Héliophoria! (return of the Silver Records)

 

New joint project from DJ Food and Howlround, under the deliciously sibilant and resonant alias   The Superceded Sounds of… The New Obsolescents... released shortly on the equally sibilant imprint Castles In Space.

What is immediately striking is the silver metallic artwork with which the releases are gorgeously clad... triggering erogenized memory-rushes for those of a "lost future" fetishising disposition. 

For the process involved, known as Héliophore, is the self-same one used for the beyond-iconic covers of the Prospective 21e Siècle series of electronic avant-garde and musique concrète  LPs released by Philips in the late 1960s. 

                                             

As Food, a.k.a. Strictly Kev explains, he has been fantasizing about making a record with this kind of cover since stumbling across the Prospective series while touring Europe in the '90s: 

“The patterns etched in the covers are achieved by minute differences in the angles of the foil coating which then reflects the light and appears to animate when moved... Tracking down the company who made the original Philips covers in France led to a dead end as they had long ceased to exist so I gave up hope. Unknown to me a British company had managed to replicate the process under the name Dufex in the UK. Sadly they’d also wound up business in 2019 but via a chance encounter on a separate project I managed to find the final stocks of card from the business at a lighting company. Once The New Obsolescents’ album was in the bag we started to think about artwork and I knew that this collision of tape loops and turntablism was the perfect record to sleeve in foil as a homage to the Philips series.... Procuring 300 sheets in five different designs, I gave them to Jonas Ranson at paperHAUS who carefully but expertly screen printed each panel with the cover design. Each sheet was then cut to a 12”x12” size and painstakingly glued to each sleeve, pressed while drying and sleeved in PVC outers, making sure not to scratch the foil which is extremely delicate. As a nod to the site of the original performance recordings at the Museum of London, with moon rock bean bags and a space travel theme, we decided on a silver and black hybrid moon surface effect for the vinyl. The whole process of making the sleeves probably took longer than the whole album but I couldn’t be happier with the results, it was worth it.”

There are five variants of the foil board sleeves known respectively as “Spiral’, “Starburst’, “Cross’, “Swirls’ and “Hyperspace”

For a text for the exhibition Futur Anterieur, I wrote about the Prospective 21e Siecle covers and how the look inspired similar covers for the French science fiction publisher Ailleurs et Demain (which translates as Elsewhere and Tomorrow)

"In 1969, the publisher Robert Laffont launched the literary equivalent of Prospective 21e Siècle: the imprint Ailleurs et Demain, dedicated to science fiction and under the direction of Gérard Klein. Over the coming years Ailleurs et Demain would publish translations of works by giants of the genre such as Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Frank Herbert, and Arthur C. Clarke along with novels by French s.f. writers like Jacques Sternberg, Michel Jeury, and Klein himself.  Klein was an admirer of the Prospective series and decided to package A & D fiction using the same process, called Héliophore and originally developed in the 1930s by Louis Defay to transform aluminum paper for printing.  Some of the Ailleurs Et Demain designs closely resemble specific Prospective 21e Siecle sleeves, while others are new but clearly inspired by the series. (With both the albums and the novels, nobody seems to know the identity of the designers, who were in-house and uncredited).  The design style, which eventually extended beyond silver to gold and copper book covers, was maintained for over 20 years, before being abandoned." 

More on the Héliophore process at Grapheine

                                                                

                                                      

   

The Superceded Sounds of... release rationale: 

This album began life four years ago when the trio of Strictly Kev, Robin The Fog and Chris Weaver were tasked by Jonny Trunk with providing an all-night immersive soundtrack for the mammoth ‘Museum Of Last Parties’ extravaganza in the Museum of London’s Torch Room. Setting up their vintage reel to reel tape machines, turntables and various FX units in the very shadow of the torch that became the icon of the 2012 Olympics, the trio set about creating a soundtrack worthy of champions.Strange new worlds conjured from obsolete media, a vision of the future constructed live using nothing but vintage analogue technology and a sense of adventure.With a constant stream of revellers stopping by to lounge on moon-shaped cushions and enjoy this interstellar soundtrack being woven right before their ears, the trio amassed almost four hours of improvised oddities that night. It wasn’t until the spring of 2020 when they suddenly each found themselves at home with all plans cancelled and a LOT of spare time that the tapes were resurrected and the album started to take shape.

(Hat tip Bruce Levenstein and Andrew Parker)

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While checking out the release, I also had a butchers at the recent discography of Castles In Space - mostly clocking the visuals, not so much the audio. I was struck by how they are sticking with the hauntology (the uncanny persistence of H being a recurrent thought-wrinkle here).  This was the most striking son-of-Ghost-Box release.

