Psych-tinged film posters from the latest Omega Auctions catalogue.
I’ve included ‘If’ at the bottom even though it doesn’t fit the description but because I love it so.
Poster / flyer
Telepathic Fish resurfaces in 2027 with a chill out room at Bloc‘s 20 year reunion party. Get tickets here
Here’s a selection of posters featuring light shows listed by name, actually something of a rarity despite the light shows of the late 60s and early 70s being a key part of some bands’ appeal. Above is one of the only posters devoted entirely to a UK light show, Bristol’s Great Western Light Show. More info about them can be found here.
Below are a set up I know very little about, out of Downey, south west LA, Wick Light Show had many great posters and flyers for their shows, lots which can be seen here.
Two of these next three appeared in the previous Ewell Tech post and feature either Black Lights or Mass Spectrumeter / Spectrometer although they’re somewhat hidden on the last two.
Above is a ticket I found somewhere online, looks like a US show from New Jersey, Jorma Kaukonen was a blues/folk/rock guitarist – anyone know who the lights were by? ‘Psych-A-delic’. Below is a poster featuring the legendary Bill Ham’s Light Show – gotta be late 60s. I’ll add to these periodically as I find more.
A whole raft of rarely seen posters from the Lindsay Brown collection coming up for sale at Omega Auctions on the 14th September. Most of these look screen printed using the split fountain technique where one colour will fade to another across the page. Brown was the Social Secretary at Ewell Technical College in Surrey in the 60s and 70s so was in charge of booking bands to appear at the site. Above is the star exhibit from the auction, designed by David Arnott (as are several of the others) and features Nick Drake. Another poster in the collection is from Drake’s last known gig where he left the stage mid-concert and both are expected to fetch a high price.
There have been a lot of images building up on the desktop of late and my workload hasn’t allowed any time to go through them for presentation. But a brief pause over the bank holiday has afforded some housekeeping so expect a few themed posts this week. Some of these posters here come from the Omega Auctions catalogue for upcoming lots from the Lindsay Brown collection in two weeks time. Some of these posters are for student union gigs so are extremely rare.
After spending an amount of time in Leicester in recent years I’m convinced there’s a hidden psychedelic history and below is another piece of evidence for the case. This poster was from 1970.
Beautiful typography on the two images below, unrelated to the above material.
Resident King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard artist, Jason Galea is on fire with his recent designs for their new Alien Metal album and four night run of gigs in the US this weekend just gone. A quartet of designs appeared featuring robots in the style of Shogun Warriors or early Transformers, each made up of elements that relate to previous KG records or songs.
Besides designing these mecha warriors he also 3D printed and painted versions as seen below, how does he find the time?
Below is the new album artwork, no AI, 100% physically printed and painted sculpture which was built digitally before 3D printing. His Instagram shows a speeded up film of the process which is frankly mind-blowing. He also printed the dragon from the song of the same name’s video, also seen below.
Vintage inspiration from Jason’s studio.
More dates are emerging for the Extended Turntablism dates I’ve set up for the summer. We head to Holotronica‘s Church House Studios just outside Bristol on July 17th for their second Synced night of audio visual goodness where we’re joined by PuttyRubber on projection duties. Tickets here.
A couple of weeks later and she joins us (minus Graham) in London for this year’s FogFest alongside Xylitol, Sarah Anglis & Karina Townsend and The Howling at Iklectik in its new home in Peckham.
Tickets on sale soon…
There will be cassettes on sale at both, the new Duplokit album plus a second batch of mine and Graham’s ‘Extended Turntablism vol.1’
It’s been an exciting week for Boards of Canada fans. News broke last Tuesday of a VHS tape sent out to selected people across the world containing a brief but garbled message, very much in the style of similar transmissions around the time of the band’s last album promo campaign for ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’. The fact that the tapes were sent from the same address used by Warp and Bleep for their distribution rang alarm bells.
