The Trunk reissue 10″ of Tom Dissvelt and Kid Baltan‘s ‘Electronic Movements’ single with my original Philips 7″ version of the same. The reverse of the Trunk release has Daphne Oram‘s ‘Electronic Sound Patterns’, which I don’t have an original of so you get the reverse of the Philips 45. As usual with Trunk, this is pretty limited and available from the website now. Also there’s an excellent 8 page overview of everything Trunk in this months (Feb 2013) Record Collector magazine.
Posts are slowly but meticulously being added over at artofztt.com
AJ Barratt: “I remember going into the NME offices one day and I saw this poster on their wall, and someone had added a third line to the bottom of it. ‘Noise Is Golden, Silence is a Dead Giveaway… and Bullshit stinks’, that’s what it was! (Laughs) That’s what somebody had written.”
‘Into Battle’ promo poster from the archive of AJ Barratt, digitally restored by artofztt.com. Also included is the original photo for this design, scanned from the negative. The quote above is from a forthcoming interview with AJ which contains more exclusive images from his collection.
artist: Art Of Noise title: Into Battle With Art Of Noise format: A2 promo poster design: XLZTT photography: AJ Barratt cat. no: ZTIS100 date: 09/83 art of notes: The red crosses are identical to the ones on the ‘You Can’t Suck The Same Piece of Sugar…’ poster and continue the trend for ephemeral symbols hovering in the top right corner.
I’d like to bring your attention to a new blog I’ve set up about the Art of ZTT Records (or ‘Who’s Afraid of the Art of Zang Tuum Tumb’ to give it its full title).
For years I’ve been collecting everything I can find from the early 80’s incarnation of this label and tracking down the designers and photographers responsible for some of the artwork. It’s a constant work in progress, starting off as a possible magazine article then progressing to a book idea and now, finally, I’ve decided to make it a website.
Inspired by Paul Gorman‘s rehabilitation of Barney Bubbles‘ work into today’s design community I hope the same can happen for the work of ZTT as it was hugely influential on my own desire to design for the music industry. XL, Accident and The London Design Partnership aren’t exactly household names in the same way as Vaughn Oliver and Peter Saville are but I think that the work they produced for the label in their golden age is at least an equal of the Factory and 4AD portfolios.
The site will eventually feature sleeves, promo posters, print ads, photos, exclusive interviews and associated ephemera connected with the label, its artists and designers. At the very least it should be an exhaustive gallery of an innovative label with a host of rare and forgotten imagery.
Just out is issue 3 of Classic Pop magazine with a 4 page article I co-wrote with editor Ian Peel about the 80’s music design work of the XL design studio. You don’t hear much about them but they’re a big passion of mine because they largely defined the look of the Zang Tuum Tumb label from 1983 through to the end of the decade, greatly influencing myself in the process.
Whereas some had Saul Bass, Hipgnosis, Peter Saville or Vaughn Oliver, I had XL who, in conjunction with press officer Paul Morley and another group, The London Design Partnership, created the look of my favourite record label of the 80’s. They did many other sleeves for pop acts on other labels as well but the combination of their work with design briefs from Morley (collectively XLZTT) really stands out from the pack and it’s this that we focus on.
Op-Art seems to be back in a big way in 2013. After seeing the odd example over the years (Trevor Jackson‘s Soulwax sleeves spring to mind) the floodgates seemed to open last year. Chris & Cosey‘s ‘Transcend’ sleeve was the one in all the end of year lists and I think I’ve featured more op art in the last year than ever before.
Drums of Death was one of them and his Waves trilogy of EPs (red, blue and black) are getting the remix treatment on the Civil Music label. Above are the cover of the remixed versions of red and blue with the original blue and black below. Whilst the music isn’t all my bag I can highly recommend ‘Bang The Drum’ from the Red Waves EP. The Blue Waves Remixed 12″ is released on March 4th.
