I have been aware of this for a long time, but it is such a nice piece of design I felt I really should share!
Check this out for beautiful typography.
If you want to know more about the Danish Film Institute, click here.
Also this is a pic of their magazine which is available on the website for free as a PDF. I love this shit!!!!
GF Smith Colorplan promotion and Direct Mail campaign.
I don’t normally put my own work up but I am particularly proud of this, so have a look.
PEACE
A friend made me aware of these guys a while ago. They are straight out of Berlin and are called TOFA. They use a unique blend of photography and graffiti to create stunning imagery and installations. The images above are some bits i have picked out. For more, check out their blog: TOFA
This has been kicking around for some time, but it is something I love and absolutely wish I had created! It is a great
use of typography and it shows how typographic design really can be functional and great to look at. It was designer
by Axel Peemöller and this is what he has to say about it.
‘In Melbourne I developed a way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark while working for Emery Studio.
The distored letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position’.
I went to see ‘ Awild Combination’ on Friday at the Assam Arts Space in Whitechapel.
It was truely brilliant! well worth a watch. I have attached a few pics, some interesting info, a trailer and a track for you to enjoy. YOU HAVE TO TRY AND GET HOLD OF A COPY.
The toilet… nice huh
The DJ, who was ACE! Sit down sessions.
DOWNLOAD THIS:
ARTHUR RUSSELL – GET AROUND TO IT
WILD COMBIANTION begins in the bucolic landscape of Oskaloosa, Iowa. Chuck and Emily Russell remember their precocious son Arthur’s early inspirations. As a teenager in the 1960s, Arthur was obsessed with Timothy Leary, John Cage, and Beat poetry. Clashing with his parents’ Midwestern conventionalism and inspired by these figures’ counter-cultural imaginations, Arthur ran away from home. He joined a Buddhist commune in San Francisco, and he met his lifelong mentor and collaborator, Allen Ginsberg. Allen described Arthur as “delicate, exquisite-minded, youthful, and at the same time oddly reticent.” The two collaborated on a number of recordings. But when the commune tried to take away Arthur’s cello, forcing him to secretly play in a closet, he followed his greater musical ambition, and he joined Ginsberg in New York.
Arthur began working with Philip Glass and other composers in the avant-garde music world, specifically at The Kitchen, where he became musical director in 1974. He composed melodic orchestral music and absorbed the vanguard ideas of the new music scene. Simultaneously Arthur discovered the liberating social and aesthetic possibilities of underground discos. Under the guise of various monikers—Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, Indian Ocean—Arthur produced playful and eccentric disco records that became hits of the pre-Studio 54 era.
The rules and codes of established genre didn’t apply to Arthur. The serialized patterns of minimalist symphonies resonated with the repetitive rhythms in dance music. Likewise, the utopian social settings of the early discos were like the Buddhist commune Arthur had once known. With childlike innocence and fun, Arthur ambitiously explored all of these possibilities.
He fell in love with his boyfriend Tom Lee, and the two moved in together in the East Village, next door to Allen in a building populated by poets, musicians, and artists.
But despite Arthur’s musical talent and ambition, he was often tempered by self-defeating career choices and alienating perfectionism. It seemed that Arthur was creating a kind of utopia, where the absorbing process of making music was his life. Finishing his work was a secondary concern. Collaborators moved on to new projects, career opportunities passed, and Arthur began working alone in his apartment. What resulted was perhaps his most fully realized body of work, “World of Echo.” These transcendent solo cello-and-voice songs were like intimate diaries that fit somewhere between lullabies and art songs.
It seemed that popular success was within Arthur’s reach: He believed these diverse musical projects would reach a wider audience. But the devastation of AIDS cut Arthur’s career short. When Arthur died, he was puzzlingly lost in obscurity. His 1992 obituary in the Village Voice read, “Arthur’s songs were so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music.”
But now fifteen years after Arthur’s death, his music is being rediscovered. In the past five years, Arthur has developed a significant, international following. A new generation has discovered Arthur.
With a visually experimental form, WILD COMBINATION brings to life Arthur’s descriptively rich and emotionally direct music. The film explores the compelling cultural history of New York in the 1970s and ‘80s, the experience of being gay and confronting AIDS, and the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those goals were mutually attainable. Intimate interviews with Arthur’s family and collaborators, rare archival materials, and an engrossing visual language bring his music to life and give long overdue attention to this ground-breaking artist.
