Back catalogue: Leftfield

Notes: These are the first and last sentences from Charbel Haber's latest offering, A Common Misunderstanding of the Speed of Light: a multi-media musing on the chronic and the chronological, the subversive nature of time. This combination of a record and book observes the slow passing of life and the illusion of retrogradation in his every day. Simply by documenting - via image, text and tune - Haber assigns value to everything that is cast in amber by this project. There's an acceptance and appreciation of the destitution he witnesses, it is an homage given in overlapping forms.

ACMOTSOL has two parts. The book, paperback in an embossed orange, features photographs and texts taken from Haber's personal digital diary spanning from 2020 to the start of 2022. Broken into six chapters - named for the six tracks on the record - the entries are an artist's log of sorts during a peculiar period of global hyper stagnation and navigating the aftermath of the Beirut explosions. The 96 pages highlight Haber's interest in decay, negative space and the temporality of the human condition. Instead of presenting the images and texts as they were originally paired online, they're reordered and recontextualized in the book. New connections are formed, as tenuous and fleeting as the content they surround. The images interrupt the texts in many instances, forcing pauses and inviting distraction.

At the centre of the book is a sudden burst of orange pages, with stylized pluckings of the text framing a QR-code that grants access to the record. With the brilliant orange covers and matching innards, pregnant with the music at the core, it's almost as if these central pages act as a way to turn the book inside out. There, the book's purpose is altered, fixated on a mirror image of itself. It forms a self-completing arc for the project, a loop.

ACMOTSO's second half is that mirrored album. Six tracks totalling just under 52 minutes. The music could be a continuation of his solo albums Of Palm Trees and Decompositions (2016) and It Ended Up Being a Good Day Mr. Allende (2012), an exploration into the expansiveness of seemingly simple loops of a lilting guitar. Careful electronic effects add dimensions or reground the listener. There's a swelling of sound, the illusion of the push of space before it retracts back into itself or fades into the distance. Much like the images and texts the music complements, the songs challenge the purity of cycles. Endings are beginnings, beginnings are endings or is everything just the middle? Haber is quietly and elegantly grappling with the troublesome act of place-making. In music, in words and in visual storytelling.

ACMOTSOL is a work that can be calming or disorienting, depending on what is requested of it. Similar to the way loops and cycles can signify both meditation and mania. The tendrils of Haber's past - his home of Beirut, fictional and real characters encountered, authors read, films watched, composers listened, walks taken - knit themselves together for a presentation of our immediate present. An evidence of a happening. A considered project of time.

All photographs, texts and music by Charbel Haber. Album mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. Design by Maziyar Pahlevan. Printed by Albe De Coker in Belgium.

This dual-part project will be released on November 11 2022 on 'Other People.'

Description by Nereya Otieno.

86 images
6 songs
52 minutes
96 pages
86 texts

Notes: Written by Spiral Tribe's co-founder and visual artist, Mark Angelo Harrison, A Darker Electricity charts the infamous sound system's nomadic journey and the rapid escalation of their popularity - and notoriety.

From small squat-scene parties in early 90s London to enormous warehouse raves and free festivals. The undercover police operation against them. The record deal with Youth. The creation of their community recording studio. The government stitch-up and their prosecution. The escape to Europe and the start of the teknival scene.

Notes: Large format catalogue documenting a multichannel installation by Florian Hecker at Kunsthalle Wien, transformated into a resonating space, with texts by curators, researchers, theorists, and art historians.

The catalogue collects essays by curators, researchers, theorists, and art historians on Hecker's work and its relation to topics ranging from musique concrète, Mallarmé's poem The Afternoon of a Faun, and computer music. The psychoacoustic phenomenon of Resynthese FAVN is illustrated via a series of tensor acoustic measurements resembling the colorized impressions of thermal imaging, which is followed by 270 pages of densely sprawling data tables abstracting sound and its textures into text.

Notes: After having borrowed lines from Jimi Hendrix and English poets for all previous anniversary releases we struck out for this one until Kim, well after the deadline, accidentally stumbled over Johnny Cash and "Forever Words: The Unknown Poems". "Let's Put It To Music" quite nails it when it comes to the basic idea of the book and how we approach the whole process of making a record.

As Tim Gane is quotet in Adrian Shaughnessy's introduction "a Stereolab record was never finished until the cover was done". That rings true for Rune Grammofon as well, and we would like to add that a sleeve is never designed for the sole purpose of selling a product (it took 28 releases before an artist was pictured on the sleeve!), or necessarily reflect the music in any way (is that even possible?), but rather to establish a suggestive relation between the two, often based on the album title or a song title, but not in an obvious way.
After some 200 releases, I can't remember Kim ever "explaining" a sleeve design, and I can't remember me ever asking him. It's no secret that label founder Rune Kristoffersen is a big admirer of labels like Blue Note, Impulse, ECM, 4AD and Factory, to mention some labels with strong visual identities. But we can't recall another label that has worked with one designer exclusively for 20 years and 200 releases.