Date 70 – Space Loops Vol.1 & 2, 7″ covers and coloured discs, Enraptured Records 2004 / 2007
Two Systems 7″ picture disc with music by Wrangler and Scanner, Static Caravan Records 2008.
Selected images from the amazing portfolio of Karol Lasia aka Khomatech.
Christian at Stylusnation sent me this photo of the Pete Namlook / Fax records tribute poster I designed. His wife downloaded the pdf and had it printed and framed as a surprise for Xmas, looks beautiful, well done that woman. 
Fabulous Hallmark calendar from 1970-71, designed by Push Pin Studios and containing 16 months. Seen via the ever-excellent Voices of East Anglia website who, themselves cribbed it from the Flickr of Mewdeep who has the full thing.
2012 was a busy year for me, probably one of the best yet in terms of new things achieved and unique experiences. I’m always striving to do something different and at the end of each year I remember the line from The The‘s ‘I’ve Been Waiting For Tomrrow (All of My Life)’, “another year over and what have I done?”.
Thankfully 2012 has been a golden year in terms of ‘getting things done’:
Finally getting ‘The Search Engine’ out there was a good start as were the Greenwich Planetarium launch shows and exhibition with Henry Flint at the Pure Evil Gallery, all in January.
Featuring on a Cineola podcast, being interviewed by Matt Johnson alongside an exclusive remix of ‘GIANT’.
The Kraftwerk month and mixes I did on my blog going a bit viral in March.
Having The Amorphous Androgynous remix one of my tracks for a release on Record Store Day was a massive thrill. Hearing it played on 6 Music was great too.
Going to Montreal to learn about and present The Search Engine show in their SATosphere was one of the proudest points of my gigging career to date.
Having J.G. Thirlwell pop round for tea and a chat one afternoon.
The Food & Flint exhibition, hosted at the Factory Road Gallery in Hinckley by Sarah & Leigh was amazing fun.
The Sacrum Profanum concert in Krakow I took part in after an invitation from Skalpel was one of the most fantastic concerts I’ve ever seen and gig of the year for 2012.
The Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ mix I did with Cheeba and Moneyshot making waves on the web.
Playing a small part in some of ZTT‘s Element reissue series and getting to edit one particular master recording for a future issue.
Providing images, sleeve notes and audio for a reissue compilation of John Rydgren‘s work on the Australian Omni Recording Corporation label.
Instigating and then editing the results of a new meeting of Coldcut and The Orb for the 25 years of Solid Steel mixes in 2013.
With so much out there it was inevitable that some got missed.
Things that came out in 2012 that I still didn’t get to see or hear:
Berberian Sound Studio
Cabin In The Woods
Lone’s – Galaxy Garden album
The Amazing Spiderman
The B.P.R.D. hardback editions
Butcher Baker comic
Can : The Lost Tapes compilation
The last few issues of Godland comic
GOAT’s ‘World Music’ album
A couple of weeks ago I posted about buying a fifth copy of The The‘s ‘Infected’ album upon finding a test pressing secondhand. Whilst record shopping in Montreal this summer I found a new copy of the Nonesuch vinyl reissue of Eno & Byrne‘s ‘My Life In The Bush of Ghosts’ – another of my all time favourite albums. The CD reissue in 2008 with the bonus tracks is already in my collection but the double vinyl version added multi-track parts to two album cuts on the fourth side as well so I couldn’t help but pick it up.
Add to the bonus audio that the whole package was housed in a beautiful, heavyweight card gatefold sleeve with notes and it was an instant sale. Around the time of the reissue a special website was created with additional content such as extra sleeve notes by Paul Morley, recording session photos and discarded screen captures from the original artwork. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated and now all you can get is the home page (possible out-dated Flash plug-in is my guess) so here are some of the artwork outtakes.