Fans immediately set about trying to decode the tape and decipher the muffled spoken word or identify the brief visible images which include a sign saying ‘I Love Jesus’, images of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and what appears to be a 3D rendeing of a hexagaon made up of smaller hexagaon, the same logo printed on the label of the VHS tapes. The audio seems to have been identified as coming from what may have been a radio advert for a magazine (Moody Monthly, that does exist) from the Moody Bible Institute AD, a religous organisation from Chicago, originating in 1886. Their website states; “Moody exists to proclaim the gospel and equip people to be biblically grounded, practically trained, and to engage the world through gospel-centered living. In short, we prepare people for their purpose and calling!”
The unconfirmed audio source also mentions hexagonal flexi discs several times but no trace of a flexi disc associated with the magazine has been located yet. What is odd is, as a collector of flexi discs (and odd formats in general) as well as religious records, I have NEVER seen a hexagonal flexi disc. I have a couple of hexagonal vinyl discs but not a flexi as you’d have to cut down a larger disc to achieve the shape and the largest flexi I have is a 10″. Is someone trolling us with this supposed interpretation of the muffled audio clip or have BoC inserted new audio into the ad to sow more seeds? Is a 7″ hexagonal flexi disc the next thing to look for? Possibly on Record Store Day this weekend? At the time of writing approx 30 VHS tapes had been identified, all seemingly the same in content but in both PAL and NTSC formats.
Friday night/Saturday morning saw pictures of four posters bearing distressed ‘children of the damned’ type images on them start appearing on streets in London, Barcelona and LA. Each poster had only the same hexagon symbol as the VHS tape in one corner, nothing else, seemingly confirming a connection at least. I spent part of Sunday afternoon in Soho, looking for posters with my partner and managed to snap these images, firstly sitting in plain sight on a hoarding on Oxford Street.
The posters below were some of the first to be found and posted online, nestling down St. Anne’s Court, a side alleyway off Wardour Street in Soho. To me, these could all plausibly be connected to a new release from Boards and I’m looking forward to what they do next…
Three very exciting events are happening next month in London as part of the Open City Documentary Festival. On April 16th the ICA will show a selection of light show-related films curated by Sophia Satchell-Baeza whose book, ‘Sensual Laboratories’ has been on Strange Attractor‘s release list seemingly forever and may at last see the light of day this year. The selection ‘focuses on British and North American work from the 1960s and 1970s, bringing together early films by Barbara Hammer, John Smith, Jud Yalkut, Jerry Abrams, Scott Bartlett, and Mark Boyle and Joan Hills’ and is followed by a Q&A with Jarvis Cocker and John Smith. Tickets here.
The following night is the offical festival party at Rich Mix where I’ll be playing alongside NTS’ Mark Leckey with light shows from Insight Lighting, Turbulent Light and Heavy Flow – I’ve also designed the flyer you see here and it’s a pay what you want fundraiser for Gaza Formula Fund – book tickets here.
On Sunday 19th there will be a workshop with Sophia and light artists Julian Hand and Heena Song on the history and making of light shows. So if you want to get your hands dirty with ink and slides then that’s the place to be. Tickets are only £5 – book here for limited places https://richmix.org.uk/events/making-liquid-light-shows/
Seeing as this is an online scrapbook, here are some bits and pieces that have been clogging up the desktop for some time. Yardbirds poster directed to me by Neil Rice who spotted the Holy See Lights credited.
Can’t remember where I saw the above and below but I love them. Above is actually a Rolling Stones 1972, music concert programme.
A Peter Max poster from 1967 and detail, maybe for a show at The Contemporaries gallery in New York?
Membership card for the Guildford Arts Lab, date unknown and two sides of an invite to appear in the audience for Jukebox Jury at the BBC.
and finally a very groovy ad for an Irish cassette, tape and 8-track shop, Pat Egan‘s.