The exclusivity was a premise for our collaboration from the very beginning, but we certainly never had any expectations about how long we would be able to keep it going. Especially when considering that Kim is occupied on a number of arenas; as photographer, filmmaker, illustrator, painter, writer, musician, dancer and choreographer.
As one will discover, the book is far from being a catalog lining up the releases (it's not even "complete" or chronological in that sense), but gives an interesting insight by also including sketches, rejected designs and unused ideas that never left the drawing board... until now. Lists are a source of controversy, as Hedvig Mollestad discusses rather well in her text.

We haven't had much time for them either, but with the resurgence of music literature on all sort of subjects, they seem to have come alive again. And with the eclectic mix of artists on the label, why not give it a try? We figure the main funcion of lists is to arouse curiosity and hopefully lead to new cultural discoveries, which can only be a good thing. The idea of including a 7" single also came late and would depend on getting at last one track real quickly. To our delight, we miraculously ended up with what is surely three of the most beautiful tracks in our catalog, and all exclusive for this release.

Tracklist:

Side A:
1. Fire! Orchestra - Enter, Part One (With & Without Fire!)

Side B:
1. Maja SK Ratkje - Sja, Amioda
2. The Last Hurrah!! With Nora Zheng - Blues In Chinatown

Notes: A charming, often barbed observation of the evolution of American mainstream filmmaking over the course of its first century, this memoir chronicles the unusual, multidecade career trajectory of Curtis Harrington. Conveyed in a witty and campy style, it follows the strange arc of a man who created avant-garde films as part of Kenneth Anger's inner circle, directed critically acclaimed and cult adored horror films like Night Tide and Games, and then descended down the "slippery slope" of television work by directing episodes of Charlie's Angels and Dynasty.

As a fast paced view of Harrington's journey through the kaleidoscope of the movie business, it acts alternately as a personal memoir and cultural history from a veteran of the entertainment business. As Harrington was living as a gay man in Hollywood, the book additionally gives a rare peek into the hidden world of what was then an elite subculture. Doubling as both a serious study of film aesthetics and a gossipy tell-all, this truly unique look at the Hollywood dream includes an unlikely cast of characters, including Dennis Hopper, Christopher Isherwood, Shelley Winters, Marilyn Monroe, Stanley Kubrick, and Aaron Spelling, as it reveals a portrait of the machinations of the film and television business.

Curtis Harrington was a film and television director whose work included experimental films, horror films, and episodic television. He was a close associate of groundbreaking cult film pioneer Kenneth Anger and is considered one of the forerunners of New Queer Cinema.

The book includes a mid section of black and white photographs.

Notes: Hardbound Book w/Signed Bookplate by author Jeff Hayes / 6" x 9" / 200 pages

Both the book and music packaging for the CD and vinyl were designed by Hagcult, who previously worked with 1984 Publishing on Clark Collis' acclaimed You're Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Came to Life, plus on artwork for officially-licensed Halloween and Vampira merchandise. The Sleepaway Camp releases also feature the original hand-drawn one-sheet artwork by David Schleinkofer.

About Jeff Hayes (author): Jeff Hayes is a filmmaker who has made independent short films, documentaries, and even a handful of experimental feature-length films (mostly horror-related, of course). Jeff has run the official site SleepawayCampMovies.com for over two decades and co-produced Robert Hiltzik's Return to Sleepaway Camp. Jeff is also a vocalist and music producer who was lead singer for several bands and released two '80s/'90s-influenced solo albums. He enjoys spending time with his cats Sadie and Dexter (named after another one of his favorite characters) and is a supporter of NeadyCats.org. Married to his lovely wife (and always his co-producer) Cheryl since 2005, the couple reside in picturesque Massachusetts. This is his first book.

Notes: 'This book will delight both New Order-ites and general rock readers' Mojo

A rollicking, no-holds-barred account of New Order's entire history.

Two acclaimed albums and an upcoming US tour - Joy Division had the world at their feet. Then, on the eve of that tour, the band's troubled lead singer, Ian Curtis, killed himself. The next time they got together, they were a new band.

That band was New Order - their label was Factory Records, their club The Hacienda. Their distinctive sound paved the way for the dance music explosion that followed, earning them the reputation as one of the most influential bands of their generation, and changing the course of popular music.

Following on from his bestselling titles The Hacienda and Unknown Pleasures, Peter Hook has written a rollicking, no-holds-barred account of the band's entire history. Substance is packed with never-before-seen detail, discographies and technical information. This is possibly the most entertaining memoir ever written by a British musician.

'There are stories here that make Ozzy Osbourne looks like Mother Teresa' Sunday Express

'A rollicking read' Record Collector

'Rock writing rarely tells us properly what a band treading water or in slow decline feels like from the inside. Hook does so memorably' Guardian

'As mammoth and downright idiotic as the band deserves... something hilariously daft happens on nearly all of Substance's 750 pages' Classic Pop