Lovely new science-fiction book cover designs on Gollancz.

As see on Creative Review.

My favourite volume of Ballard – the complete short stories, nestled next to one of the author’s key inspirations.

References to Ballard on this blog.

RIP.

These are fantastic designs. At time of writing I haven’t quite figured out whether they’re in print or are speculative designs. If the former, I’m definitively going to buy copies. I adore their elegant simplicity. The designer is Nicole Paterson who writes as follows:

A series of book covers and interior spreads, a contemporary take on Dante’s classic poems. I wanted to create a set of book covers that did not use images from the Bosch Hell painting, or any images of Dante and Virgil that are normally found on covers for the Divine Comedy.

I was inspired by Dante’s use of mathematics and architecture in describing Hell, Heaven and Purgatory. I employed simple geometric shapes and color to represent these places, while still keeping the design simple, and allowing the reader to use their imagination when reading these vivid poems.

Her Flickr-based portolio.
Via the Creative Review blog.

The latest in a very occasional series of lovely things (predecessor to this post was the Max Bill Chronoscope). The subject – and particularly the title – of this wartime novel reminds me of the line in John Foxx/Ultravox’s Hiroshima Mon Amour: “Riding inter-city trains/Dressed in European grey.” The Aerodrome is a detailed dystopian fable that, although slow to unfold, is worth searching out for those interested in the likes of 1984, In The Second Year and Brave New World.

I’ve just reread Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds and would wholeheartedly recommend it for anybody interested in the dance music revolution of the last 20 years. It’s also a hell of a lot more interesting read that Reynolds’ more recent book on Post-Punk, Rip It Up and Start It Again. Although it could do with some editing (the chapter on American rave culture is pretty superfluous), its breadth of ambition – literally to cover the period from the birth of techno in the mid-80s up to the date of the book’s publication in 1998 – proves much more admirable than foolhardy. Reynolds is a committed, articulate and often highly engaging writer who clearly loves his subject. One of the book’s standout chapters, ‘The Sound is For the Underground’, brilliantly evokes pirate radio’s amazing otherness:

My passion, though, is for the pirate stations that seem the most piratical (…) and that means the jungle pirates (…) the unruly ‘ardkore pirates of 1991-3: Touchdown, Defection, Rush, Format, Pulse, Eruption (…) I’m not taking the piss when I say that I rate (the) phonetic poetry plucked from London’s pirate airwaves.

What in part makes Energy Flash distinctive is the author’s passion for populist rave at its peak, rather than the artier end of things admired by so many critics. Also fascinating is the sociological analysis and the tracing of the impact of drug use upon both the music and the social scene. Although I very much enjoyed this approach, it does result in reduced attention on the music itself. Likewise, however attractive Reynold’s populism, it’s not an enthusiasm I share. He only devotes one page to the minimal techno output of one of my own favourite labels, Berlin’s Chain Reaction. Frustratingly, it’s a very fine piece of writing!

Energy Flash is unsurprisingly at its weakest in its concluding chapter when Reynolds surveys the music closest to the book’s publication. Big Beat exponents like Chemical Brothers and FatBoy Slim align to the author’s love of thrill, but haven’t really led onto anything new, though to be fair it’s a factor he does acknowledge. Given the preponderance of Nu-Indie in the media, Energy Flash serves as a reminder of both the continuity and innovation that the 15+ years of dance culture represented.

10 used and new copies available from Amazon marketplace vendors from £12.99

If, like me, you’re an avid listener to music, allow me to impress upon you the importance of reading this book. Its subject is the impact of recording upon music itself and it’s full to the gills with insight, cogent argument and wit. Here’s a representative, arguably pivotal, paragraph:

The life of the touring blues musician, Charles Keil has observed, furnishes all the loneliness and jealousy he needs to sing the blues he needs to sing the blues authentically (…) The recording situation is an even stronger and more representative extract. The glass booths and baffles that isolate the musician from his fellow musicians; the abstracted audience; the sense of producing an object and of mass-producing a commodity; the deconstruction of time by takes and its reconstruction by splicing – these are strong metaphors of modern life. Their mirror images in the listener’s experience are solitude; the occlusion of the musician; the use of music as an object and a commodity; the collapse of a public architecture of time and the creation of a private interior design of time. Since they contradict everything that music-making once seemed to be, they are paradoxes.