I now own five versions of this seminal record – the original vinyl (with the track, ‘Qu’ran’ which was later removed), original CD, Nonesuch reissue CD and vinyl. There’s also an Italian bootleg CD called ‘Ghosts’ with demos and original versions before samples were removed or tracks reworked which features a couple of things not on the reissues. I also have the two 12″ singles that were released originally in the early 80’s but not the ‘first edition’ vinyl bootleg of demo versions.
Apparently above is a scan of an earlier version of the album sent to the record label. Because of ‘sample-clearance’ issues (this was 1980, such a thing was unheard of) the record was delayed and later some of it was reworked by Eno and Byrne. Some tracks were dropped or titles changed, some mixes were redone and some new tracks were added. Most of the dropped tracks were reinstated on the reissues on Nonesuch. I never tire of this record and the reissue is the rare exception of the bonus material actually adding to an enhancing the original rather than just padding it out.
Much like Malcolm McLaren‘s ‘Duck Rock’ album this record is a product of its time and exists almost in a vaccuum, barely dating in the 30 years + since its release. You can hear echoes of the sounds Eno & Byrne created here on either side of their respective discographies around the time but they never fully reached the other-worldliness achieved on this album
I actually already included this in my list of favourite design pieces of 2012 before posting it on the site even though these photos were taken months ago. The Rx:Tx label from Ljubljana reused their die-cut packaging again (this is the third time to my knowledge) but now with a retina-burning Op-Art design for Fulgeance‘s album ‘Step-Thru’. 
I was shocked to hear of the death of Ewan Robertson yesterday, one half of design duo Oscar & Ewan who created many iconic covers for Ninja Tune and Big Dada g others. Ewan also recorded as Offshore for Big Dada and had just released his first album only a month ago –‘Bake Haus’. Alongside Oscar Bauer, Ewan created some iconic sleeves for the labels including Roots Manuva, Wiley, Bonobo and the recent Amon Tobin set housed inside a ‘flower press’.
I only met him once or twice – first at the exhibition for the release of the Ninja Tune ’20 years of Beats & Pieces’ book – and he was friendly, humble and easy to talk to. We’d corresponded over email many times in order to get his and Oscar’s work well represented in the book and he graciously agreed to show the plaster cast of Roots Manuva’s head they’d made for the ‘Slime & Reason’ LP campaign at the opening.
He was always super helpful and supplied many exclusive images from behind the scenes which showed the processes they went through when designing. My thoughts go out to his family and friends, he left a small but striking caché of music and visuals behind that will ensure he isn’t forgotten.
It’s on the horizon, no denying it any more, best accept it and hope you get something you actually want. Here’s the last of the scans from the European magazines Steve Cook and I found back in May, all Xmas-themed for you. As usual there’s an unhealthy obsession with guns and what looks like a cut out card to send to Santa.
The first trailer drops on Dec 10th but here’s a look at the Gipsy Danger monster-fighting Jaeger bot from Guillermo Del Toro’s forthcoming Pacific Rim film, due out next July. The silhouette of a human at the bottom shows the scale of it.
And now there’s a second one, a Russian ‘Cherno Alpha‘ bot, there are also a couple of teaser films doing the rounds and ‘leaked documents’ relating to these blueprints.
And then there were four five: 
that’s some BIG robot action next year
I can’t begin to pretend I’ve heard even a couple of dozen releases on Pete Namlook‘s Fax +49-69/450464 label (to give it its full title). But those that I did hear, and own, have stuck with me. Releases like Air (not the french duo who came later), Alien Community, Silence, Dark Side of the Moog, Sequential, Sea Biscuit and Dreamfish are all part of the ambient resurgence of the early to mid 90’s. Dreamfish was the moniker of Pete Namlook’s collaboration with Mixmaster Morris, who was a huge champion of the label and got some of it licensed to the Rising High label in the UK.
