Meanwhile, in sides
Hello hello.
Among this month’s batch of albums that are somehow thirty years old is one of my all time favourites, Orbital’s In Sides. It’s like a time capsule of 1996, the Hartnoll brothers musically Zelig’d throughout popular culture: The Girl with the Sun in Her Head was originally recorded for the Hackers soundtrack; P.E.T.R.O.L. for Wipeout; Adnan’s for the Warchild Help album. Plus you’ve got a pre-Goldfrapp Alison Goldfrapp on vocal duties. Oh and their follow-up was the Event Horizon soundtrack. Just typing all of this makes me feel eighteen again.
Anyway, this nostalgic trivia-dump is just preamble to me linking to the work of In Sides sleeve artist John Greenwood, who specialises in paintings and drawings of boxed-in organic, cartoonish … things. Possibly a tad reductive, but imagine if Hieronymus Bosch watched way too much Ren & Stimpy.
And while we’re on the subject, this interview with Jes Benstock about the making of his video for lead single The Box is well worth a read. Those five minutes of Tilda Swinton stop-motioning her way around East London deserve to be filed alongside Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.
Wes Anderson’s go-to model-maker Simon Weisse has turned coffee machines into tiny cafés for a new De’Longhi campaign and they are of course utterly darling.
The science fiction cover art of Richard M. Powers. An absolutely incredible body of work. I want the £85 Folio Society edition of The Martian as much as the next nerd, but there’s something magical about a dog-eared and musty sci-fi paperback.
Eames Office and Spanish furniture brand Kettal are producing modular kits to build your own Eames House. A perfect place to sink back into the leathery embrace of your lounge chair and read Phaidon’s new book The Eames Houses.
I’m profoundly envious of James Brouwer’s postcard collection, grouped into common deltiological tropes such as ugly restaurants, tunnel entrances, drive-thru trees and mock violence. One particularly curious set is postcards that all feature exactly the same sky, explored in this video from Vox. There’s a beauty to how these ephemeral objects gain meaning and beauty when arranged together – Brouwer compares the griddy repetition of his Flickr albums to the work of Warhol or Hilla and Bernd Becher. Brouwer’s own minimal photography is well worth a look too.
Jon Klassen on the art and joy of choosing a cover font for your picture book; with examples from masters like Eric Carle, William Steig and Maurice Sendak.
Owls of despair. velcrows, fezn'ts – there’s a very very silly Moose Allain bird pun t-shirt for everyone (other puns are available).
And finally, one for the cartophiles – lose yourself in these delightfully enormous scans from A collection of plans of fortifications and battles, 1684-1709 (Europe). War, what is it good for? NICE MAPS.
That is all.
