Perhaps there should be a warning. Maybe something like: “These Ghanaian movie posters may have no relationship to the actual film you are about to see.” But that kinda ruins what these artists are trying to achieve. Their remit was simple: Get as many people to come and see this film no matter what—so paint lots of blood and guts and monsters and big, big, huge breasts. Anything. Just so long as it gets some butts on seats and some moolah in the box office coffers.

The Ghanaian artists who created these posters probably didn’t make much money for their efforts. They probably could earn far more painting walls or street signs or putting down road markings. Each poster could take up to three days to create depending on the subject matter and what the artist could find out about the movie. Their one big advantage was that they could paint whatever they liked so long as it created interest. This inevitably led to a few well-worn tropes: snake women, skeletons, zombies, witchcraft, and even the occasional giant fish—as seen in a few James Bond posters. Some of these efforts are far better than the films they advertised—Van Helsing, for example.

The so-called “Golden Age” of Ghanaian movie posters is cited as the 1980s—1990s, when the boom in VHS players meant films could be screened in the smallest of venues, Most of the posters from this era were painted on grain sacks or just large pieces of cloth. These now fetch around a thousand bucks a pop at the more fashionable L.A. art galleries—considerably more than the few cedis the artist originally made.
 

 

 

 
More handmade Ghanaian movie posters, after the jump…
 

 
We’re leaving Beardsley country. Taking the old dirt road off Harry Clarke county, on thru the inky backwoods and the old lost village long grown green and rotten with tree and weed, towards a place called Vania Zouravliov. The sky’s dark, and there’s movement among the trees that grow too close together to give any idea what that movement might be other than it’s something watching, something waiting. And you know pretty soon you’re going be meeting this something one way or another and the thought of it sends a cold ripple of excitement through your backbone as you push on ahead wanting to get there faster.

That’s kinda like the feeling I get when I look at the artwork of Vania Zouravliov.

Zouravliov is a Russian graphic artist based in London who draws sensuous, intricate pictures of beauty, death, sex, and decay. Born into an artistic family (his mother was an art teacher), Zouravliov was a child prodigy whose earliest works gained him considerable praise and some notoriety—“famous communist artists, godfathers of social realism, told him that his work was from the Devil.” He was drawing “evil hammerhead people” at the age of four, which he has said proves that “Contrary to what most adults would like to believe, a child’s mind can be a very strange and disturbing place.”

By thirteen, Zouravliov was exhibiting his work in Moscow in 1994 and then internationally. He began to travel and later attended art college in Edinburgh where he started his career in earnest producing work for the Scotsman newspaper and then for magazines and comics. He moved to London where he is currently based.

In an interview with Awk Online Gallery, Zouravilov said he found his inspiration everywhere:

[F]rom popular culture to classical art.I get inspired by fashion magazines, books, films, old photographs, music, various cultures, and religions. I think my overall melancholic view on life is represented in my work.

When I was a child I used to draw animals and birds all the time and now I draw women. I can’t think of anything more interesting or beautiful at this point in my life. I use female characters in my work to say or explain things about myself.

He cites his favorite artists as Ingres, Gustav Dore, Grunewald, Von Bayros, Bakst, Utamar, and Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff—whose paintings have an “other-worldly feel to them.”

That other-worldly feel is also there in Zouravliov’s work which is rich, beautiful, and utterly personal. There’s a quote from Zouravliov that’s been bandied about the Internet for a long time which gives his answer to the question “What’s the one thing that gives you the inspiration to keep making art?”

A strong belief that creativity is the only relative freedom we have in this world.

It’s a good answer which I hope is true. See more of Vania Zouravliov’s work here and here.
 

 

 
See more of Vania Zouravliov’s art, after the jump…
 

 
A few months ago, DM brought you news that a legendary postpunk mix that had been bouncing around for years was now officially downloadable in full for the first time. That mix, titled 1981, was the brainchild of a well-nigh bottomless musical compendium of awesome and obscure shit named Ian Manire. That mix exhaustively covered the manifold epiphanies from 1981, and when I say “exhaustively,” I’m talking on the order of 25 solid hours of music. If you’d like to hear more about that, by all means, you really should.

Earlier today, Manire uploaded a relatively modest effort called 1979, which consists of seven new CD-length mixes that organize the postpunk output of 1979 into several broad themes, which was also more or less how the 1981 compilation worked: “Fire,” “Amplifier,” “Brain,” “Cassette,” “Computer,” “Convertible,” and “Ice.” Fans of Talking Heads, Magazine, Comsat Angels, etc. are encouraged to download and burn the mixes for free. Many of the tracks will be known to you, but one of the pleasures of Manire’s mixes is the encounter with less familiar bands, such as Essendon Airport, Essential Logic, and the Embarrassment and even many bands not starting with the letter E.
 

 
In a longer note, Manire said this of the motivation behind investigating 1979 after such an intensive engagement with 1981:
 

I originally made ‘1981‘ because that seemed the year of peak post-punk fecundity, the maximum expansion of its sounds, styles, and energy before it all inevitably had to cool down (though post-punk-rooted artist aged much more gracefully than their rock forebears, see ‘The Dawning’ and ‘Evensong’).  1979 isn’t quite so overgrown with sheer diversity and quantity, but it’s got the quality in spades.  Post-punk might have been ‘born’ in ’78, when all the fomenting strands began to coalesce.  But 1979 seems like the year the spark of punk fully became the post-punk wildfire.  Many of the most well-loved and iconic albums of post-punk were issued in ’79: ‘Fear of Music,’ ‘Entertainment,’ ‘The Raincoats,’ ‘Y,’ ‘Unknown Pleasures,’ ‘Cut,’ ‘Metal Box,’ ‘The B-52’s,’ ‘Quiet Life,’ ‘Replicas,’ ‘Specials,’ and on and on, and those artists are well represented.  But ’79 was already generating remarkable breadth, as many more nascent and less well-known groups were also making incredible music, and a lot of them are here, too. As with ‘1981,’ the gap between the legendary and the mostly forgotten is strikingly non-existent.

 
Here’s a stirring “sampler” from the 1979 mix, just so you can get an idea of what you’re in for. FYI: The first track is “Do the Du,” from A Certain Ratio’s 1979 John Peel session, which is an exemplary kickoff to more than 8 hours of galvanizing, bracing tunesmithery:

 
via Carpet DM
 

“We don’t just do a musical performance. It’s a 45-minute happening.”—Marc Bolan on John’s Children in 1967

John’s Children were a mod-era proto-psychedelic, proto-glam, proto-punk rock British beat group who are today mostly regarded as a footnote in the career of Marc Bolan. The future T.Rex leader was briefly brought into the group to replace a departing guitarist by manager Simon Napier-Bell (who also managed the Yardbirds, and later Wham!). They were never Bolan’s band, although he did write a few songs for them.

Their flamboyant stage antics were reminiscent of the Who during their “auto-destruct” phase and featured pillow fights, feathers, fake blood and lots of beating up on their instruments. The group wore all white and apparently played quite loud. Their lyrics “went for it” in ways not typically done at the time, with a song like “Not the Sort of Girl (You’d Like to Take to Bed)” and an album that they titled Orgasm which their American label refused to release for four years. As one rock scribe remarked about John’s Children, they were “generally disrespectful and crazed” and once posed for a magazine advertisement wearing nothing more than some strategically placed flowers.
 

 
Probably the most notable John’s Children number is a powerfully strange ditty for the era titled “Smashed! Blocked!”:

Please! I’m losing my mind
Help me now before it’s too late
Try to bring me back
Everythings spinning
My eyes are tired
I’m losing my way
Where are you, where am I?

 

 
A few years ago a “Smashed! Blocked!” clip of somewhat mysterious origin turned up on YouTube. The group’s lead singer, Andy Ellison had this to say:

This is strange film clip, that Chris, John and myself (Andy Ellison) filmed for our first single, at the then famous, basement, ‘Establishment Club’ (Peter Cooks, satirical venue in Greek St Soho), 1967. The clip is made up from bits of film left on the cutting room floor. A technician must have kept them. And Somehow they have made it to YouTube! No Idea what happened to the proper film.

He went on to add:

SMASHED was a mod term for drunk and BLOCKED was a mod term for being pilled up (high on amphetamines).

Now ya know. Original copies of this single can sell for big bucks on Discogs.

