections such as these. The post-punk material is home territory by comparison. The contents of the new album include yet more Cabaret Voltaire (I’d probably have chosen the uptempo Sluggin’ Fer Jesus instead of Red Mask), the beatless Beachy Head by Throbbing Gristle (the closest TG get to Eno’s On Land), and Monochrome Days by Thomas Lear & Robert Rental. The latter is from Lear & Rental’s The Bridge, a one-off collaboration released on Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records, and a cult album round these parts. If you’re familiar with Savage’s tastes, all the above are the kinds of inclusions you’d expect. Less predictable was another number from Fourth Wall, the second album by The Flying Lizards, which follows the Fourth Wall track that Savage included on Volume 1. I bought Fourth Wall when it was released in 1981, in part because Robert Fripp was credited among the players and I was curious to know what Fripp was doing with such an eccentric bunch. (This, if you’re equally curious.) David Cunningham’s Lizards are best known for their off-beat cover versions, the most popular of which, Money, was a surprise chart success in 1979. But Cunningham was (and still is) an experimental musician, and Fourth Wall showed much more of this side of his group, juxtaposing short looped pieces and other weirdness with a handful of original songs. Patti Palladin does most of the singing, also co-writing a huge favourite of mine, Hands 2 Take, that (once again) I would have chosen over Savage’s selections even though it’s not electronic enough for the album as a whole. But that’s one of the benefits of the compilation: it compels you to follow somebody else’s inclinations instead of your own. Biggest surprise of all has been Soft Space on the disco side, an electronic instrumental credited to Soft Machine. If you’re familiar with Soft Machine’s early albums, which evolved from psychedelic pop in the late 1960s to jazz-rock improvisation in the 1970s, then nothing prepares you for this piece, a one-off synthesizer composition recorded in 1978 by keyboard player Karl Jenkins. And that’s another benefit of the compilation album: an introduction to discographic anomalies that you’ve been missing all these years.

Will there now be a third volume? There’s more than enough musical material for another collection along the same lines so we’ll have to wait and see. Volume 2 is out now on Caroline True Records.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews
• Do You Have The Force?

Weekend links 729

Phosphorus and Hesperus (1881) by Evelyn De Morgan.

• Mix of the week, or possibly the entire year: The Deep Ark, 167 tracks (over 8 hours of music), most of which are from the electronic deluge of the early 1990s. The download link may not work for all browsers—it didn’t for one of mine—but it is active. Via Simon Reynolds who has more about the Deep Ark project.

• At Nautilus: Betsy Mason on the use of stage magic to investigate animal behaviour. “By performing tricks for birds, monkeys, and other creatures, researchers hope to learn how they perceive and think about their world.”

• At The Daily Heller: Mad and the Usual Gang of Idiots. Meanwhile, Mr Heller’s font of the month may prove useful for this election season, a Jonathan Barnbrook design named Moron.

Looking back, you can see a pattern in those eras in which interest in telepathy boomed. Coined by Myers and his fellow psychical researchers in the 1880s, telepathy gained traction because it was formulated inside a moment of scientific and technological revolution, where uncanny transmissions proliferated across the visible and invisible spectrum, seeming to collapse the natural and the supernatural together. In the 1970s, telepathy returned, if under different names, as part of another moment of crisis. The Cold War arms race was an essential part of this, feeding a strange supplemental world of fantasy technologies, from mind control to brainwashing, and playing on an all-too-widespread psychological paranoia around being seen, infiltrated and manipulated by invisible agents.

Roger Luckhurst looks back at a century of psychic research

• New music: Portable Reality Generator by Field Lines Cartographer, and Sublime Eternal Love by Chrystabell and David Lynch.

• Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars: Robert Fripp interviewing John McLaughlin in July, 1982.

• Paintings by Ithell Colquhoun currently showing at the Ben Hunter gallery, London.

• At Public Domain Review: Eye Miniatures (ca. 1790–1810).

• ESP (1965) by Miles Davis | ESP (1990) by Deee-lite | ESP (2002) by Comets On Fire

The art of Vojtech Preissig, 1873–1944

Self-portrait.

There are times when one of my searches for work by an unfamiliar artist turns up results that are much more varied than I anticipated. Vojtech Preissig is one such artist, a Czech graphic designer, printmaker and typographer whose name I’d only registered in the past via digital revivals of his type designs. Preissig’s career follows a similar trajectory to that of his contemporary František Kupka: both artists started out working their own variations on fin-de-siècle art—Symbolism in Kupka’s case, Art Nouveau design in Preissig’s—before finding their way to abstraction in the 1930s. Both artists also worked for a time with Alphonse Mucha in Paris, until Preissig moved to the USA where he spent a number of years teaching.

When reading about European artists of this generation there’s always the question of how they fared during the Second World War. Preissig was among the less fortunate. After his return to Prague he spent his last few years putting his print skills to the service of the Czech Resistance. He ended his days in the concentration camp at Dachau.

A monograph, Vojtech Preissig by Lucie Vlckova, was published in 2012.

Day (1899).

Night (1899).

Dreaming (1899).

Continue reading “The art of Vojtech Preissig, 1873–1944”

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 725

Springtime in Paris (1923) by Georg Kretzschmar.

• I’ve been asked to mention that the tribute book put together for Alan Moore’s 70th birthday, Alan Moore: Portraits of an Extraordinary Gentleman, is still available. As before, the book features contributions from many well-known comic artists, a foreword by Iain Sinclair, and this piece of my own.

• “I never posted any lecture of mine on Tumblr, even though Tumblr would seem to have plenty of elbow-room for hour-long, learned, European public lectures (with many lecture slides).” Utopian Realism, a speech by Bruce Sterling.

• Reading the Signs: John Kenny in conversation with Mark Valentine about Mark’s new collection Lost Estates.

There remains something suspect about blotter, a stain that is both a blessing and a curse. As the blotter producer Matthew Rick, who started selling sheets as non-dipped ‘art’ collectables at festivals in 1998, puts it: ‘[B]lotter is the last underground art form that’s going to stay underground, simply because you’re creating something that looks like and functions like a felony.’ In other words, blotter is ontologically illicit; it is, as Rick says, ‘drug paraphernalia by its very existence’.

Erik Davis (again) on LSD and the cultural history of the printed blotter

• At Colossal: Uncanny phenomena derail domestic bliss in Marisa Adesman’s luminous paintings.

• Standing stones, urban hellscapes and male nudes: Andrew Pulver on Derek Jarman’s Super-8 films.

• “ [breaking news] An anomaly on earth has brought the cats to over 150 meters. Please be patient.”

• At We Are The Mutants: Alien Renaissance: An interview with illustrator Bob Fowke.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…René Crevel My Body and I (1926).

• At Public Domain Review: The Little Journal of Rejects (1896).

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Sandhouse.

• RIP Steve Albini.

• Sandoz In The Rain (1970) by Amon Düül II | Bon Voyage Au LSD (2001) by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. | Careful With That Sheet Of Acid, Eugene (2019) by Jenzeits