Happy #808day everybody! And as we're celebrating the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer I make no apologies for sampling one of my favourite previous threads.
This is the story of digital synthesised music...
In the 1940s Musique Concrète introduced the idea of sampling and sound distortion into musical composition - often with the help of audio tape splicing.
It was all very avant-garde, but it was limited by the available technology.
However by 1957 the massive experimental RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer had shown composers how an analogue synthesizer could be paired with a programmable sequencer to play music too complex for human musicians to manage.
JX Williams was an alias used by many writers who knocked out cheesy sex pulp for Greenleaf publishing. At least 20% of each novel had to be sex scenes with the other 80% titillation, voyeurism or padding.
As a result Greenleaf plots were somewhat thin affairs: sexy sensationalism was more important than character arcs or the niceties of the three act drama.
Time once again for my occasional series "Women with great hair fleeing gothic houses!"
And today it's a Queen-Sized Gothic special...
'Queen-Size' is a polite way of saying large print, which is a format that has a lot going for it. For a start it's much easier to read!
However for years the standard size for a paperback book was the dimensions of a coat pocket. Paperbacks were meant to be read on the train or bus, so they had to be compact. The US term for them was 'pocket books.'
Today in pulp... I look back at an artist whose brazen, action-packed news images captured the essence of post-war Italy: Walter Molino!
Molino began his career as an illustrator and caricaturist in 1935, working on a number of Italian newspapers. But in 1941 he took the prize spot for Italian commercial artists: cover illustrator for La Domenica del Corriere.
La Domenica del Corriere came out every Sunday, free with Corriere della Sera, and its hallmark was always its cover illustration: striking, exciting and sensationalist!