Invisible Garfield

Dark.

HI

March 2008 sees a minor price hike for The Speeding Train. Increased print and postage costs means my profit margins are dwindling and it’s about time, after 3 years, that I went with inflation.

So from March 1st 2008 it’s going to be £5 per poster and my deal is now £12.50 for any 3 (plus postage).

BUT!

I am re-stocking in March so take the opportunity to buy a shitload of my old stock off me at the old price of £4 per poster and any 3 for £10 (plus postage) and I will throw in a minimum of 2 randomly selected used posters of my choice too. More likely I will throw in about 4 or 5 as I have tons. I’ll try and pick something you might like too.

Basically, all these are genuine gig posters, they’re printed up and used to promote gigs. I print the ones for use on lighter glossier paper and the ones for sale on heavyweight matte finish A3. I have piles of the glossy promo ones in my house and I can’t move. So if you order any of the posher ones from me I will chuck in some of the glossy ones too for you. They might be a bit creased or have some staple holes or whatever but they’re free, what’s your problem?!

So have a look here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157594212951999/

and email me to check what I have in stock. This offer only applies to what I have in at present and it ends on Sunday 2 March.

Contact me on honeyisfunnyATfastmail.fm

I accept Paypal, cheque or lovely smelly cash.

There are over 100 to choose from…go see go see…

All this recent talk about album covers (plus related Creative Review sidebar activity) reminded me to introduce to you Alex Steinweiss, who, in 1938, invented the album cover (see the ‘covers’ link on that page for some awesome early designs). Not content with doing this, in 1948 he invented the LP sleeve. Three cheers for Alex Steinweiss!

Liking the new diskant!

Listening: Lots and lots of Lungfish. A little Lungfish here and there also. I try and mix it up a bit with some Lungfish too.

Also: the Mick Turner/Tren Brothers compilation on Drag City showcasing one of the finest guitar players ever; Birds Of Maya on Holy Mountain which sounds like it was recorded from a record player with the stylus covered in pubic hair and wire wool; Nathan Bell’s solo banjo pieces sound like a spectral memory-trigger if ever I heard one; new Earth LP is a juicy monster (though I suspect if it were any other band this would be labelled ‘post-rock’ in reviews before you could blink); Sir Richard Bishop’s furiously-picked solo guitar records; the new Bilge Pump album ‘Rupert The Sky’ (click the link to be magically transported to Gringo Records’ Myspace page for a sneak preview).

Reading: I just finished Please Kill Me, the anecdotal history of Punk as told by some Americans. It’s fascinating stuff, especially when dealing with Detroit and the MC5 and Stooges. Less so when Patti Smith crops up at any given point. Patti Smith is bullshit, am I missing something with her or something?

Watching: Broke my “no trips to the cinema” policy to see No Country For Old Men, a film so detailed and so reliant on the audience’s total undivided attention that it only served to place my policy firmly back in action. I am never going to the cinema again. A guy sitting along from me screamed at the kids in the back to stop rattling their keys and then said kids moaned loudly when the ending didn’t deliver what they wanted/expected. It was excellent of course.

Been watching lots of randomised You Tube stuff as well which I will endeavour to share with you through diskant as often as possible.

Working on: an absolute pile of design work. Record sleeves for Crevecoeur from France, Bilge Pump, Beyond This Point Are Monsters and gig posters galore of course. Some shown below…

Team Damn You! has also been hard at work in 08 so far with some amazing shows by the likes of Enon and Fuck Buttons and more to come.

Music-wise, I only got round to doing my first gig of 08 last week when Felix opened for the Cave Singers in Nottingham. We’ve been hard at work on a Felix record with Mr Ian Scanlon at the helm. It should hopefully come out later this year when we ever finish it and we’re dead excited.

2nd Lords album hit a hiccup at the end of last year due to some crazy bad luck occurrences. It is done, dusted and being artworked at the moment with a view to coming out in May. It is called “Everyone Is People”. We tour with Bilge Pump in March in the UK. This summer will see a serious slowing down of Lords gig activity for good so come out and see us now.

Antipating: Lords LP/tour; Chris Leo playing in Nottingham; Human Bell playing in Nottingham; going to Australia later this year for a holiday; getting a new band together at some point (do YOU play drums or sing? Then email me!)…

Self-promoting: I think I’ve done enough of that already.

Here’s an interesting conjunction between music and art, that I’ve just been told about. Looks like a good thing to me…

“Here at Tate Modern we’ve just launched an initiative called Your Tate Track. The initiative is aimed at unsigned bands and musicians aged between 16 – 24.

Your Tate Track asks unsigned musicians to choose a work of art from a selection on display at Tate Modern and then to write a track in response to it. The public will vote on submitted tracks and the 20 most popular will go before a judging panel which will include, among others, Graham Coxon, Roll Deep, Basement Jaxx and Radio 1 DJ Huw Stephens.

