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Old Marvel versus Sherlock Holmes

Arriving in the post this week, one of the books whose covers I was creating late last year. Work-wise, the past year has been busier than usual which means I’ve fallen behind with the logging of recent commissions. In the past few months I’ve created several album designs, more book covers, an entire book design (cover plus interior), and also been working on two bigger projects at the same time. Things have calmed down a little now so updates will be forthcoming.

Old Marvel: The Scientific Detective is another design for Mark Williams’ Dark Lantern Tales imprint which once again resurrects a forgotten detective from pulp obscurity, and in a larger format than before. The new volume is significant for presenting a Sherlock Holmes-like character—credited to the pseudonymous “Grip”—who predates Holmes’ first appearance by three years, thereby suggesting a possible inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes collector Joe Rainone provides the details of publication and sets out the available evidence in an informative foreword. The Old Marvel character not only pre-empts Holmes by using his scientific knowledge to solve mysteries but he also pre-empts subsequent generations of spies and investigators with the various gadgets he uses, including what may be the first fictional deployment of an Edison voice recorder. My brief for the cover was to combine the illustration of the character with a vignette showing a shipping disaster from the story plus some of the contents of the detective’s tool kit.

The book is actually two stories in one volume, with the second half being a reprint of the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. Both stories are presented as semi-facsimiles of their original US printings, together with reproductions of title pages and so on. The Holmes story is reproduced from its appearance in The Illustrated Home Guest in 1892, and includes rare illustrations one of which appears on the cover. Doyle’s first Holmes novel is the most controversial of all his stories—at least if you’re a Mormon—since this is the one where the inhabitants of Salt Lake City are depicted as a murderous religious cult. I filled out the cover with panels showing the two main story locations: a view of London via Ludgate Circus and a canyon in Utah. Finding a period engraving of St Paul’s Cathedral that remained visually interesting when narrowed down in this way took some time.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More detectives
• The Joe Phenix Detective Series
• Illustrating Sherlock Holmes

Invisible Jukeboxes

A collection of visible jukeboxes.

Invisible Jukebox is one of the longest running regular features in The Wire magazine, a cross between music interview and music quiz in which a different interviewee each month is asked to listen to a piece of music and identify the title and artist. The musical selections all have a link either to the interviewee’s career or the idiom in which they operate. Right or wrong answers aren’t really the point, the interest comes from the way in which each piece prompts a discussion about either the music itself or some related matter. For the past two years the magazine has kept the feature Covid-free by asking musician colleagues or partners to test each other.

A large cache of Wire back issues turned up recently at the Internet Archive, the bulk of which is a complete run from 1982 to 1999. In its early years the magazine was almost solely devoted to jazz, old and new, but it changed direction in 1991 when the agenda broadened and the magazine slowly transformed into the forum for new music it still is today. I only became a regular reader in 1994 so it’s good to find these older issues and be able to read some of the Invisible Jukeboxes that I’d missed. What follows is a list of all the interviewees from the first Invisible Jukebox in 1991 up to the end of 1999, together with links to the relevant issue. I hadn’t realised before that the feature wasn’t always as regular as it seemed, there are occasional gaps in the first few years. The earliest ones also asked the interviewee to give each piece of music a rating from one to five, a rather pointless request that was soon dropped. Despite the increasing diversity of the magazine’s contents the list below remains male-heavy to the end. This may reflect the dominance of men in the music business as a whole but I’d still liked to have seen the test applied to (for starters) Laurie Anderson, Sheila Chandra, Alice Coltrane, Sussan Deyhim, Pauline Oliveros, Annette Peacock…

1991
• Mark Springer
• John Harle
• Bob Stewart
• Kate & Anna McGarrigle
• Leon Redbone
• Bill Bruford
• Taj Mahal

1992
• Cabaret Voltaire
• Asley Maher
• James Moody
• Julian Lloyd Webber
• Steve Martland
• Ali Farka Toure
• Humphrey Lyttleton & Acker Bilk
• Billy Jenkins
• Neneh Cherry

1993
• Sonic Youth
• Don Pullen
• Coldcut
• Jack Bruce
• Lester Bowie
• Lydia Lunch
• Pee Wee Ellis
• Paul Weller
• Holger Czukay

Continue reading “Invisible Jukeboxes”

Weekend links 609

Cover of Tom Veitch Magazine #1 (1970).

• RIP Tom Veitch, a writer with whom I almost created a comic-book series in the 1990s. Things didn’t work out for a variety of reasons but we had some good conversations. All the news notices focus on his writing for comics, a career which ranged from angry, political strips with Greg Irons to typical franchise fare. But he had short stories published in New Worlds magazine when it was at its peak under Michael Moorcock’s editorship, and in Quark, a short-lived paperback magazine edited by Samuel Delany & Marilyn Hacker. Veitch was also among the first 35 contributors to John Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem service when it launched in 1968, part of a select group that included John Ashbery, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Related: An interview with Tom Veitch on William Burroughs at Reality Studio.

