My good friend David Vallade has a new website, go have a look and commission him to draw something especially for you…
Design
Christ this is good! If you love real Hip Hop then this is as real as it gets. Cold Rock Stuff with Audessey and Oxygen from Soundsci, mixes by Daily Diggers and The Process, sleeve by Mr Krum. Get it here.
A unique opportunity to buy items from the Mo Wax Urban Archaeology exhibition opens next week at the Saatchi Gallery.
Following on from the brief exhibition at the Southbank (featured here) ‘Build & Destroy’ is an exhibition of rare art works, proofs and merchandise from the Mo Wax archive. It will also feature new works and limited editions by various artists like Swifty, (who has been posting things on his Instagram recently) Futura and 3D who have worked with Mo Wax over the past 21 years. Build & Destroy also coincides with the major survey exhibition Post Pop: East Meets West at the Saatchi Gallery.
All of the works are available to buy and the exhibition is a rare opportunity for people to obtain original works and limited editions produced throughout the history of the label to date alongside newly commissioned pieces. More details here
I’m playing in Russia this weekend with Mr Armtone, Lynch Club in Yekaterinburg and Zvezda in Samara – check the poster for the 2nd gig – beautiful.
I like how this ad for Hive laid the info out, incrementally bigger bites of info depending on how much time you have but referencing the site it was posted at (a train station). You probably can’t read it but you get the jist from the headings. (Click image for larger version)
It’s almost that time again, you know the one, if you’re organised and on top of things then these will not be left by the time the 25th rolls around. Sarah and Leigh at Factory Road have now added glow in the dark dinks (GIDD?) to their 45 adaptor arsenal (great stocking filler) and have updated their Xmas card range featuring different coloured dinks.
They are also hosting a spoken word poetry performance by Buddy Wakefield in Leicester on Dec 1st at the Silver Arcade. £10 entry gets you in the door, a free cup of hot cocoa and a £5 voucher to spend in the arcade.
You can now pre-order the new album from The Advisory Circle over on the Ghost Box shop and download 2 posters designed by Julian House on the label’s Belbury Parish Magazine blog. Also, just to be advised, the CD has 3 extra tracks.
At long last, after 8 months of work (off and on) the Frankie Goes To Hollywood box set ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’ was released on Wednesday 29th – 30 years to the day from its original debut. Back in November 2013 I was asked if I’d be part of the team that would put together the 30th anniversary set of Frankie’s ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ album, for release in Autumn 2014 and this is what writer Ian Peel, designer Philip Marshall and myself came up with.
To put this is context, this was a big deal, a very big deal indeed. Frankie and by extension Zang Tuum Tumb records were a massive formative influence on me in my early to mid teens. The band and label created a phenomena in 1984 which I’ve still not seen the likes of again and, alongside Trevor Horn and his team, the group made some of my favourite pop songs ever.
The album was the most eagerly anticipated of the year and, while being uneven, contains possibly the greatest side A of music ever issued in the 17 minute long title track. The design of the label greatly influenced my own aesthetic for record sleeve graphics although I didn’t realise this until years later and I started the Art of ZTT website as an online archive of the old material which I feel has been neglected in the history of music design.
This set is officially sold out now as it was a Pledgemusic production but I’m told a quantity have been kept back of the 2000 made (never to be repressed) and will be available from some distributors to those who couldn’t pledge due to the restrictions of licensing territories.
Lovely poster, designed by Matt Needle, for the showing of ‘Slient Running’ at the Eden Project in Cornwall which happened yesterday. See Pete Thorton‘s review over on Front Row Reviews for more of what went down.
Bonobo has a new EP out on Dec 1st with a lovely cover design by the ever-excellent Leif Podhajsky, someone who has really carved his own niché out over the past few years. Also responsible for ‘The North Borders’ artwork and the new live album covers as well as several others for Ninja (Kelis being just one). Check out the special website created for the release and you can download the title track if you use the Shazam app on it.
Here’s the unboxing of the Frankie Goes To Hollywood ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’ set I co-designed with Philip Marshall for Universal Music / ZTT. The 30th anniversary of its release is next week and these will ship out to pledgers on the 28th.
There is still time to pre-order one but they’re down to the last 30 of 2000 now it seems. A series of full, in-depth blog posts will follow soon detailing the various aspects of the designs which have been on-going since January this year.
Scarey as hell, voice reels and foley sounds from the film within a film from Berberian Sound Studio. 10″ via Death Waltz which is sadly sold out at source, but who have just begun reissuing their original back catalogue in remastered and expanded form. Cover by House from the outtake posters he designed for the original film.
The Discovering Scarfolk book arrived today and it’s a beautiful object, perfectly realised and presented. The dark humour that runs through the website of the same name is here in physical form, looking just like a government handbook from yesteryear as is the intention. Having not had time to fully digest it I can see that pieces from the website are reprinted but there’s possibly other new material too. Well worth a look and no doubt a read too. Perfect Xmas present fodder.
A very odd combo arrived in the form of a Teeny Tiny Trunk 7″ the other day. An as yet unreleased duo of tracks by Anthony Newley with musical accompaniment from none other than Delia Derbyshire. The pair are an oddity and so are the recordings with Newley coming across as a bit of a perv as he comments on the passing of young girls in short skirts. The combination of clear vinyl and a Julian House sleeve design completes the package although these appear to be sold out now in the clear variant. Go to Trunk Records for black vinyl copies
Received a vinyl copy of this wonderful album over the weekend from InFiné Records (thanks!) Beautiful packaging with debossing on silver card + insert and inner sleeve, rounding off an excellent record perfectly. Pretty sure this will be in the end of year top 10 album chart for 2014 for me, not a duff track on it. Get it here.
UPDATE: Finders Keepers have just put an exclusive cassette version on sale referencing the original artwork.
Love these graphics for Paper Tiger who have a mix on Solid Steel in a week or so.
No.2 – so soon? Ghost Box‘s follow up to the Study Series of 7″s continues with Other Voices and it’s the turn of Listening Centre from New York. Two tracks on a beautifully designed 45 single, available to pre-order for Sept 17th release. More info here…
You may remember me featuring the Madlib ‘Pill Jar’ album cover a while back when he put it up as a free download. Well, it’s still there but he’s added more tracks and it’s now available as a physical LP with that great cover image by Rogerio Puhl. Another couple of nice cover designs, courtesy of Jeff Jank, come for the Rock Konducta 1 & 2 LPs – taking classic Beatles and Black Sabbath sleeves and bastardizing them.
I’ve been scanning the original Welcome To The Pleasuredome artwork by Lo Cole this week and, comparing it to the existing scans I was working with, there’s quite a bit of difference. It’s tempting with Photoshop to put images through all sorts of filters and processes to make the image ‘pop’, much like compression and limiting on audio files. After a while you can lose sight of the original but having the original paintings to hand I could check on screen that they were as accurate reproductions as possible. Certain colours didn’t initially scan exactly so I made sure that I corrected them to as near as possible with the colours of origin.
It’s actually hard to tell but the lower left of the moon is a subtlely different shade to the rest. The background is a more yellow/grey tone of blue.
This is a little like remastering from the original master tapes, cleaning up any stray dust or hair particles that have got on to the surface in the process. The blurrier, more saturated images here are the working files I’ve had and the subtler, sharper ones are the new scans that will be seen on the forthcoming box set. If you get the prints from the box, rest assured that the colours on them will be as accurate as possible to the original source (as long as the printer doesn’t mess things up) and if you display them they will nearly pass for originals.
As you can see with this comparison, there’s a bit more of the image on the top and the blues are more grey/yellow.