Back to the Present

Slightly behind the times, as ever - by inclination & design, of course – a certain something, gracing the cover of a recent issue of Design Week, came to my attention. It transpired that the work illustrated – essentially iconic album cover designs of the 1970s/80s appropriated along with & restyled in the retro manner of time-worn vintage paperback books of equally iconic, instantly-recognizable design - was/is that of Huw Gwilliam, itself being part of a wider trend of such mixing-&-mashing graphic re-imaginings (as has become common practice in creating ‘new’ music from pre-existing sources, for example, a development of music’s long-established tradition of referencing its past), many of which might be found at the online Flickr community Make Something Cool Everyday.
Having owned such featured examples as ‘Technique’ & ‘Unknown Pleasures’ in LP format almost since their original releases (& retained them amongst the few examples from the once-extensive vinyl collection saved for posterity), it’s a delight to see such favourites sampled & recontextualized thus, represented in a contemporary idiom of digital art that yet, artificially aged, displays an historic aesthetic, appearing in a condition as might secondhand books, actually much as the original sleeves came to assume over time & much use. Such magpiesque ‘borrowings’ might leave themselves open to criticisms of nostalgia &/or ‘mere’ pastiche, of course, but, nevertheless, the results can be something new, fruitful & most enjoyable, visually & conceptually, as in such examples as Heath Killen’s ‘Modernist Editions’ album covers-as-pictograms, simple & direct.


Further to the subject of retro aesthetics & the mixing of, the creation of something new from archive sources, & returning to a particular personal favourite embracing both graphics & music, I recently received notification from source of Moon Wiring Club’s contribution to Bleep 43’s extensive series of podcasts, which proved to be a compellingly enjoyable listen, endlessly inventive with its source material of music & found sound clips, proper thoughtful, stimulating entertainment & ever so slightly bonkers, witty & unsettling in the finest traditions of MWC’s oeuvre. As always, it’s the sense of displacement created by hearing recognizable archive fragments – old TV station idents & commercial radio ads (the latter so cringe-makingly wonderfully cheesy & awful), snippets of TV celebrities (equally cheesy), public information films with their dire, portentous warnings - represented within a new context of electronic music – itself often of a certain vintage, with that stereotypically futuristic sound (ironically dating it so) of the pioneering forays into the form, but still incongruously combined - that lends proceedings a particular frisson & inspires such an atmosphere of delight at the degree of inventiveness involved in the endeavour.