Antoni Maiovvi – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 145

Weird Tales, October 1933. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

• Michael Moorcock’s novels are being republished this year by Gollancz in a range of print and digital editions. Publishing Perspectives asks Is Now a Perfect Time for a Michael Moorcock Revival? • Related: Dangerous Minds posted The Chronicle of the Black Sword: A Sword & Sorcery Concert from Hawkwind and Michael Moorcock. My sleeve for that album was the last I did for the band. • Obliquely related: Kensington Roof Gardens appear as a location in several Moorcock novels, and also provided a venue for the author’s 50th birthday party. If you have a spare £200m you may be interested in buying them once Richard Branson’s lease expires.

• One of my favourite things in Mojo magazine was a list by Jon Savage of 100 great psychedelic singles (50 from the UK, 50 from the US). This week he presented a list of the 20 best glam-rock songs of all time. For the record, Blockbuster by The Sweet was the first single I bought so I’ve always favoured that song over Ballroom Blitz.

• The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage is a forthcoming book by J. David Spurlock about the Weird Tales cover artist. Steven Heller looks at her life (I’d no idea she knew Djuna Barnes) while io9 has some of her paintings. Related: Illustrations for Weird Tales by Virgil Finlay.

The masterpiece of Mann’s Hollywood period is, of course, Paracelsus (1937), with Charles Laughton. Laughton’s great bulk swims into pools of scalding light out of greater or lesser shoals of darkness like a vast monster of the deep, a great black whale. The movie haunts you like a bad dream. Mann did not try to give you a sense of the past; instead, Paracelsus looks as if it had been made in the Middle Ages – the gargoyle faces, bodies warped with ague, gaunt with famine, a claustrophobic sense of a limited world, of chronic, cramped unfreedom.

The Merchant of Shadows (1989) by Angela Carter. There’s more of her writing in the LRB Archive.

• Television essayist Jonathan Meades was back on our screens this week. The MeadesShrine at YouTube gathers some of his earlier disquisitions on culture, place, buildings and related esoterica.

• Sometimes snark is the only worthwhile response: An A-Z Guide to Music Journalist Bullshit.

• London venue the Horse Hospital celebrates 20 years of unusual events.

• The Politics of Dread: An Interview with China Miéville.

• How Giallo Can You Go? Antoni Maiovvi Interviewed.

• A guide to Terry Riley’s music.

• Three more for the glam list: Coz I Love You (1971) by Slade | Get It On (1971) by T. Rex | Starman (40th Anniversary Mix) (1972) by David Bowie

Circadian by Jack Sparrow

I’m still (still!) playing catch-up posting all the things I’ve been working on this year. Here’s one of the more high-profile releases in the music sphere, Jack Sparrow‘s debut album, Circadian, which is unleashed this week on the Tectonic label. This is another dubstep production and I don’t have to try and describe the music this time when you can hear a stream of it at FACT.

Vinyl sleeve.

Design-wise, this is another release in CD and vinyl editions, and like all the work I’ve done for Tectonic it comes wrapped in Liz Eve’s wonderful photos. The pictures this time are some kind of industrial detritus which she’s turned into abstract landscapes. The vinyl was a three-disc set and the way the labels have turned out is probably my favourite part of this particular job.

Vinyl labels.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New work: Two forms of darkness
• The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi
• New music and design
• Plates: Volume 2
• Aerial by 2562

The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi

The Thorns of Love CD cover.

One of the consequences of having been so productive of late is having less time to update my web pages. The CD design section is now a year out of date so I’ll be trying to amend the situation as time allows.

The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi was released last month and is another of my designs for the Caravan label. The attention-grabbing photos are by Liz Eve whose work adorned earlier designs for 2562 and Pinch. It’s great to work with quality images like these, and Liz’s gory pictures are an ideal match for Maiovvi’s music, a series of lengthy compositions in a style which might be described as Giorgio Moroder scoring a Dario Argento horror movie. This is a fantastic album and the CD’s fourth track, Class Dagger, is one of the best new electronic pieces I’ve heard this year.

The Thorns of Love vinyl sleeve.

The Thorns of Love was released on double-12″ vinyl as well as CD so I’ve also posted the vinyl art, something I need to go back and do for previous designs. Vinyl isn’t dead by any means, and it’s a pleasure to work for the larger format.

• Antoni Maiovvi interviewed at Electrofreaks

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dead on the Dancefloor