(page 130)

Although Eisenberg’s perspective occasionally appears rather conservative, his doubts give necessary pause for thought. The book was first published in 1985, the second edition includes an interesting afterword for the 1996 Italian edition and a brilliant flight of fancy for the current edition penned in response to the massive changes in the music world prompted by the internet.

The Recording Angel is mandatory reading and it’s available for £8.36 + P&P from Amazon marketplace vendor The Book Depository (who supply as print-on-demand). What are you waiting for?

Amy fished out Georges Perec’s A Void from the bookshelves the other day. It’s the novel that famously, and with great resonance, avoids the use of the letter ‘e’ on any of its 283 pages. (Alongside the brilliant playfulness of this work, I still find it hard to comprehend how such a work could have been translated from the original French {by Gilbert Adair}). Amy’s brother Gabes, also aware of the book’s unique feature, peered over her shoulder as she flicked through the pages. After a few moments he exclaimed with marked vehemence that he’d spotted an ‘e’. Amy didn’t stop her flicking immediately so the place was lost. Gabes spent quite some time futilely looking for the word he’d seen. He still refuses to concede that there was no such letter in this particular book. (There’s more than a whiff of Borges, to my mind, in this incident.)

I was recently sent a couple of CDs to review for Jazzwise by a Swedish singer I was unfamiliar with, Eldbjørg Raknes. I liked one of the two, ‘Solo‘, a collection of pieces comprising only Raknes’ voice and live vocal samples. It was stark and rich with darkness and shadow. The other CD which I liked less, ‘I Live Suddenly’, was the product of Raknes and three other musicians. The words were by the likes of Emily Bronte, Dorothy Parker, Pablo Neruda and Robert Frost, but four songs featured the works of the German Jewish poet and holocaust survivor, Paul Celan. My feeling was that the Celan settings would have benefited immensely from the treatments applied on Solo, in preference to the relatively straightforward music that was actually used.Like most people, I first encountered Celan (many years ago) via Death Fugue (“Black milk of daybreak, we drink it at evening…”); soon after I purchased a volume of selected poems, which I rediscovered the other day lurking at the back of a bookshelf. Although I didn’t include the observation in my review, I wished that Raknes had approached Celan in the same way that Ute Lemper sang the two Scott Walker compositions, ‘Scope J’ and ‘Lullaby (by-by-by)’. These are extraordinary pieces, almost epic in duration; stretched and riven, they’re also direct precursors of Walker’s own ‘The Drift’.

I opened the Celan volume randomly at ‘Snow-bed’ and was immediately struck by its proximity to Walker’s late work which, until now, I could only relate to the likes of Samuel Beckett’s own late work (e.g. ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’), both being denuded of anything extraneous, leaving only flint-like shards of meaning. Celan’s poetry with its shafts of blinding light, shed upon unspeakable horror appears to be a much more appropriate point of reference. Fellow travelers surely?

Eyes, world-blind, in the fissure of dying: I come,
callous growth in my heart.
I come.

Moon-mirror rock-face. Down.
(Shine spotted with breath. Blood in streaks.
Soul forming clouds, close to the true shape once more.
Ten-finger shadow, clamped.)

Eyes world-blind,
eyes in the fissure of dying,
eyes eyes:

The snow-bed under us both, the snow-bed.
Crystal on crystal,
meshed deep as time, we fall,
we fall and lie there and fall.

And fall:
We were. We are.
We are one flesh with the night.
In the passages, passages.