The regular Omega Auctions in Manchester continue to expose all manner of amazing counter cultural artefacts and the up and coming ones are no exception. Their Music Memorabilia and Vinyl Showcase on Dec 2nd contains all the lots in this post and many more. Above is a lovely Hendrix poster on silver foil I’d never seen before, circa 1968 and designed by Photosida.
This poster for issue 5.5 of I.T. (International Times) by Michael English is super rare. Entitled ‘The Invisible Generation & The Invisible Generator’ and using text by William Burroughs, it was printed in an edition of 200 in silver ink before Xmas, 1966, then in a larger run in gold sometime later after Burroughs complained that he couldn’t read the silver. Most of them went to subscribers before they went on sale to the public, hence the scarcity.
An original flyer featuring a collage by Linder Sterling for a Buzzcocks gig in 1977.
Another one I’d never seen before, a poster for Futurama, billing itself as ‘The World’s First Science-Fiction Music Festival’ in Leeds, 1979. Look at that line up! There’s also a badge to go with it.
One of the most amazing lots (actually several different lots) is the original artwork, paste ups, proofs and other materials for the infamous Tudor Lodge album cover on Vertigo. This lavish, die-cut, fold out sleeved folk rock album goes for £500 in poor condition and up over £1000 for a decent copy, I wonder what the art will go for? The lots are originally from the collection of artist and designer Philip Duffy of PD Graphics.
This weekend (25/26th Oct) I’ll be at the Bound Art Book Fair at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester with a table selling my latest collage comic, the All Colour High Fidelity Radio Cartoon. This was started in lockdown in 2020 and worked on intermittently for five years until recently when I exhibited some pieces in Folkestone and decided I had enough to assemble a comic/zine/whatever at last.
That had always been the goal but there was no deadline so I just continued to work on pieces for years, slowly building each page to a point where they were ‘finished’. With the Bound Art Book Fair invitation for Saturday, I decided that would make a suitable deadline to compile a first version of these works.
Unless I’ve got a deadline I can tinker with things forever (hence no new DJ Food music in years) and this has been on the Infinite Illecktrik release list since 2020 (ii03 – to be accompanied by an album of the same name but that will come later now). Talking of which, I am also readying some new releases for the label which will take physical form soon…
But I digress, the comic – I’m calling it a comic because a large proportion of it is taken from comics and you can ‘read’ some pages, but really I have no idea what it is – is 32 pages, full colour and includes a free pair of 3D specs to view the centre spread. The first 50 come with a random sticker applied inside and I will have a random selection of badges free for buyers at the fair this weekend.
I’ll also have the new Mindfood zine (issue 5) and very limited original copies of #1,3 & 4 for sale as well as copies of the Float III mixtape and a handful of the Telepathic Fish LPs. Also there will be copies of my Wheels of Light book, the comic book version of my Search Engine album and whatever else I can find.
In addition to that I’ll be giving a talk at 1pm on the Mezzanine about the Telepathic Fish parties and the zines we made at some point on Saturday and in the evening I’ll be playing at YES alongside my good friend Moz. That’s quite an itinerary for Saturday. The comic will go on sale online next week via Bandcamp for those who can’t make the fair.
It’s with great excitement that I can announce the launch party for the Telepathic Fish album in association with Fundamental Frequencies! It’s on August 31st, at a unique venue in Brixton, the home of some of the original parties and keeping a similar vibe.
Mixmaster Morris will of course be gracing the decks, as will Doug Shipton, and myself and original Openmind DJ partner Mario Aguera will also be doing sets. Special guests will be KiF Productions who will DJing the soundtrack to the film of their ‘Chill Out’ homage, ‘STiLL OUT’.
Matt Black will be back on visuals, digging out some period animations for the event and we’ll be dragging a few choice pieces of original Telepathic Fish decor out of storage to give it the feel of the old parties. You’ll have a chance to pick up the album five days early too along with other assorted merch.