Directors Statement
Before I even heard Arthur’s music, I was intrigued. My friend described a long forgotten gay disco auteur in a farmer’s plaid shirt, obsessively listening to mixes of his own music on the Staten Island Ferry. That image alone was enough, but when I heard the emotional intensity and the complex beauty in Arthur’s music, I was obsessed.
Coming from an experimental filmmaking background, my first instinct was to expressionistically render Arthur’s music —on the Staten Island Ferry, by the West Side Piers, or in cornfields.
I found an address for Arthur’s former partner Tom Lee online and I wrote him, requesting permission to possibly use Arthur’s music in an experimental film.
Months later, Tom called and I went to meet him in the same East Village apartment that he shared with Arthur, where Allen Ginsberg once lived next door. I was so inspired by Tom—his openness, generosity, and the connection he still feels to Arthur—that it occurred to me that this film could be much larger than I initially imagined.
As I spoke to Ernie Brooks, Steven Hall, Arthur’s parents and many others, I recognized the need for a biographical film, which would explore the legendary cultural history Arthur was a part of as well as the emotional and personal stories imbued in so many of his songs.
Rather than producing an encyclopedic or definitive film that reconstructs Arthur’s entire musical trajectory, I chose to make a portrait. I retraced Arthur’s footsteps on the Staten Island Ferry and I ran through cornfields with a VHS camera. I interviewed Tom Lee in the small apartment where Arthur once obsessively worked and I met Chuck and Emily Russell in Arthur’s idyllic childhood home. These experiences helped me imagine Arthur’s point of view and enabled me to form a deeper interpretation of his music.
In the process of making the movie, I learned things from Arthur about being an artist and pursuing it at all costs. Arthur struggled: he created obstacles for himself and he frustrated his collaborators and loved ones. But I think, unlike many other people, Arthur was able to connect to a primal place of childlike innocence and fun. I love going there with him.
Biography
Born in 1952 in Oskaloosa, IA; died on April 4, 1992, in New York, NY, of AIDS-related causes. Education: Attended Ali Akbar Khan School of Music, San Francisco; attended Manhattan School of Music, New York City. Addresses: Record company–Soul Jazz Records, 7 Broadwick St., London, UK, W1F 0DA, phone: +144 (020) 7734 3341, fax: +144 (020) 7494 1035, website: http://www.souljazzrecords.co.uk, e-mail: info@soundsoftheuniverse.com.
Arthur Russell was one of New York’s most prominent figures on the 1970s avant-garde, disco, and new wave scenes, but at the time of his death in 1992 his music was all but forgotten. Although Russell never took center stage in any of these genres, his work nevertheless provided the springboard that vaulted numerous musicians of the time to successful careers, and his own works enjoyed renewed popularity in the early 2000s with the posthumous release of several of his works.
Russell was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1952. Throughout high school, along with interests in astronomy and aquariums, he honed his training on the cello, an instrument that his mother also played. At age 18 he moved to San Francisco to further his studies in Eastern music at a school organized by famed India musician Ali Akbar Khan. During his time in San Francisco Russell joined a Buddhist commune, where he practiced cello endlessly. He enjoyed the shared atmosphere of his living situation until it was decided that the residents would pool their resources, and he chose to leave the commune because he could not part with his cello. In San Francisco he made countless musical acquaintances, befriending musician Alice Coltrane and legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. In performance, Russell often accompanied Ginsberg on cello while the poet recited his work.
In 1973 Russell moved to New York City—a city where he would remain until his death—to continue his studies at the Manhattan School of Music. There, the downtown music scene was overflowing with creative artists working in many musical genres, and Russell felt very much at home. He began playing at clubs such as the Manhattan Ocean Club and the Kitchen, and started collaborating with many of the city’s musicians, most notably with minimalist composer Philip Glass.
Soon Russell formed an avant-rock group called the Flying Hearts with friends Ernie Brooks, Larry Saltzman, and David Van Tiegham. The band’s recording sessions, most of which took place in the late 1970s under the direction of John Hammond, included guest work by the Talking Heads’ David Byrne and Jerry Harrison. Russell would later continue his involvement with the Talking Heads, providing horn arrangements on some of their records and nearly joining the band as an official member.
The late 1970s in New York City was an explosive time for music, as numerous scenes—hip-hop, disco, punk, new wave—all mingled with one another. Russell couldn’t have been more pleased to witness such a merger. He turned much of his attention to disco, a style of music rarely recognized for its thoughtful musicianship and usually written off as a hedonistic soundtrack to drug-fueled mayhem. Russell’s compositions and his collaborations with the city’s top DJs of the time—Francois Kevorkian, Larry Levan, David Mancuso—transformed his disco sound into an organic instrumental style that relied heavily on jazz and Eastern influences.
