Time for a pulp countdown now, so here's my top 10 book titles that would make great prog rock album titles!
Everyone loves a 10 minute drum solo, right?
At #10: Murdock's Acid Test! Side one is mellow acid jazz, but side two is all stream of consciousness poetry and percussion...
At #9: Into Plutonian Depths! A concept album where Chinese war gongs, the Welsh harp and nine detuned Hammond organs evoke the legend of Persephone...
At #8: Bluebeard's Seventh Wife! Reminiscent of early Soft Machine this album includes an underwater piano AND an electric glockenspiel...
At #7: Thongo At The End Of Time! Trippy free-form eclectic harmonies interspersed with chants from the Upanishads make this album ideal for meditation and/or hot yoga...
At #6: Don't Tempt The Hangman! Old school folk acoustic songs with perhaps more hurdy-gurdy than is strictly necessary or bearable...
At #5: The Light Of Lilith! Unkindly reviewed by Melody Maker as "barely listenable" this album has found a more sympathetic audience recently, and is now rightly hailed as the ur-text of drum & bass lounge music...
At #4: Conscience Interplanetary! Ambient dub soundscapes melding effortlessly with the whispered poetry of e.e. cummings form themselves into an alarmingly intense ASMR cosmic head massage...
At #3: Death Is A Ruby Light! I hope you like post-minimalist interpretive percussion because that's basically all this is, and it's in mono to boot...
At #2: Space, Time and Nathaniel. Recorded live in Antwerp as a War Of The Worlds sequel, the lyrical Moogs and clarinet swirls depict the reawakening of the Earth as the Martian red weed gives way to daffodils and dragonflies...
And at #1: Epitaph For A Dead Beat! A cacophony of jazz fusion harmonies in 5/4 time, undergirded by Mellotron and the bells of St. Oswald's church in Lymington. A classic...
More pulp countdowns another time. Stay cool cats...
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Today I'm looking back at the work of British graphic designer Abram Games!
Abram Games was born in Whitechapel, London in 1914. His father, Joseph, was a photographer who taught him the art of colouring by airbrush.
Games attended Hackney Downs School before dropping out of Saint Martin’s School of Art after two terms. His design skills were mainly self-taught by working as his father’s assistant.
Today I'm looking back at the career of English painter, book illustrator and war artist Edward Ardizzone!
Edward Ardizzone was born in Vietnam in 1900 to Anglo-French parents. Aged 5 he moved to England, settling in Suffolk.
Whilst working as an office clerk in London Ardizzone began to take lessons at the Westminster School of Art in his spare time. In 1926 he gave up his office job to concentrate on becoming a professional artist.
Today in pulp I look back at the Witchploitation explosion of the late 1960s: black magic, bare bottoms and terrible, terrible curtains!
Come this way...
Mainstream occult magazines and books had been around since late Victorian times. These were mostly about spiritualism, with perhaps a bit of magic thrown in.
But it was the writings of Aleister Crowley in English and Maria de Naglowska in French and Russian that first popularised the idea of 'sex magick' in the 20th century - the use of sexual energy and ritual to achieve mystical outcomes.
Between 1960 and 1970 Penguin Books underwent several revolutions in cover layout, at a time when public tastes were rapidly changing.
Today in pulp I look back at 10 years that shook the Penguin!
Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935, aiming to bring high-quality paperbacks to the masses for the same price as a packet of cigarettes. Lane began by snapping up publishing rights for inexpensive mid-market novels and packaging them expertly for book lovers.
From the start Penguins were consciously designed; Lane wanted to distinguish his paperbacks from pulp novels. Edward Young created the first cover grid, using three horizontal bands and the new-ish Gill Sans typeface for the text.
Today in pulp: a tale of an unintentionally radical publisher. It only produced 42 books between 1968-9, but it caught the hedonistic, solipsistic, free love mood of the West Coast freakout scene like no other.
This is the story of Essex House...
Essex House was an offshoot of Parliament Press, a California publishing company set up by pulp artist Milton Luros after the market for pulp magazines began to decline. It specialised in stag magazines sold through liquor stores, to skirt around US obscenity publishing laws.
By the 1960s Parliament Press was already selling pornographic novels through its Brandon House imprint, though these were mostly reprints or translations of existing work. Luros was interested in publishing new erotic authors, and set up Essex House to do just that.
Today in pulp... one of my favourite SF authors: Harry Harrison!
Harry Harrison was born Stamford, Connecticut, in 1925. He served in the US Army Air Corps during WWII, but became disheartened with military life. In his spare time he learned Esperanto.
Harrison started his sci-fi career as an illustrator, working with Wally Wood on Weird Fantasy and Weird Science up until 1950. He also wrote for syndicated comic strips, including Flash Gordon and Rick Random.