This weekend I visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park for the final week of the KAWS and Eduardo Paolozzi exhibitions (not shown but awesome). Highly recommended but only one week left! I’ll let the pictures do the talking, they’re mainly KAWS but there are some other incidentals from the park added in too.
Things have been a bit quiet on here recently due to various changes happening in my life right now, 2016 is turning out to be quite a rollercoaster. I’ve been a little more active over on Instagram though, with almost daily postings of personal miscellania, record finds and the Kosmischer Debris series, but even that’s taken a hit this month.
Above – top row, some experiments that date back a fair few years now with manipulated audio waves put through a spectral visualiser. Middle row – left: collage detail, middle: ‘Circult Skull 1′ test, right: ‘weird jazz thing’ that was the unexpected result of an old Freehand file where I held down the wrong key. Bottom row – experiments with a flexible material and light reflections – more to come with that…
The front and back covers of two amazing religious spoken word records – love the double entendre.
Below: Four Music De Wolfe 10″ library records, the ‘Electroshake’ is particularly good, there’s a vol.2 as well…
45 finds – the Public Enemy includes the instrumental on the flip
A fun little flexi disc from Fermaley Flame – nice electronics at the beginning and end
Lastly – a beautiful Robert Crumb sleeve from 1974
Sculpture, Splice festival
“Untitled” by Sculpture from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.
More ideas in 8 minutes than some people have in an entire career…
Sculpture will be appearing at the first of 3 nights under the banner of Splice in London next weekend 3rd-5th of June along with many audio-visual acts like The Light Surgeons, DJ Cheeba, Addictive TV, Pete Elastic Eye, Cassetteboy, D-Fuse, Blinkinlab, Matt Black, Plaid, Joe Catchpole, Mixmaster Morris, Matt Sharp, Mark Pilkington and many more.
Splice Festival 2016 from Splice Festival on Vimeo.
I’ve always been fascinated by this cover art, the artist is simply listed as ‘Corrigan’. On the back of the Castor LP it has a passage about the cover, possibly written by Corrigan (?):
“The illustration depicts Jimmy Castor in a double role: as a Gemini and Cancer personality. Gemini’s aspects are described as egocentric, intellectual and airy. Castor’s egocentric aspect is affirmed by his unconcealed face; his intellect is symbolized by the tube running from a fitting on his temple to a fitting in the musical tree. His mind drives his music. A second tube runs on to a small cluster of clouds hovering near Castor’s head, symbolizing his airy and mutable nature. Castor’s Cancer aspects are symbolized on the right by the slum tenement which rises out of wasteland. Castor is directly above a large opening in a wall containing his heart; this serves to stress Cancer’s intuitive qualities. Castor’s face is partially concealed to correspond to the introverted nature of Cancer personalities. The tube which runs from his heart is attached to an armored egg; spilling out of the egg are three elements associated with Cancer: the moon, water and food. The prehistoric, “Troglodyte”-like figures are the end products of the intellectual, emotional and astrological input of Castor from above.”
After a bit of help from fellow facebook-ers, it seems the man responsible was Dennis Corrigan, a surrealist American illustrator who only has one other record sleeve listed on Discogs (The New York Rock & Rock Ensemble, front and back covers below).
Still with us and now teaching at Marywood University in Pennsylvania, he has work in various art institute collections and illustrated for the likes of The New York Times, Random House, Pan American Airways and more. He’s had several books of his work published, ‘The Amusement Park’ from 1982 and ‘True Love Knows No Boundaries’ from just last year. You can find more about his weird world at his website, Dennis Corrigan Artist.
Wishing I had the funds to get one of these bots, a 24″ TK Hunter by Ashley Wood, several years in production now but at $600’s it’s way out of reach. On sale on May 30th from 3A’s Bambaland store.
Out today, another banger from Soundsci – this time concentrating on Oxygen. ‘1-4-9′ is under two minutes and comes with an instrumental to match on the same side, surely a first for a 45? This is the second in a trilogy of 45s from the crew before they drop their LP, ‘Walk The Earth’ and features a great cover from Paul ‘Sub2’ Trewin who also did all the character designs for the 45 Live roster earlier this year. Buy it here before it goes
Ted Coconis – love this cover art, he didn’t do many record covers but the ones he did are beautiful.
Earlier this year I was asked by the organisation ‘Give Crohn’s A Slap From Me’ if I would provide them with a mix as their remit is to help raise awareness of the disease through art, music and design. For their hospital radio slot they’ve already had the likes of DJ Vadim provide one and I wanted to do something a little different that would, potentially, bring more people to the site than your standard mix selection.
I always wanted to do a follow up to the ‘Selected Aphex Works 1’ mix I did early in 2015 for Solid Steel, an 86 minute collection of my pick of the bunch of tracks uploaded to Richard D. James‘ User48736353001 Soundcloud account during the early months of that year. The plan is to hopefully get some of the near 100,000 people who listened to the first mix to come to the Crohn’s site for more so, beginning from the place where the first left off, here’s a second volume, culled from tunes uploaded after the first mix was finished.
Up until mid February 2015 there were around 160 tunes to choose from but, as I was completing the first mix, there were still more tracks being uploaded. At various times after the transmission date on Solid Steel of Feb 24th around 90 more were uploaded with the final total being an estimated 275 tracks before they were deleted. There were more than enough to make another mix and there could easily be a third from all the songs that wouldn’t fit or didn’t make the grade the first time round. There are albums worth of material as good as any official Aphex release in the Soundcloud uploads, which I view as one of the most important ‘releases’ of 2015.