Russell’s first major release, “Kiss Me Again,” was recorded under the name Dinosaur L in 1979. The track was co-produced by Nicky Siano, a local scenester who owned a performance space known as the Gallery. In the liner notes to Russell’s posthumously released collection World of Arthur Russell, Russell’s friend Steve D’Acquisto recalled an early version of the song: “Arthur [gave] me tapes, pieces of ‘Kiss Me Again.’ I went to [disco club] Studio 54 and it was like 10:30 in the evening, there were just a few people in the place. I said to the DJ, a friend, ‘Would you play this, I think it’s just fabulous’ and they played this 12-minute tape of ‘Kiss Me Again’ and the place flipped and danced for the entire bit.”
“Kiss Me Again” was Sire Records’ first disco single and was quickly followed up by Russell’s “Is It All Over My Face,” recorded as Loose Joints with D’Acquisto, whom he had met in 1977 at Siano’s space. The song went on to be a club hit on the New York party scene, especially at Mancuso’s Loft, a place known for fostering disco and house music in its infancy. In the liner notes to The Loft, Mancuso’s mix CD released in 1999, D’Acquisto recounted the song’s synthesis: “I had this idea about love dancing,” he commented about the track’s verse. “It was about being on the dancefloor and digging another dancer. Did it show on my face? Did you catch me cruising you?…. ‘Is It All Over My Face’ would never have happened without the Loft.”
In 1982 Russell and his friend Will Socolov founded their own record label, Sleeping Bag Records, and their first release was Dinosaur L’s 24-24 Music, which included Russell’s next club hit, “Go Bang.” The following year Russell tempered the dance floor feel of 24-24 Music with Tower of Meaning, a return to his avant-garde roots. For this record Russell found himself in his studio for inordinate amounts of time, and he began to use the studio itself as a musical instrument rather than as a simple recording tool. This method enhanced his leftfield cello compositions, and his dance tracks such as “Wax the Van” and “Let’s Go Swimming” also benefited from his new technological experiments. For every track that was actually released, he had numerous versions or mixes of the same song that never saw the light of day.
Russell continued to perform with members of Flying Hearts throughout the 1980s, although he generally opted to sing alone, accompanied only by his cello. Although this style of performance lent itself to avant-garde compositions, much of the music that he recorded during this era was of the experimental pop brand. In 1986 he released his first record of these new pop songs under the title World of Echo, and toured the record at such venues as Boston’s ICA and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. Its pop sensibility was felt so strongly that Britain’s arbiter of pop music, Melody Maker, named it as one of their “Top Thirty Releases of 1986.”
The rest of the 1980s and early 1990s saw Russell collaborating with a host of artists, and he began composing for dance and theater with choreographers Diane Madden and Stephanie Woodward. He also continued to record diligently, and although he did not release any more records prior to his death in 1992 of AIDS-related causes, some of the music that he made during this period later surfaced as the album Calling Out Of Context.
Russell left behind a wealth of recorded material, much of which was culled for a series of posthumous releases, the first being Another Thought in 1995 on Philip Glass’s Point Music label. Glass commented that Russell “was a guy who could sit down with a cello and sing with it in a way that no one on this Earth has ever done before, or will do so again.”
In 2004 Russell finally received the recognition he deserved with the release of the compilation The World of Arthur Russell, and with an album of heretofore unreleased music titled Calling Out Of Context. The records, both taken from Russell’s massive tape stockpile, received wide critical acclaim and garnered Russell a new following with a new generation of avant-rock and dance fans.
The now long-defunct Tunetourist blog interrupts transmissions from Not-Ready today to re-present a post that first featured on Tunetourist over a year ago. Here, we take it back to Acid House’s earliest incarnations for inspiration.
Seldom has the sound of 1988 – 90 as we recall it been captured adequately on a compilation album; even Soul Jazz’s “Acid” comp beat a well-worn and geographically focussed path through jackin’ Chicago house. So, we hereby launch our manifesto for the first truly as yet un-compiled history of a certain strain of the movement we’re happy to call Acid House.