• “I won’t deny that I thought very much about a post punk influence on it. Everybody knows that I love post punk, but I didn’t want to copy anybody.” Robert Hampson talking to Jonathan Selzer about the return of Loop.

• “What Joyce and Eliot, Ulysses and The Waste Land, had in common was a showiness, an overt ambition as well as a magpie approach to literature as assemblage.” John Self on the year 1922, “literature’s year zero”.

• At Spoon & Tamago: All of Japan’s 47 prefectures captured in expressive typography.

• At Public Domain Review: Composition (1905) by Arthur Wesley Dow, a book for art students influenced by the example of Japanese prints.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the unending attempts to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

• Mixes of the week: Fact Mix 846 by Ehua, and Soylent Green – No Escape by The Ephemeral Man.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Matthew Suss presents…Joseph Cornell Day.

• At Bandcamp: A guide to Alvin Lucier.

• Loop The Loop (1980) by Young Marble Giants | Q-Loop (1995) by Basic Channel | Loop-Loop (1996) by Michael Rother

The other Carceri

Dark prison with a courtyard for the punishment of criminals (c.1750) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. (NB: not one of the Carceri d’Invenzione although it is another imaginary prison.)

Piranesi’s etchings of imaginary prisons, the Carceri d’Invenzione, are his most celebrated and influential works but they’re not the only such views to be found in 18th-century art. What you see here are some of the prison settings designed for the theatre and opera of the time, where incarceration or unjust imprisonment was a recurrent theme. Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, is one of the more famous examples, with all the action taking place inside the walls of a Spanish prison.

Prison Courtyard with Figures (c. 1720). Attributed to Francesco Galli Bibiena.

Many of these designs are by various Galli Bibienas, a multi-generational family of Italian artists and architects who included theatrical designers among their talented number. The Galli Bibienas’ prisons lack the invention and menace of Piranesi’s etchings—many of them look as neat and tidy as their designs for colossal gardens and palaces—but I enjoy the dramatic perspectives all the same.

Prison Interior (c.1725–1730) by Antonio Galli Bibiena.

Print depicting the Prison scene in the opera-ballet Cerere placata at the Royal Palace of Jove (1772). Carlo Bibiena (artist) and Giovanni Battista Nolli (etcher).

Design for a stage set: the interior of a prison. School of Francesco Galli Bibiena.

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Something Rich and Strange: The Life and Music of Iannis Xenakis

In the days before our present age of cultural plenitude, recordings by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis weren’t always easy to find. My haphazard introduction to contemporary composition came via record libraries and secondhand shops but even in these havens of obscurity discs of Xenakis music remained frustratingly elusive. Today I do own a few Xenakis CDs but there’s still a large portion of his work that I’ve yet to hear. After watching Mark Kidel’s documentary I’m persuaded once again that the gaps in my listening ought to be filled.

20th-century composition can be intimidating to the unitiated. Intimidating to listen to when so much of it is about finding new sounds, new structures, new modes of performance; and intimidating to read about when the discussion involves the analysis of very cerebral or technical conceptions. It can also disappoint when the results of those conceptions fail to hold the attention or excite the emotions. Many Xenakis compositions had their origin in mathematics or scientific theory but the musical results are consistently powerful and dramatic, even unnerving in a manner familiar from the works of Penderecki and Scelsi.

Mark Kidel’s hour-long documentary gives a small taste of the musical power and drama, especially in Roger Woodward’s performance of Eonta, a short composition for solo piano that’s astonishing to hear and see. Something Rich and Strange was made for the BBC in 1990 but it’s one I missed on its original broadcast so it’s good to find in a quality copy on the director’s Vimeo pages. The note there describes the film as a definitive portrait which sounds like a boast but there aren’t many Xenakis documentaries to choose from and it is very good, if a little too short for its subject. The film follows the composer and his wife, Françoise, as they journey to the Greek island of Spetsai where Xenakis spent several years at school in the 1930s. His reminiscences (or refusal of them) are interwoven with a sketch of his remarkable life which in its early years involved fighting with the Greek Resistance during the Second World War (and losing the sight in one eye as a result), fleeing to Paris in the post-war period after being condemned to death in absentia by the authoritarian Greek government, and working as an architect with Le Corbusier in the 1950s before deciding to devote the rest of his life to music. Kidel’s views of the Greek landscape wordlessly demonstrate the parallels between Xenakis’s music and the sounds of that landscape—goat bells, water lapping in a cave, a priest hammering a piece of wood—but we don’t hear much discussion of the composer’s musical evolution. His interest in electronic music, for example, is briefly mentioned but dismissed as being a direction he was unwilling to follow. But it was a direction he followed intermittently for at least a decade, and his electronic compositions would occupy several hours of your time if listened to in sequence. That’s the problem with trying to sum up a diverse career within the bite-sized limits of broadcast media; if the film was longer there would have been more time to address both the life and the details of the work. As it is, this is still an excellent introduction to a great composer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vasarely, a film by Peter Kassovitz
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic