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Visiting a strange city with Sun Ra and Merzbow
When Cold Spring Records brought together the talents of Sun Ra and Merzbow, the opportunity to design something distinctive was too great to pass up. Cold Spring’s Justin Mitchell negotiated rare and unreleased tracks from the Sun Ra archive which were then remixed and treated by Merzbow’s Masami Akita into five pieces that turn Ra’s sounds into crushing noise whilst retaining his sense of space and innovation. Strange City was released as a matt laminated digipak CD and on 180gm black vinyl, with a limited 200 on yellow vinyl for Cold Spring mailorder customers only. Different music was featured on each format, with Livid Sun Loop and Granular Jazz Part 2 on the CD and…
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A Handful of Z’EV
2015 saw the release of Eleven Mirrors to the Light, bringing to a conclusion what had evolved into a trilogy of releases by legendary percussionist Z’EV on Cold Spring Records. Writing the press release for Eleven Mirrors gave me cause to reflect on the previous two releases, and where the third sat in relation to it. “Z’EV completes an alchemical exploration of Concord and Dissonance that began with the cosmological equations of Sum Things and then clasped the elemental quintet of air, water, fire, earth and spirit in A Handful of Elements. Now, with Eleven Mirrors to the Light, Z’EV plays with the intersection of light and dark, catching waves…
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Climbing an emergency stairway to heaven, backwards
This survey of recent and not so recent work consists of several Cold Spring releases and begins with a picture disc and CD release from the legendary Hijokaidan. This was quite the honour and it was made all the better by being provided with some rather lovely gearshots to work with. These shots of wires and mixers (and an orange keyboard of some kind) provided the focus for the two sides of the picture disc, which contained the four parts of the studio-recorded title track. The CD, presented in a digisleeve and containing a track each from two live shows, was adorned with thumbnails of Hijokaidan performing. She Spread Sorrow…
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Dragons, Pillars and Hekatombs, Oh My.
A brief survey of recent and not so recent work includes the double CD of Draconis by legendary purveyors of noise rock Skullflower, released on Cold Spring. The brief called for a look that recalled the heady days of occult publishing in the 1970s, so a double CD book-like digipack was designed using a blue cloth-bound look, incorporating sigils and photographs by Skullflower’s Matthew Bower. Other recent releases on Cold Spring include album designs for Khost, a picture disc of Laibach’s Neu Konservatiw and released this month, Hekatomb, a document of Mz. 412 performing at Cold Spring’s 21st anniversary, with photos from the evening adorning the digipack. Recently released by…
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Nine Inch Nails gets recoiled on Cold Spring
Some of our recent work has included Recoiled, a collection of remixes of Nine Inch Nails tracks by Coil on Cold Spring. Remixed from original multi-tracks and DATs sent by Trent Reznor to Peter Christophersen and Danny Hyde, part of which was appeared in the soundtrack for the film Se7en. Featuring the treated photographs of Marius Andrei Dima, Recoiled was issued in multiple formats: a CD digipack, black vinyl, limited brown/black splatter vinyl, and a forthcoming picture disc version.
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Recent new releases from Psychic TV and Mesektet
There have been a couple of recent releases on Cold Spring, with three live Psychic TV albums and the debut from Mesektet. The Psychic TV albums include shows from the Haçienda, the Marquee Club in London and at the Hammersmith Palais (with the release taking its name from that of the event, The Fabulous Feast ov Flowering Light). The cover art for The Fabulous Feast ov Flowering Light incorporates Val Denham’s original t shirt design for the event. Both the Marquee and the Fabulous Feast ov Flowering Light releases include 8 page booklets with sometimes never seen archival photos of the performances Towards a Bleak Sun is the debut from Dutch dark ambient act…
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New releases from Z’EV, Tunnels of Ah and The Grey Wolves
There have been a couple of recent releases on Cold Spring. For a vinyl and slipcase-CD reissue of Blood and Sand from The Grey Wolves, we took the original artwork from 2002 and remixed it, adding a strong typographic focus using Karbon Slab Stencil; a face that has a suggestion of military stencil but still with a modern typographic polish. A Handful of Elements, Z’EV’s follow-up to his previous Cold Spring album Sum Things, incorporates photographs shot at Cape Palliser near Ngawi, featuring rocks, sky and sea to express the idea of the elements found in the track titles. Also recently released is Lost Corridors, the debut album from Tunnels of…
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Gnosis Exhibition: 18 October – 16 November
Gnosis | Occult perspectives in Art opened last night at Nature: Art + Design in Auckland and runs through to 16 November. This features work by Abby Helasdottir, along with Mary MacGregor-Reid, Math Kabryn, Melanie Tahata, Joel Bradley, Jared Holland and Steven Johnson Leyba. |gnos·tic [nos-tik] 1. pertaining to knowledge. 2. possessing knowledge, especially esoteric knowledge. |Gnosis describes an individual’s attainment of inner understanding of the nature of the universe and it’s parts – often through life-long perseverance, frustrating examination, and mystical initiation – involving great sacrifice and usually subtle but real risk to themselves. Those who are privy to these supra-human states of knowledge-in-being often accomplish feats that surpass what is normal – and may be described as “magical” by…
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Troum – Syzygie
We are very pleased to announce the release of Syzygie on Cold Spring Records by legendary drone duo Troum. Syzygie is a collection of rare / deleted tracks from compilations Vol. II (1999-2002). Everything recorded by Troum between November 1999 and May 2002 on analogue 8-track. 9 meticulously crafted tracks, carefully compiled by Troum and delicately remastered by Martin Bowes (Attrition). It was a pleasure and an honour to work with Glit[S]ch and Baraka[H] on the artwork for this release. Available from Cold Spring