Let’s kick off with the daddy of them all, Manuel Gottsching‘s majestic “E2 – E4″; 23 minutes of otherworldly inspiration that hit this member of Krautrock act Ash Ra Temple like a thunderbolt, sometime in 1981. Yes, 1981. If you don’t recognise this minimal exercise in modal groove in its original form, you may recall it from the endlessly re-issued ‘Balearic’ dance classic “Sueno Latino” which first landed in 1989 and which rips off Gottsching’s vision wholesale. Here, you can listen to 25 years of electronic music being mapped out in gently undulating grooves with an insistence and restraint that dance music has only had the courage to return to in recent years.
Some Derrick May track or other, usually the sublime “Strings Of Life” or bleeps ‘n’ bass-defining “Nude Photo” ought really to crop up at this point but instead we’ve opted for lesser-known Detroit-producer Neal Howard and a track called “Indulge”. It was licensed to Network Records – a key UK distributor of the Detroit sound in the UK throughout the late 80s and early 90s. Usually the internet yields something on most artists, however minor. Here though, we have little supporting information for you. Nonetheless, this feels more like an unofficial follow-up to “Strings Of Life” than anything Derrick May released and points the way to the lusher techno soundscapes of second-wave Detroit producers like Carl Craig. Originally recorded in 1988 it still sounds wonderfully fresh.
Sadly, Ron Trent is now probably better-known for meandering cod-spiritual house music of the kind proffered by Joe Clausell et al but once upon a time he was capable of delivering this aircraft hanger-proportioned epic techno belter. Later, he’d go on to more or less single-handedly define ‘deep house’ through the early nineties output of his Prescription label and seminal releases with Chez Damier, like “The Foot Therapy EP”.
The Art of Stalking – Suburban Knight
Another in our admittedly Detroit-centric take on the Acid House story which hails from the Motor City. This 1990 release from James Pennington is our only track from a foot solider of the legendary Underground Resistance. Included here because it neatly prefigures the ‘dark side’ sounds that would invade the euphoria rush of rave in ’91.
What You Need – Soft House Company
The Italo influence that soundtracked the sweaty joy of Nude nights at the Hacienda throughout ’89 and ’90 is summarised as well by “What You Need” as any other track. Don’t ask us to tell you any more about it… Same goes for this ’88 classic from Sha-Lor which was reissued by Mike Pickering’s Deconstruction label in ’89 and is one of the Hac’s most enduring vocal house moments; one of the few that’s still an absolute pleasure to hear. Beautifully dubby and restrained, it’s hard imagining such an elegant record rubbing shoulders with Black Box on Manchester’s most hallowed dancefloor.
Aftermath – LFO Remix – Nightmares On Wax
Itals Anthem (Trebledown/Bassup Mix) – Ital Rockers
The Northern bleep moment is rightly remembered for LFO‘s eponymous earth-quaking debut and Nightmares On Wax‘s double-headed assault, “Aftermath/I’m For Real”. On our alternative guide we leave both of those to other comps and opt instead for LFO’s sublime remix of Nightmares On Wax. See what we did there. “Ital’s Anthem” was one of the heaviest tracks to force its way inside our young ears back in 1990. Released by the Leeds label that ran parallel to Sheffield’s Warp for a while, it is techno as understood by kids more accustomed to reggae ‘blues parties’ than ‘Balearic’ beats. Can you see rave coming yet? Finally, 80s industrialists Renegade Soundwave were uncommonly inspired on their 1990 release “Renegade Soundwave In Dub” which yielded “Thunder”, another proto-rave anthem that, oddly enough, used to get mixed into Jimmy Somerville at the Hacienda.
Finally, one that clearly points us off in the direction of jungle, when the East London kids got involved. Here’s where things began to fracture and, arguably, Acid House span off in different dirctions. The London ‘summer of ’88′ lot were already sneering about sweaty ‘Acid Teds’ but the break with 4/4 beats and increasing importance of breakbeats really seems like a good place to leave it.
Our alternative Acid House compilation, then. Better than “Old School Euphoria” innit?
Amazing video short by Stink Digital: “Carousel” It’s a frozen moment of cops vs. clowns in a hospital shootout. Check it out!!!!
If you’re around, you need to go to this. TRUST ME. All about Martyn.
P.E.A.C.E.
So i was hanging out with my mate Danny at lunch today, just thought i would share…
P.E.A.C.E.
ME AND DANNY
HELLO PEOPLE!!!!
Welcome to NOT READY 2.0 and thank you for joining me. I have decided to move over to my URL to keep everything in one place and allow me to display more of my own work too!!!! This is exciting for me as I will be to be more focussed with my posts and do more excting things with them too.
Following this I will be posting a handful of my favourite posts from the old site just a as a little reminder of what has past.
I hope you all enjoy!
P.E.A.C.E.