 
Between them, the members of instrumental quartet Double Naught Spy Car have served as side players for too many greats to list, but highlights of their collective CV include stints with Lydia Lunch, Nina Hagen, Nels Cline, Josie Cotton, Taj Mahal, Robert Fripp, and Stan Ridgway. As DNSC, they’ve served as the backing band for live performances by crime novelist James Ellroy. Their sound is an all-embracing classicist homage, drawing from surf, exotica, lounge jazz, prog, and Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtracks. (Amusingly, the CD Baby page for the release categorizes them as “Jazz: Weird Jazz.”) Their kitchen-sink methods were described thusly to L.A. Weekly by the band’s guitarist Paul Lacques:

We don’t pay off for fans of any genre. If you‘re a surf fan, we’re really gonna let you down. If you‘re a jazz fan, we’re gonna offend you. If you‘re a rock fan, good luck. If you’re a country fan…well, maybe we‘re reaching a country audience. We sort of mock genre, and at the same time we’re trying to create our own genre.

Their sixth album, MOOF, is set for release in a week, and it’s DM’s privilege to premier the entire album for you today. It includes a lot of high-powered guest performers, including Nels Cline, Mike Watt, Sylvia Juncosa, Joe Baiza (Saccharine Trust), Joe Gore (Tom Waits), and Ben Vaughn. That last name gave me a laugh to read—despite having penned the surfy theme music for 3rd Rock from the Sun he’s far from a household name, but he’s the artist behind one of my desert island albums, Designs in Music, a marvelous record that MOOF’s kitsch-obeisant ethos and slick production immediately reminded me of.

Here’s that LP stream for your examination. High points to our minds are “Hairsuit,” “Rhymes of Chimney,” “The Hesher Variation,” and “Loose Cannons in Tight Quarters.”
 

 
Imagine someone sneaked into your bedroom when you were asleep, peeled back your eyelids and scooped out your very worst nightmares then turned them all into sculptures.

Well, that’s kinda like what Mexican artist Emil Melmoth has achieved with his gruesome, morbid, yet strangely compelling sculptures of deformed creatures and unnamed things that dwell in the night—he has made the terrors of darkness visible.

Melmoth takes his inspiration from religious iconography, medical anatomy, death culture, the circus, the freak show, and the downright macabre. His sculptures may look like expensive props for a deeply disturbing horror movie but they are intended to engage the viewer in some serious thinking. Fusing wax, ceramics, resin, nails, and bone, Melmoth creates meditations on the human condition that juxtapose “ideas of religious immortality and paradise with the reality of bodily imperfection, dissection, and truths of scientific knowledge.”

[His] wax, anatomical models revel in a dark and surreal environment, and where his depraved sculptures live in affliction: fragile beings in an eternally harrowing state of mind. Melmoth projects the sublime and ethereal concepts of death onto his creations, portraying pessimism, nihilism, existentialism, the question of transcendence beyond death, mental instability, and self-destruction, all ideas represented in his invigorating constructs.

An exhibition of his work is currently on show at the Last Rites Gallery (until September 9th) but if you can’t make that then you can follow Emil Melmoth on Instagram and Facebook.
 

 

 

 
See more of Emil Melmoth’s nightmarish sculptures, after the jump…
 

 
Ever wanted a giant skull chair to relax in? Well, have I got just the giant skull chair for you. Chicsin Design on Etsy makes the skull chair for $450 with free shipping worldwide. I’ve never ordered from this shop before, so I can’t vouch for the quality of their merch. I do, however, totally dig it.

According to the listing, it “will require assembling before use.” I hope it’s not complicated. You may want to contact Chicsin Design before purchasing to find out. I mean if IKEA can end marriages, what damage might a difficult to assemble giant skull chair cause?

 

 
More after the jump…

 
If you have a cat then you know you’re in thrall to that little furball pussy-paws. Your cat rules your life and only lets you live because you feed it, empty its litter tray, and sometimes you can be quite amusing like a smelly old court jester telling fart jokes. You know your place. And so does your goddam cat. So isn’t it time you just admit who’s boss in your household? Who’s the veritable Regent of all it surveys? And give your cutesy cat god the throne it deserves like maybe the one from Game of Thrones?

Made for Pets make “pet furniture” for your favorite feline (or even canine) to snuggle-up in. Among the many designs on offer is this “Iron Throne” cat bed as inspired by the hit book and TV series Game of Thrones. It’s a bit pricey at around $200 (£158.64) but if you love your cat and you know it’s really the protector of the realm, the top feline of all the Seven Kingdoms, etc. etc. etc. then you know damn fine your kitty deserves its very own Iron Throne. See details here.
 

 

 
Inspect more of your cats new bed, after the jump…
 

 
The little-known German band, Night Sun, is one of the earliest groups to blend heavy metal with progressive rock—and they did it really well. They were around for just a few short years, and released only one record, but it’s a MONSTER.