Tickets available here:https://ra.co/events/2218194
Omega Auctions have taken on the task of disposing of some of John Peel‘s incredible collection and I can’t think of anyone better. It’s odd seeing objects that I’ve actually held in my hands up for auction and fascinating to see some of the items that I’d not seen when I visited Peel Acres for the Dust & Grooves 2 book – I feel very lucky to have seen it before it was broken up. Here are just some of my favourties from the catalogue, the auction takes place on July 28th.
This has been a long time coming, I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a few years now and at last its time has come. I was approached by Doug Shipton of Finders Keepers / Fundamental Frequencies last year about doing a compilation based around the Telepathic Fish parties I co-founded in the early 90s with Chantal Passamonte (later Mira Calix), Mario Aguera and David Vallade. The four of us shared a house in East Dulwich between 1992-1995 when David and I were in our last year at Camberwell College of Art before leaving to make our way out into the world. What started as a house party grew into a series of ambient events called Telepathic Fish under the name Openmind, an alias I still use to this day for my design work.
Doug’s enthusiasm for the project got Mario, David and I back together (Chantal sadly passed away in 2022) to compile an album of tunes we’d all played and loved at the parties as well as digging in our respective archives for photos, artwork and memorabilia from the time. This was a pivotal era for all of us, a formative intersection before we split and went off in our various directions, and the people we met and partied with remain friends to this day. The double album – Telepathic Fish: Trawling the Early 90s Ambient Underground – includes music from the timeframe above by Caustic Window, Global Communication, Spacetime Continuum, No-Man, Tranquility Bass, Nightmares On Wax, Insides and remixes by The Irrestistible Force, The Orb and David Morley.
It comes in a gatefold sleeve with a 20 page booklet that tells the full Telepathic Fish story and features Mixmaster Morris, Coldcut’s Matt Black, Aphex Twin, Orbital, the Leaf Label’s Tony Morley, the Ambient Soho shop, Megatripolis, The Roundhouse and a disused gas tanker in Amsterdam. All lavishly illustrated with loads of unseen photos and art.
Also available exclusively through Fundamental Frequencies will be a limited bundle that includes a 44 page zine, Mindfood #5 (we also made an ambient fanzine back in the day) that features material from the first 4 issues plus additional unseen ephemera plus a 60 minute mystery mixtape – ‘Float III’ – and an enamel badge of the Telepathic Fish logo too if that kind of thing floats your boat. Pre-order is up now for a release date of September 5th and we’re looking at the prospect of re-enacting the old Fish parties with some of the original participants and decor around that time for a launch party.
It seems things are coming full circle at the moment, what with me supporting The Orb the other weekend. Ambient music is where I first cut my teeth in London as a DJ and these parties were greatly influenced by Mixmaster Morris aka The Irrestistible Force. They were the springboard between college and a career in music and design, where I met Coldcut and in turn ended up jumping on board the Ninja Tune ship for the next three decades. Coinciding with the launch announcement today, Mixmaster Morris, Doug Shipton and I are playing tonight at the Tate Modern Corner bar in London, giving you a flavour of what to expect from the compilation.
More images saved from various trawls around the web, above: Images for Learning (Science Research Associates Inc.) 1971, found on eBay.
From Andrew Sclanders’ Beat Books list: A large postcard with designs by Gompers Saijo publicising the benefit held for the Zen Mountain Center at the Fillmore, San Francisco, March 15, 1967.
22.5×14.7cm.
Apple Boutique ‘Upon Our Way’ poster by The Fool, 39.5cm x 57cm, 1967/68.
Upscaled repro Pink Floyd poster, 1967.
International Times graphic, 1968. Thanks to Neil Rice for pointing this out. From Hoppyx.com
It’s seemingly been a month of losses so far and sadly news of another reached me this week, less than two weeks after I’d posted about him for the first time. Doug Lear, formerly one of the UK’s leading exponents of the Magic Lantern (both in performance and collection) passed away on March 6th. Bizarrely, on that very day, I met with friends Neil and Sally Rice who had known him for decades and Neil passed me a red photo album given to him by Doug some years before. Inside this treasure trove is a collection of press cuttings, flyers and other ephemera from his days of giving Magic Lantern performances alongside his then wife, Anita, on their two canal boats.