The winning track will be installed in the gallery through headphones next to the work which inspired it and will be streamed on Tate’s website. Tracks can be submitted until the 31 August.”

More information here.

I’m always babbling on here about the new crafting revolution and its links to the indie DIY zine making community and I just found out someone is making a documentary about it all. Focusing on the USA craft community, Handmade Nation features a whole range of crafters including old hands like Nikki McClure and the Austin Craft Mafia and covers all the craft fairs, studios, art galleries, shops and other people involved in making it all happen. There’s a sneak preview up now on YouTube that shows the breadth of the topic and all the amazing things people are making. If we’d had the technology back then there would totally have been a film like this about zinemaking. Also so inspiring to see so many girls doing stuff! Sorry, I get so excited about all this – zines and DIY are what got me and diskant started and it’s all exploded in so many new ways over the last 15 years. Watch it!

In one of those strange collisions between music and, er, cordwainery, Johnny Marr (ie the bloke from The Smiths and latterly Modest Mouse) has designed a rather nice-looking shoe. Take a look here. You collector types will love it, as only 216 pairs will be made. They’re to be sold via eBay from 10 July, with the proceeds going to a good cause.

Isn’t that nice. Perhaps the shoes will make one a better guitar player. Perhaps not.

Leaving aside the related gig disaster as previous post, I was excited about this, the idea of wandering around the back streets of Glasgow and discovering light installations and disused buildings that have temporarily been given a purpose again.

With Alasdair on map reading and Glasgow knowledge duty we began by meandering our way round the Merchant City. The first couple of installations were so non-eventful as to almost pass notice and the church with, um, some lights on it was similarly unremarkable. We were invited to make our way round a set path through the Ramshorn Gardens which was initially exciting as our giant shadows projected themselves on to the building opposite and slowly shrunk as we walked. Things then turned muddy and dark with some tiny fixed lights illuminating random gravestones, branches and corners. Woo.

Down the back end of King Street things improved with warped, melty shop sign lights making me feel like I had taken a wrong turning into surrealist France, and an enormous video projection on a wall was momentarily awesome in its size.

‘Trapped’ at the bottom of King Street was possibly the biggest installation where a disused building has had its windows lit in colours with video projections filling the central area of windows. We arrived while they were displaying adverts (for the festival. Which we were at) so had to make do with the entertainment provided by Man Pissing in Doorway and Children Crying (possibly related). Then giant ants started marching over the windows in patterns, getting bigger each time they appeared with the colours changing in rotation, eventually culminating in enormo-insects filling the whole central area. Giant insects crawling over buildings is to be encouraged, I think.

Up at the Trongate a building was sporting projections designed by children which meant we had the scarily fun sight of a building covered in brightly coloured balloons. Further projections were based on the actual building itself making it appear as if it had been coloured in with neon crayons, a slightly disorientating look that made me feel like the buliding itself was a projection.

Our last stop was the view of the, again, unremarkably lit church and mosque by the Clyde but much more captivating was the long term lighting developments on the various bridges which reflect shimmering colour on to the river. The blood red pedestrian bridge dominated the view and we walked back over it where it loomed, bright red, clear and strong overhead and easily beat the festival installations.

The main problem with most of the installations is that they were just kind of there. Pretty and kinda cool but not really living up to the status of a festival of light. Radiance was trying too hard. Glasgow doesn’t need this trumpeting and garish cosmetic lighting. Light up the dark random areas, highlight the unused and un-noticed and let people discover them for themselves.

Well, I am back from my holidays and will post some thoughts on them soon. However, I see that the only two things of major interest that I did have already been written about elsewhere. Stu Fowkes has an in-depth review of Audioscope 05 over at OxfordBands while Alistair Fitchett once again has stolen my thoughts in his almost perfect post on Tangents about the Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate. Nice of them to do the hard work and leave me free to write some kind of flippant top ten list instead.

UPDATE: You can now look at some photos I took.

This is the most fun I’ve had (online) in ages. Cut and Splice is an online exhibition of sound art over at the BBC Radio 3 website. It comprises mostly of pieces acting as “a visual music system, which allows users to compose new pieces of music”. In reality this means beautiful Flash/Shockwave screens which you can interact with by drawing shapes, moving stuff or just dragging your mouse around randomly to create your own unique piece of music. I’m particularly taken with rechord‘s Cubop which makes rather soothing electronica out of something I do often enough – draw rectangles with my mouse – and tinhoko‘s rhapsody where pixellated container ships and bizarre octopi enlarge and change while you scatter coloured squares around making music as you go. Don’t bother unless you have a spare half hour and some speakers. I took some photos while I was doing this – see them on my Flickr.