Night Sun were based out of Mannheim, and though many members passed through the Night Sun ranks—including former servicemen of the British army stationed in Germany—their identities are largely unknown. But we do know the lineup that appears on their lone album, Mournin’: Walter Kirchgässner played guitar; Ulrich Staudt was the drummer; multi-instrumentalist Knut Rössler took on piano, organ, saxophone, trumpet, and trombone; bassist Bruno Schaab was also the singer, voicing all of the lyrics in English.
 

 
The most famous individual to orbit the Night Sun universe was the producer/engineer of Mournin’, the great Conny Plank (Krafterwerk, Neu!, etc, etc). In the LP credits, the producer is listed as “Aamok Musikproducktion,” which was the name of Plank’s company. The album was released by Zebra Records, a German label, and was distributed by Polydor International.

Night Sun comes out blazing with the opening track on Mournin’, “Plastic Shotgun.” The mix of Deep Purple’s organ-driven hard rock and heavy metal masters Black Sabbath, executed with the speed and precision of prog rock, is startlingly great. Get ready, ‘cause “Plastic Shotgun” is gonna blow your head off.
 

 
Other groups that come to mind while listening to Mournin’ include King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, and Billy Joel’s wild, pre-fame two-piece, Attila. After the jump, we’ll embed a few more of our favorites from the Night Sun record, but if you like what you hear—and we assume you will—check out the entire LP here.

DIG IT, after the jump…

 
Call me disputatious—or else DON’T, it’s entirely up to you—my favorite Stones album has always been Their Satanic Majesties Request. It’s practically the only one that I still play all the way through. It sounds so amazing as one great big, trippy chunk, that it would be a shame not to experience the whole thing in one go. Many Stones fans and music critics hated TSMR when it came out and saw the album as a weak attempt to out weird the Beatles after they’d unleashed Sgt Pepper’s on the world, but time has been very kind to Their Satanic Majesties Request. To me, it’s just a thing of great beauty, with the normal blues-based Stones sound thrown out the window and replaced with a colorful sonic palette the likes of which they would never return to.  It’s a fantastic headphones album, too, the closest they ever got to doing a Pink Floyd (and it’s NOT a Sgt Pepper’s wannabe, okay? Obviously TSMR (badly) wants to be the Stones’ Piper at the Gates of Dawn!)

Anyway, I’m not saying that it IS the best Stones album, I’m just saying that it’s MY favorite. (For the record, my favorite Stones song is “Monkey Man,” followed by “Stray Cat Blues,” then “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)”—dark horses, all, I grant you. I’m also partial to “I Don’t Know Why,” but the Glimmer Twins didn’t write that one—it’s a Stevie Wonder cover.)

Their Satanic Majesties Request is getting re-released on September 22 by ABKCO in a 50th anniversary deluxe box set that’s packaged in a slick, limited edition bespoke box set that comes with two records (a stereo and mono pressing of the album, remastered by Bob Ludwig, with the lacquers cut at Abbey Road Studios) and two SACDs (which will still play in a normal CD player) of the stereo and mono mixes. Overkill? Oh probably, but then again I already own two copies of the original stereo LP with the 3-D lenticular cover, the 2002 SACD and a DSD download of the mono mix from that recent Rolling Stones in Mono box set. Maybe I’m the wrong middle-aged guy to ask. (It sounds very nice, by the way. Not sure it’s going to displace my original wax, but it sounds quite tasty in case you were wondering. The mono mix reveals a far punkier-sounding album and is absolutely worth having.)
 

 
Anyway, if you ask me, the Stones’ “demonic” phase, inaugurated, if you will, by their association with the Magus of Cinema, Kenneth Anger, was when the band were truly at their peak. Mick was still quite into his Satan/Lucifer thing well into the Let It Bleed/Gimme Shelter-era, but after Altamont, Jagger was often seen wearing a crucifix around his neck, perhaps seeking to put down all that chaotic hoodoo Age of Horus energy he’d help raise? Have sympathy for the poor devil. Jagger had a shamanic current running through his body during the Sixties that killed quite a few of his friends and contemporaries. Today, like a rock and roll Dorian Gray, he hardly looks any worse for the wear.
 

Kenneth Anger’s “Invocation of My Demon Brother” with a bleating one-note (but super effective!) Moog synthesizer soundtrack by Mick Jagger.

Much more after the jump…