DEATH DRIVE

 

1970 flyer for what turned out to be a very Ballard-ian exercise in the breakdown of societal behaviour. Drunkenness, licentiousness and public urination all featured.

OBLIGATORY HALLOWEEN POST

A selection of German covers for Dracula related records. Happy Halloween / All Hallows / All Saints Eve / Samhain, everybody!

SYNCHRONIZER SEQUENCE

 

Weird scenes in the Bio-Feedback Chamber. From John Boorman's disastrous, stupendous Exorcist II: The Heretic.

EVERYDAY ELECTRONICS

002: Electronome

POLE POSITIONS

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!

WORLD PEACE, ONE TAPE AT A TIME

 

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.

You can listen to it here, and there are still some cassettes (7 at the time of writing) available. Postage from the USA is hugely expensive, but, if you message the label about a bulk order, they'll see what they can do because they're not only visionaries, they're also really nice people.

BLATZ ENTERTAINMENT

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.

EINE KLEIN

 

A selection of Bernat Klein's impasto abstracts.

NOT TO BE CONTINUED

 

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.

Klein died in 2014 aged 91, and this photograph (by Gordon Burniston) shows his last, unfinished painting on the easel, forever a work in progress.

EVERYDAY ELECTRONICS

 

001: Damp Locator

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...