The final edition of e/i magazine arrived the other day. As Darren Bergstein, writes (fulminates might be more accurate) in the editorial, he’s another victim of the lightning expansion of virtual media. I’m sad to see the magazine fold, its last few issues were notably handsome, a result of Taylor Deupree’s design skills and a distinct improvement on the recent caretaker work on The Wire following non-format’s apparently sudden departure. (Note to self, get round to writing a post on the Wire’s design rejig + critique of mag as a whole). I must confess that I found some of the writing in e/i went right over – or past – my head, but there were also some fine articles in there – and no, I’m not referring to myself. In the latest issue there’s a fine piece on the late Bryn Jones aka Muslimgauze that reminded me of the excellent one on Louis and Bebe Barron in the first issue of e/i that I came across.

If I were crazy enough to launch a print endeavour at this time, I’d want to treat a small number of key subjects in significant depth – e/i’s website proudly declares that the latest issue contains 150+ reviews – that does quite the opposite of what it’s intended to do. In light of the information glut I’m faced with on- and offline, what I want to read about are the underlying connections within and across media (from music to fiction, music to the fine arts and so on), the (possible) meanings of music in the wider cultural – and global – context. I’d like to see (serious) playfulness – if that’s possible, who knows. I do not want to have to wade through 150+ reviews. The same goes for those endless pages of short genre reviews at the back of The Wire (shivers). I want to see confidence, an informed authority that might make me care rather than recoil in data overload. Less is – in my book – very definitely more.

As well as the foregoing, I’d like to see a greater focus upon innovative music-related design, let’s say an ongoing folding-in of Adrian Shaughnessy’s approach in his Intro books. The Wire’s ‘my favourite album cover’ is interesting, but way too token. Why can’t reviews be presented with CD cover images? (Maybe it’s printing costs? Personally the site of columns and columns of text creates a marked reluctance to bother to read. I’d also like to see a greater range of deep coverage of not just experimental/esoteric/obscure music, but any sort of music as long as an interesting, viable perspective can be drawn upon it. All these years later, Richard Cook’s Michael Jackson issue (I’d always thought til now it was done by Mark Sinker) seems essential rather than crazy. This from the magazine’s online history:

88 June 1991
Infamously, the cover features Michael Jackson. In his editorial, Richard Cook anticipates the response of long term readers: “Michael Jackson? What the hell’s going on here?” He then attempts to reassure them: “Nothing, actually, that we haven’t done before. Maybe the scales are tipping a little differently as from this issue, but The Wire is essentially the same argumentative, alternative, demanding music magazine it’s always set out to be… [But] the word from now on is music [as opposed to Œjazz']. Music worth hearing, worth talking about, worth documenting.” And just in case anyone had failed to get the message, the subtitle changes from “Jazz And New Music” to “Music Now And All Ways”. The magazine starts calling itself The Wire again. The next four issues contain a ragbag of articles on The Jam, Stravinsky, Elvis Costello, Elliott Carter, Prince, Haydn, Kraftwerk, John Lee Hooker, Z’ev, Van Morrison, Test Department, David Bowie’s Tin Machine, Whitney Houston, Robert Wyatt…

The Wire continues to thrive – I assume – and it’s difficult for me to be balanced in my appraisal of it given the shabby treatment I feel I experienced. It has some brilliant writing, but I do feel thought that it needs a really good shakeup to bring it back to life. It doesn’t seem that Simon Bohn/Biba Kopf is the man, nor was Rob Young before him, however decent a writer the latter is. I’d say the last great period for the magazine was when Tony Herrington was the editor rather than publisher. Perhaps the magazine’s success at that time also had something to do with the music of the mid to late ’90s. Since then The Wire has certainly failed to engage with either UK Garage or the Grime/Dubstep movements of the last near decade – reviews of the new Burial and Boxcutter CDs appear, oddly enough, under Dub and Electronica respectively in the latest issue. The magazine’s also pretty much failed to engage in any interesting way with the web. It remains very much a print endeavour, its website is appalling badly designed (step up to the stocks non-format, print not web designers). Ultimately The Wire’s in significant danger of sinking under its own venerable status. Or perhaps it’ll sail on for decades…

Anyway, I wish Mr Bergstein luck in whatever future endeavours he undertakes, virtual or otherwise.