Face Off
Adrian Shaughnessy’s Cover Art By: New Music Graphics (Laurence King Publishing, 2008) begins with a jeremiad of sorts, suggesting that the book is a survey of a dying art. ‘The major labels still commission cover art, but it’s rare to find examples with any resonance or originality,’ he glumly notes.
This degrading of the role of cover art is in part a consequence of the prevalence of downloading, but downloading is only the end-point ofa process that began with the CD. Shaughnessy cites critic Paul Morley’s view that the CD was ‘a banal bastard stopgap…
by Mark Fisher on 21/04/08 | No responses | Read More
Artificial Intelligence
Autechre made their debut for Warp Records in 1992, contributing a track entitled ‘The Egg’ to the benchmark electronica compilation Artificial Intelligence. This is something that they may not wish to be reminded of however; interviewed recently on the American music website Pitchfork, Autechre’s Rob Brown admitted that he found the duo’s first two albums ‘cheesy’ to listen to now. But compared to ‘The Egg’ (which today could pass for the woozy idylls of Warp label-mates Boards of Canada), their debut and sophomore albums – Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994) – were…
by Tony F. Wilson on 13/03/08 | No responses | Read More
Harping On
For ages after seeing singer-songwriter Baby Dee I had a strange chuckle ringing my ears – the performer’s between-song ‘Hee, hee, hee’, which sounds a bit like an overgrown child playing white witch. Certainly, Baby Dee’s spell worked on me. The artist’s free concert in Berlin in late September – organized by new project space Rise and hosted by easily my favourite independent culture club, Basso in Kreuzberg – was a rare jewel-like offering.
If you do a bit of nosing around for Baby Dee on the Internet you’ll pretty soon hit on a remarkable biography that goes…
by Dominic Eichler on 31/10/07 | No responses | Read More
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