With Neil’s permission I’m posting some of the contents as a record of their activites in the 80s and 90s, hopefully people will find them along the way and they’ll be useful for research. Also included were four copies of The New Magic Lantern Journal by The Magic Lantern Society from the late seventies / early eighties. This was a reactivated version of an original publication that ran around the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s – several issues of which can be perused on the Internet Archive. I hope you enjoy these pieces of history as much as I do, RIP Doug.
With a growing family, the couple opened a museum, tea room and theatre in Wales in 1991, leaving the boats behind. For more information, see my previous post on the Lears. 
I visited Mick Jones‘ RRPL exhibition at the Farsight Gallery on Friday courtesy of Stephen Coates (seen above at the magazine kiosk inside the venue). For anyone who doesn’t know, Mick is a collector, an understatement when you realise that the amount of ephemera, memorabilia and esoteria on display is possibly only 5% of his archive. Although I can’t claim to be a huge Clash or B.A.D. fan there’s no denying that the collection on display is impressive and wide-ranging. From toys, games, comics, magazines, records, tapes, clothes to art, posters, projection equipment, videos, music gear and pop culture artifacts, it seems there is very little that Mick doesn’t collect.
Primarily of interest to me were his pieces of hip hop ephemera including several by Futura from the early 80s when he and Mick wrote ‘The Escapes of Futura 2000’ with The Clash as backing band. Inside one of the glass cabinets I noticed Futura’s handwritten lyrics to the song, beautifully enscribed in his recognisable style. In another was a customised boombox with drawings by Dondi and Zephyr, a Rammellzee flyer and Beastie Boys tour pass – what a time to be in New York!
Of course there is loads of Clash-related memorabilia too, from equipment to tapes, toys to merchandise, press coverage to what appears to be a Futura-sprayed canvas.
Fanzines were a huge part of the punk movement and there are plenty here although most have been photocopied and pasted up as wallpaper at various points to aid ease of display.
There are also a number of huge colour-themed collages of all manner of ephemera, an ingenious way to display many of the items that were found without an obvious home.
And it goes on and on… there’s even the first in a projected series of magazines devoted to highlights from the collection on sale inside. I highly recommend you try and visit if you’re in the centre of London with an hour or two to spare. It’s free, open daily from midday – 7pm and the gallery is at the end of Denmark St. tucked round the corner by St. Giles church, nearest tube, Tottenham Court Road. Be quick though as it’s only on until March 16th – more info here www.rocknrollpl.com and on Instagram @rocknrollpl
Selections from the Jasper 52 auction of psychedelic posters which closes on March 9th. Above: rare Family Dog poster by Rick Griffin.
Above: Mouse & Kelley Family Dog poster, 1968, below: Randy Tuten Family Dog poster, 1968
Above: Victor Moscoso Jungle Juice comic, below: Eye Ball poster and Ripped Van Winkle poster, 1988
Above: Bob Fried Memorial Boogie by various artists, below: Wes Wilson, The New Mobilization March anti-war march in San Francisco, 1969.
Above: East Totem West head shop poster, below: Neon Park Family Dog poster, 1968.
A rare set of four “Crunchie Bomb” posters commissioned in 1969 by Frys Chocolate, measuring 20×15 inches. Two designed by graphic artist and Professor of Illustration at the RCA, Dan Fern, two by renowned designer Chris McEwan. They were available in exchange for 3 Crunchie wrappers – see the last photo of the original advert.
Seems like Crunchie were really trying to tap into the youth market in the late sixties, check out this reworking of the Beach Boys‘ ‘Good Vibrations’ TV ad, complete with zany visual effects.