On the subject of Aphex, I recently found this poster below, designed in my third year at Camberwell College of Art in 1993. I’d recently discovered his music via Colin Dale‘s Outer Limits show on KISS FM and took inspiration from his music to make my own designs for releases – this one being ‘Xylem Tube’ on R&S. The original design was supposed to be portrait but I prefer it landscape now with the benefit of hindsight.
Just saw this via the Imaginary Cities Twitter feed – an animated gif version of Nelson Daniel‘s cover for Judge Dredd #30 from US publishers, IDW. Below is some of the work in progress from his Deviant Art page.
Another nine examples of the Kosmischer Debris floating around my computer: off cuts, try-outs, archive work, experiments and the like. Top left and right are distorted barcodes, middle top and bottom is a typeface called ‘Attention!’ that I created from a Soviet postmark I found. Middle left and right are two unused pieces from a recent project and the middle is a photo collage I did of a building in Osaka, Japan back in the late 90s. More, daily, on my Instagram.
I did some pack shots of the new Belbury Poly LP for Jim Jupp at Ghost Box. The multi-coloured cover art and Rainbow-esque inner sleeve does the music justice; a seemingly random collection of tunes emanating from approximately 1974. Autobahn-era Kraftwerk meets Glitter Band glam stomp meets folk-tinged vocals and sunshine Sesame Street ‘ba-ba-bum’ singalong harmonies. New Ways Out is a perfect title for this release in many ways, it’s his most curious and varied work to date and – much the same as The Soundcarriers and Hintermass releases – pushes out of the usual territory you’d expect from the label. Be prepared to be taken in new directions on 10 track vinyl and 11 track CD, up for pre-order on the Ghost Box shop now.
Also coming soon is Other Voices 08 featuring two tracks from Beautify Junkyards on June 10th…
Amazing! From Mark Bodé‘s Facebook page:
“Never before published Vaughn Bode story. Vaughn presented this to his college professor at Syracuse University as a gift. Its so great to see new stuff after 41 years like finding a new unrecorded song by Jimi Hendrix out of the blue. This has risen up for auction at Heritage Auctions May 13th and 14th by the family it was gifted to. Thanks to John P Rovnak for bringing it to my attention. I was able to save large files for future printing of the art. Enjoy!!!”
The Brix System is a series of handcrafted wooden electronic devices inspired by LEGO by Swedish designer Love Hulten. Each of these (and more) work as objects ranging from computer games, phones or music-making devices. Visually taken from the classic Space Lego series of the early 80s and scaled up but still able to be assembled like real pieces, they have sockets at the reverse and can be plugged together to work in tandem too.
Very pleased to see Sadiq Khan win the post of Mayor of London over the weekend but also this campaign leaflet from the Greens raised a smile. With a tagline of ‘Make Your Vote Go Further’, the leaflet can be folded into a paper plane, complete with a note that they’re not so keen on extra runways and please recycle this leaflet. Kudos to the designer who came up with this idea, nicely done.
I don’t really post cat pics on the internet but I’ll make an exception when it’s The Bean‘s moggy. From the always excellent WFMU mailout today.
Juice Aleem has signed to Gamma Proforma, a move so fitting it’s a wonder he wasn’t affiliated with the label before (he did use to be in a group called Gamma after all). The first single is called ‘Warriors’ and you can download it free and pre-order his forthcoming album, ‘Voodu Starchild’, too over here.
“Three legendary synth musicians compete in a cosmic battle for synth dominance, in this recently-unearthed concert from 1986.” From Adult Swim, I defy you to show me anything as funny as this today
I just watched all 6 episodes of this in a day, utterly brilliant, Olivia Coleman and Julian Barratt are perfect as is the casting, score, script, pacing and whole tone of this dark tale of a dysfunctional family and the events that unfold and effect them. Someone said it’s like the spirit of Roald Dahl meeting Butterflies (70s Brit sitcom) and they’re not far off. If you can watch 4OD media where you are then definitely try and catch this over the next month while it’s still available to view.
OK – massive nostalgia-fest post – who remembers these? You’d have to be well into your 40s and even though my brother and I had a couple of these figures, I had forgotten about them totally. But as soon as I saw a photo of one everything came rushing back, the weapons and attachments, the comic story on the box and the extra outfits to change Muton into different guises.
Made by toy company Deny’s Fisher in the mid 70s and apparently riffing off a Japanese toy design-wise, these were pre-Star Wars and 2000AD and the closest thing to a space toy I can remember outside of miniature scale models of Space 1999, Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet vehicles. I had Cyborg with his water-squirting laser cannon and missile firing arm attachments. He was like a bigger version of the Time Traveller from Micronauts, all see-through body, robotic parts and ambiguous features. In reality it looked like someone had taken the standard Action Man body mold and cast it in transparent plastic, forgotten to give him any clothes and added robotic parts.
One of the ways the company got you to buy more products was to sell extra sets of attachments, namely feet or arm pieces, so that you could customise him for different play scenarios (remember them?). His enemy, Muton (my brother’s figure), had a similar set and their back story was rendered on the back of their respective boxes to give you a jumping off point to start play from.
My friend Jason Atomic put a photo of his Muton accessories on his Instagram recently and it triggered some long-buried memory in me that sent me off on a Google search to find how I knew these toys. I’ve cribbed several images from the excellent Plaid Stallions site which has more info about these figures so go and take a look if you want more. It seems there was a third figure which I never knew about, another villain named Android who could be transformed with similar extra sets of limbs and, right at the bottom, there’s what appears to be some sort of Argos-type catalogue featuring the toys plus the Six Million Dollar Man which puts it all into some sort of historical context.