Namlook (Kuhlmann backwards, see what he did there?) was releasing an album a week at one point, starting off at around 500 copies on CD and progressing to 1-2000 at one point. He had a bewildering array of colour coded releases on various sub-labels, at least half of which he either recorded solo or collaborated on. The poster above is only a select number of titles, probably ranging somewhere from the early to late 90’s and doesn’t include any vinyl from the same time. Constant collaborators like Bill Laswell, Klaus Schulze, Ritchie Hawtin, Dr Atmo, Atom Heart, David Moufang and Charles Uzzel-Edwards (aka Pure Evil) are just some of the names you can find in the credits on the many releases from Fax.
I’d been thinking of doing a poster like this for some time, just to see what it would look like to put a ton of the earlier Fax releases together. Unfortunately it took the early demise of the label’s founder and driving force to make it happen. At one time you could spot a Fax record a mile off by the circular design, the Bauhaus font and an image that usually had early Photoshop filter experiments When out-sourcing design work to other people (in the case of Daniel Pemberton‘s ‘Bedroom’ album that I laid out) there were strict instructions and templates that had to be adhered to, everything had to fit into the label look. These instructions arrived by fax of course…
R.I.P. Peter Kuhlmann / Pete Namlook.
Download a high-res version of the poster HERE
When Pepe Deluxé do anything they don’t do it by halves, in fact they go the whole nine yards and then add a load more into the mix for good measure. What emerges is music and imagery so multi-layered it requires repeat listens to pierce the surface and process the motherlode of information contained within.
One of the reasons I love Pepe is because there is genuinely no one like them, they are a one-off and a band seemingly working in and across separate time zones whose records sound so out of place you wonder if they’ll ever even find reappraisal 20 years down the line. This isn’t a criticism, it’s to be admired that a band can strike out so single-mindedly whilst ignoring any current forms of music that are deemed ‘hip’ and ‘cool’. In fact it’s testament to Pepe and Catskills for leaving off the many remixes they’ve had over the last releases as, with the exception of Husky Rescue‘s cover of ‘Supersonic’, none of them came close to Pepe’s vision and sounded like they were trying to force the band into a modern day setting (sorry guys, just my opinion).
The new Deluxe version of their ‘Queen of the Wave’ album is no different, in fact it ups the ante considerably and throws everything AND the kitchen sink at you over 2 CDs, a DVD and a 64 page booklet inside a hard backed book. The original album is present but the ‘Esoteric Pop Opera In Three Parts’ has suddenly expanded to three discs, the second with versions, new and unused tracks and an easy-listening style EP of selected songs. The DVD includes videos for singles both new and old as well as stems for budding remixers. Everything about it says EPIC, the original album is one in itself but bolstered by the 2nd disc, DVD and a book that has crammed enough material for 100 pages into 64 then the deal is sealed.
No space is left un-filled and we learn everything from recording history to how they shot the video for ‘Night & Day’ with real magic tricks and all. The book shouldn’t work, it breaks so many rules of what good design is with up to 10 different fonts competing for space on any one page and a layout that’s more scrapbook than grid. Yet it does work and adds to the music is so many ways, placing the album visually between steampunk and psychedelia with nods to Tiki and Analogue electronics from the golden age. One minute you think you’re looking at an issue of Practical Electronics then it’s a poster in the style of a traveling circus or a Richard Hamilton-esque collage.
Anyway, enough of me blathering on, check the video below as it’s another brilliant Pepe production with the classic ‘Virtual Chicken Little Funk Operator’ set to become legendary. You can BUY the deluxe package from Catskills HERE.
Out on Stones Throw a while back now but still in stock, ‘3 Dollars’ on 5 inches of vinyl (actual cost: $10 + postage) but still cheap compared to some of the prices I’ve been seeing lately. Great design and illustration plus the track’s a banger – “that’s right!”
Love this tumblr of Olly Moss-inspired minimal movie posters. You’ll need a while to go through them but I’ve picked some that caught my eye, I seem to be obsessing over circular designs at the moment.
