I know I’ve already posted about this before but the Egotripland blog has a feature on Bam’s collection with more photos and guess who turned up in them?
Check the link above for many more photos which concentrate on the defacing of some of the sleeves, below are my highlights.
Nice interview with Nick Egan over on the Album Cover Hall of Fame blog about the design process for Malcolm McLaren‘s ‘Duck Rock’ LP. Easily one of my favourite records of all time along with being a pivotal influential moment in my musical upbringing. With artists such as Dondi White, Keith Haring and Vivienne Westwood‘s wares vying for space on the sleeve it’s a wonder it all hangs together but somehow it does. I wish the interview had gone into the making of the ‘Duck Rocker’ boombox a little as I’d love to know who made it and where it is now.
The mystery revealed: Ron West – who made the original Duck Rocker(s) posted this on his Facebook page at the end of 2020. It’s lost its horns and the graffiti is in a drawer but that is a copy of the original from the LP cover. Apparently Malcolm lost the original in the States and asked Ron to make a copy for promo purposes.
Bought for the sleeve alone, if you look closely you can see it’s hand cut, incredible. Love the ‘featuring Curtis Mayfield’ type too but musically it’s not doing anything for me.
Sold on the cover art alone. Richard Norris and Luke Insect‘s new Dark Seed project gets its first sleeve. Pre-order HERE. Comes with a free fold out poster too!
Love this cover for a new comp of French Cosmic and Electronic music. Very Phillippe Druillet, if not cribbed directly from one of his works. See the tracklist and pre-order here.
There’s a great article about the public cataloging of Afrika Bambaataa‘s record collection over on Wax Poetics’ site.
Friends on my Facebook page recently will have seen a new photo album called ‘The Devil’s In The Details’ where I’ve been posting design finds that I’ve photographed whilst going through a load of records recently. All these details are hidden on the backs of sleeves or on the actual labels, another example of something that’s disappearing with the digital age.
I’ve been having a clear out recently, I’ve not properly weeded out my record collection for years apart from going through the Hip Hop last year and it’s always fascinating to realise what you have and what’s contained within the artwork as well as the grooves. Speaking of Facebook, I now have a dedicated DJ Food Official page for gig news and official releases.
More old Dan McPharlin designs just because they’re so fantastic, this time for The Sword, check out the hexagonal picture disc.
Just some of the labels now signed up to Beat Delete. Check out their site, there are all sorts of releases up for a repress once there are enough pledges.
Only 12 orders left until they repress the ColdKrushCuts mix on 3xLP.
These are pretty old now but I’m a sucker for Dan McPharlin‘s work. Such beautiful examples of image and typography evoking a certain era perfectly.
These two 5″ postcard records have been available for some time now but I missed them the first time round. The first is by 2econd Class Citizen (above) and the second by Glen Porter (below). Artwork on these is by Toobz and the music is exclusive.
They are the first in a new series by the Postmanslove label, from the people behind Vinyl Postcards in Austria. Now up to no.5, they come in an editon of 200 with 50 in an even more limited edition with a personalised stamp.
Grab one from their online shop.
Hauntology super group? John Foxx, Belbury Poly and The Advisory Circle – forthcoming on Ghost Box.
Props to Kid Acne for this fantastic package, updating his ‘Council Pop‘ LP and ‘Radio Music’ 12″ – this joins my ever growing collection of hand-screened or painted records.
The new Ghost Box Study Series No.9 up for pre-order now. This one has Pye Corner Audio and Listening Centre on it and is titled: ‘Projections’. Building into a nice little series now.
Check these out, Kid Acne has unearthed a pile of his old ‘Council Pop’ LPs and given them a makeover inside and out, added new material and more. He’s got them on sale in a very limited edition over here in a package that includes an extra disc of instrumentals and a customised ‘Radio Music’ 12″, the original single from the album. Three customised discs in an edition of 33 for £33 plus postage – bargain.
He made this 10 years ago with fellow artist Req One and it’s a possibly one of the most honest British rap albums you’ll ever hear. Totally unpretentious, Ed writes about what he knows and sees on the street rather than pretending it’s all about bitches, bling and being bad, he’s more likely to rap about dogs, dracula and going down the dole office.
Below is the piece Ed and Req One did that features on the back of the album cover.
Those lovely people at Beat Delete have put the mix PC and I did alongside DJ Krush in ’97 – ‘ColdKrushCuts’ – up for a 3LP repress. Originally only available on CD, (aside from an ultra limited 2xLP version in Japan) they have set a 200 copy limit to be reached before the pressing is closed of which a third have been filled as of writing. Weirdly I only posted about the origin of the ‘The Bug in The Rug‘ sample from the same mix two weeks back.
Beat Delete have steadily been adding other labels to their repress roster too, you can now find selections from Tru Thoughts, KPM (The Big Beat!), Fat City, Mr Bongo, Brownswood, Leaf, Catskills, Ghostly International and Celluloid amongst others. I’m also in the process of curating a compilation of special oddities, offcuts and overlooked tracks for a possible future pressing with them.
Many times I’ve been asked what the origin of the story of ‘The Bug In The Rug’ was, a spoken word piece that was overlaid in the ColdKrushCuts mix that PC and I did in 1997. Until recently even I didn’t know where it came from because the original source was one of PC’s inclusions, possibly sourced from Jon More‘s record collection.
Patrick took a monologue from this record, ‘Four Dreams of Man’ by Dr. John Furbay, heavily edited it and laid it over Hex‘s track, ‘Harmonic’. The record is a kind of lecture and motivational speech about man’s place in the world released on Lecture Recordings in, I guess, the early 60’s.
This is my copy, it’s actually signed by Furbay, who was an international traveler and speaker at many schools, institutions and companies. He believed the world was getting better and could foresee greater integration of different races and cultures in the future. You can hear the original section of the mix below, the speech starts about 2.10 mins in.
Finally, after a couple of teases by Ninja Tune, I can show this beauty off, something that’s been in the pipeline for a while now. Today is Bonobo‘s big gig at the Roundhouse, a full day of music curated by Simon Green and rounded off with a performance by him and his band. With the likes of Gilles Peterson, Machine Drum, The Invisible, Adam Buxton’s Bug, a Boiler Room-hosted space and Solid Steel broadcasting snippets of the event on the web, it should be epic. To make it even more epic 500 lucky golden ticket winners will each receive one of these 12″ zoetrope picture discs of his already classic track, ‘Cirrus’.
I took the original archive loops from Cyriak‘s incredible video for the track and broke them down into circular visuals to make a spinning animated version. Dating back to the first primitive animation techniques of our time, the zoetrope relies on a viewer to see the action happen. This is included with the disc along with assembly instructions so that people can watch while the disc plays. See the above film for an approximation of what the disc does when spinning.
This is all rounded off by a beautiful Leif Podhajsky design on the reverse side. Lovely.