Listen here

Release rationale: 

“Interim Report, March 1997” by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is Gordon Chapman Fox’s hymn and homage to the brutalist beauty of Cheshire’s designated new towns of Warrington and Runcorn.

Chapman-Fox grew up in Lancashire, and having been a frequent user of the famous Preston Bus Station in his youth, he was struck by the enormous chasm between the sixties architects utopian vision for what new towns should be and the sticky-floored, piss-streaked reality. He explains: “The more I looked into it, the appeal of these visionary architects grew. It felt like perhaps the most visionary building projects of all post war Britain were some of the estates built in Warrington and Runcorn new towns, these twin towns on either side of the Mersey. The estates of Runcorn were space-age futurist with external plumbing, rounded windows and raised walkways. But as housing, they were a failure. Runcorn was the last great UK modernist, futurist building project built with a community in mind. “Interim Report, March 1979” looks at this interim, this gap between vision and reality.”

At the time of recording the album, he says, “It seemed like there were a lot of ersatz-soundtracks to lost John Carpenter films, or obscure giallo “classics”. I preferred to find inspiration from the surreality of the mundane, hence the creation of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. 1979 seemed the perfect point to be located in time, sitting on the razor’s edge between the post-war consensus and the dawn of Thatcherism. As the concept took hold, I tried to format the music according to the capabilities of a small, provincial recording studio in 1979. I limited the number of instruments available, the number of tracks available and so on. This really helped to shape the album and anchor the concept. As a teenager, I was into rock and looking for ever more extreme sounds - AC/DC gave way to Metallica gave way to Carcass. But by the 90s I heard Warp artists and that was me hooked. What they were doing could be far more brutal than anything by four sweaty long-haired guys with guitars. But it could also be funky, beautiful, ethereal, melodic and so much more.”

It’s that ethereality and true sense of time and place that Chapman-Fox has captured so well here. “1979 marked a change in the political and wider culture of British society. The Warrington- Runcorn development marks the swan song of post-war urban planning in the UK – soon the ethos of building better communities would be replaced by Thatcherite “no such thing as society” and “Greed is good” mentality. And look where that got us…“ 

Well, you can't much more hauntological than that can you? Cut-off point 1979, end of post-war consensus...  and the sonic palette is very Pye Audio Corner. 

The "H for life" vibe is discernible in some of the other Castle In Spaces releases's artwork too: 

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bonus Héliophoria!

this was tomorrow #24 ("chronosickness" and "Cosmism" text 'n' pix edition)

                                                      <sub>images from Cybersyn

"Cybersyn, a Chilean project cybernetic simulator developed between 1971–1973 (by Stafford Beer for Salvador Allende’s government) aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were linked to one mainframe computer.</sub>


Alex Williams, "Escape Velocity", e-Flux issue on Accelerationism: " It is only a post-capitalist sociopolitical model which is likely to be capable of launching a robust cosmist imperative. The first two thirds of the twentieth century saw astounding leaps forward in technology and political and social consciousness, with the era immediately after the Second World War (running up to about 1979) the apogee of future-oriented thought in scientific and popular culture. But these futurological visions of the revolutionary intersection of techno-scientific development and social transformation, after the advent of neoliberalism, were quickly replaced by a yearning for kitsch retro-futurism. This is the story of modernism and early postmodernism collapsing into what might be termed a generalized chronosickness: a loss of the thread of techno-social Enlightenment. This is encapsulated especially in the loss of space as “final frontier.” Starting in the 1970s, the huge Soviet and American space programs collapsed under the strain of political pressure and budget cuts. The resumption of a serious and ongoing exploration of space is perhaps the ultimate expression of freedom imaginable to present minds, what the design theorist Benedict Singleton refers to as a maximum jailbreak...."

<sup>From the same issue, see also: 

Benedict Singleton's Maximum Jailbreak, on "Cosmism", via the late 19th Century Russian thinker</sup> Nikolai Fedorov, author of The Philosophy of the Common Task, whose subject was:


"the articulation of a plan for the entire human race, a project that can readily be sloganed as storm the heavens and conquer death....

"It seems obvious that we are confined in space to the surface of the earth, and in time to the length of a life. Fedorov’s imaginative achievement revolves around refusing to mistake the ubiquity of these constraints—for all the great hold they exert—as inescapable necessities we have no choice but to accept. Those who point to the huge expanse of the earth and the whole terrestrial history of life—this is nothing but myopia, squalid provincialism. In isolated form, this is the characteristic gesture of cosmism, what we might call the “cosmist impulse”: to consider the earth a trap, and to understand the common project of philosophy, economics, and design as being the formulation of means to escape from it: to conceive a jailbreak at the maximum possible scale, a heist in which we steal ourselves from the vault...."
 
