Poland, 1970. In the District Cultural Centre in Pulawy, a troupe of state sponsored pantomine artists improvise a ballet while someone goes mad on a drum kit. Luckily, a film camera is there to record it.
This stuff is like catnip to me. And there are two more parts to the film!
Yard Sale For World Peace is one of my go to contemporary music labels. Operating out of Olympia, Washington, they specialise in spontaneous music, mostly recorded live or at home on a range of inexpensive equipment. DIY is the guiding principle, and this extends to their design aesthetic, which is basic but always invigorating and attractive.
One of my favourite releases on the label is by Connective Tissue. It has one track, repeated both sides: a 21 minute synth and drums jam that stretches and grows and soars before ending in what might be a shower of cosmic sparks. Like most YSFWP releases, it is organic and real: the track breathes, and you can feel the space it was recorded in. It's unadorned and imperfect, which makes it brilliant.
The prodigious Jeff Keen cuts, rips, scratches, scribbles, burns, melts, mutilates and defaces his way to fervid, febrile creation - snapshots taken from his 1967 film Cineblatz.
Bernat Klein was a Serbian textile designer and painter who lived and worked in Scotland from the early 1950s, where he established his own studio and a number of businesses that specialised in weaving and knitting for carpets, tapestries and haute couture clothing, including for Dior, Chanel, Pierre Cardin - and Marks and Spencer.
Earlier in the year, I purchased a job lot of Everyday Electronics magazines, a run that goes from the first issue in November 1971 up to August 1980. I'm not particularly interested in electronics, to be honest, but I was drawn in by the fantastic mix of the visionary and the banal offered by the featured projects. In this new series, I will simply be sharing some of the most interesting. Circuit diagrams and full instructions may be requested, but will not necessarily be provided.
Kicking off with this ^^^ all time classic...
Simple but effective design. What more do you need to know from a book cover?
I don't know if you realise this, but, if you wear glasses, it's because you're lazy. With a little effort and a soupcon of science, you can (probably) train your eyes back into perfect shape and throw away those nerdy specs forever.
Here, Australian therapist Bethany Allridge shows us some of the basic movements, her face set in an unnervingly rigid and somewhat sinister expression. We'll come back to this over and over and again and again, until that face stops haunting my dreams.
Thomas Ruff is a German photographer who specialises in dislocated images. His Emperor series from 1982 (#6 pictured here) calls to mind Scottish artist Bruce McLean's similarly chiropractic Posework For Plinths, but, in not showing the face, Ruff's perfectly colour co-ordinated photos take on a far more sinister edge, resembling a gruesome crime scene.
More meaningful / meaningless graphics from the Universe People.