"... Technologies must loosen the grip of gravity, not eradicating it per se but meaning we would no longer be forced to obey it without question, no longer subject to its necessity. Epic and unexpected, the creativity of Fedorov’s vision extended to its detail:

He speculated that someday, by erecting giant cones on the earth’s surface, people might be able to control the earth’s electromagnetic field in such a way as to turn the whole planet into a spaceship under human control. We would no longer have to slavishly orbit our sun but could freely steer our planet wherever we wished, as, in the phrase he used as early as the 1870s, “captain and crew of spaceship earth.”⁵

"This complex of ideas, which by the 1900s had been dubbed “cosmism,” was capable of inspiring peculiar devotion in the few who were exposed to it....

"The Common Task played a central role in the formation of cosmonautics. Chief among the devotees of Fedorov’s thought was his protégé, Konstantin Tsiolkovski, a frequent visitor to Fedorov’s library as a teenager, who was to go on to configure the mathematical basis for space travel, from a series of vital rocketry equations to the calculation of optimal ascent, descent, and orbital trajectories for spacecraft; and who put these to use in the design of the first multistage booster rockets, an extraordinary technological innovation that stood among many others in his work, including designs for airlocks and moon bases..."

Singleton examines the notion of the trap, and the cunning of the creature who can design a way to  escape it. Then ventures:

"As an event in this alternative history of design, cosmism arrives as a kind of absolutization of its basic principles into a project of generalized escapology.... 

"Fedorov’s cosmism is a project, ultimately, of freedom, commissioning an assault by practical reason on the things that bind us, irrespective of their historical ubiquity; the perception that a life subjected to 1g gravity is inevitable is among the casualties already listed. The conception of the world as a field of nested traps renders this vision of freedom quantitative, a series of practical achievements, proceeding by degree"

The distinction between escapism and escapology seems suggestive:

"...In order to be free of a trap, it’s of less use to the trapped to decide upon some holy condition of freedom than to understand how one is implicated in the mechanism of one’s entrapment. To engage in the former is mere escapism, as we’ve noted. The designation of this limit as sacrosanct is alien to the very logic of traps and of escaping them, to its abstract insurrectionary force"

"explode into space"
 

"it flies sideways through time"

"I've seen the future and I've left it behind"

this was tomorrow #21

this was tomorrow #14

  "vintage Nasa photographs, 1964-1983 -An exhibition detailing the achievements of Nasa – covering the golden age of space exploration –  featuring over 100 rare photographs" - The Guardian on the For All Mankind exhibition at Breese Little gallery,  London, 22nd January – 22nd February 2014

This is tomorrow, again?

So asserts the For All Mankind catalogue: 

"The achievements of NASA and the Apollo programme languished in the popular imagination from the end of the 1970s until the early 2000s, neglected in the wake of previous euphoria. The exploration of Mars, space tourism, the commercial satellite market and China’s recent rover landing on the Moon are clear signals that space exploration is once again at the very forefront of public and, increasingly, private agendas. The exploration of space has likewise renewed its grip on the popular consciousness. Motion pictures such as Moon (2009), Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (due for release 2014) are fresh examples of the narrative possibilities of space in the Hollywood science fiction tradition."

Definitely does seem to be an uptick of cultural interest in outer space, for no apparent reason. 

However, the actual "space exploration, it's ON again" stuff that's been happening recently.... Okay, it's cool that it's going on on at all, after such a long hiatus...  China's Moon rover  indicates serious intent to restart the space race, even if it is mostly impelled by the urge to flex geopolitical muscle (make space a Chinese place). (India too has grand plans, for similar reasons).

But if you think about it, all China has done is repeat something that was achieved 43 years ago. Not even repeat it, because NASA got a bunch of human beings on the lunar surface - a much huger endeavour than getting an inanimate entity, a titchy robo-vehicle, up there. So far at least, the People's Republic has reinvented the wheel, and on a miniature scale.

Branson's Virgin flights into the bit of space just above the atmosphere - again, it's hardly vacations on the Moon, is it?

 

                       lift-off of the final Apollo mission to the Moon in 1972, the one with the Eugene Cirnan monologue                                        that Daft Punk used on "Contact"

Full catalogue for For All Mankind viewable here (some 287 pix!)

 Related essay here by  Henry Little, For All Mankind: A Brief Cultural History of the Moon (originally published by The White Review, September 2013)