In a certain way, there’s nothing less “rock ‘n roll” than the Swiss poster design of the mid-twentieth century. The International Typographic Style and its design analogue, while frequently alluring, are stiff and unspontaneous, rife with right angles, straight lines, spare layouts, and immaculately kerned letters. They appeal to the part of the mind that cries out for order.

Both the post-punk and post-rock movements took a step or two away from the overtly rage-derived music of the Sex Pistols or X-Ray Spex, finding solace in “cooler” and oftentimes more robotic music that cloaked its emotionalism in tempered musical styles. This isn’t to say that there’s no emotion in Joy Division, Radiohead, Gang of Four, or Tortoise, merely that those groups and their ilk are more interested in seeking out the boundaries of form rather than letting their “wet,” subjective feelings take center stage.

In her book Exploring Typography, Tova Rabinowitz has this to say about the Swiss font-heads of decades past:
 

Around 1945, two former Bauhaus students, Théo Ballmer and Max Bill of Switzerland, recognized that increasing globalization with creating a need for a visual language that would be suitable for international communication. The style they developed—which was based on a clear arrangement of elements, photography, abstract designs, and sans-serif typefaces—came to be called the International Typographic Style (also called Swiss International Style). ... Any elements that might be confusing to an international audience were excluded. Unemotional layouts were composed that relied heavily on mathematical modular grids and a hierarchical organization of information. All elements were selected and sized to create direct and informative layouts. The calm objectivity of the International Typographic Style gained popularity, especially among corporate interests, and was dominant in America and Europe throughout the 1950s. International Typographic Style typefaces were sans serifs, based on geometric shapes. Helvetica, designed by Max Miedinger in 1952 ... became one of the most widely used typefaces in history. Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1957, gained immense popularity because of its extensive range of type styles.

For such reasons one might argue that Swiss modernism and post-punk/post-rock are natural partners. Not long ago the good people of Bleep.com unveiled two breathtaking posters celebrating the landmarks of post-punk and post-rock. For each genre “Dorothy” generated an incredible poster of 42 postage stamps, each celebrating a different album. Both posters are 4 colour print with silver foil and measure 80x60 centimeters. The post-punk poster features seminal albums such as Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats, The Teardrop Explodes’ Kilimanjaro, The Cure’s Pornography, and The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy. Meanwhile, the post-rock album celebrates Slint’s Spiderland, Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, Mogwai’s Young Team, Radiohead’s Kid A, and Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die. In every case the album is represented by a spare, “Swiss”-inspired visual motif and lists the name of the artist, the album title, the running time, the label, and the release date—thus proving that the International Typographic Style is an efficient method of transmitting information.

Both posters cost $45.50 but the post-punk one is temporarily out of stock; however they are “expected soon.”
 
Catch the posters 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
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
For the first time, legendary ‘1981’ post-punk mix is available to download in full

 
For many years now, the Musicophilia blog has been a source of tightly themed mixes showcasing the best of various genres, most notably postpunk, that are mind-bogglingly awesome. The mix for which the proprietor, named Ian Manire, is best known is almost certainly his gargantuan tribute to 1981, in which the music of that year was eventually broken up into nine distinct sub-mixes, those being “Feet,” “Convertible,” “Brain,” “Heart,” “Cassette,” “Computer,” “Fire,” “Amplifier,” and “Ice.”

The easiest way to describe these mixes is that they were all but designed for the Dangerous Minds readership specifically. Sample names from the set include the Cramps, Flipper, Bad Brains, Klaus Nomi, the Birthday Party, Kraftwerk, Magazine, the Ramones, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Pretenders, Gang of Four, PiL, New Order, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, Grace Jones, and Echo & the Bunnymen. If these acts all seem a little bit too “been there before” for you, not to worry: the mixes also have ample room for the likes of the Comsat Angels, the Durutti Column, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Bush Tetras, Cybotron, Crash Course in Science, and the Embarrassment.

The ‘1981’ mixes started out as a physical object, “a 10-disc, 9-mix physical box set that I shipped to whoever wanted it (for the cost of shipping), put together and refined from 2004-2005 as a way of exploring a several-years-gestating obsession with post punk, which, it seemed to me, had reached its maximum depth, breadth and fecundity in the eponymous year.” Eager listeners also received an amazing addendum, a “massive spill-over mp3-CD” known simply as “Briefcase.” The original nine mixes featured 231 tracks and lasted 12 hours—“Briefcase” alone contained a whopping 251 tracks and 13 hours. That material has never been made available for download.

Yesterday, for the first time, Manire made the entire set of mixes available for download. As Manire wrote on the well-known ilXor “I love music” forum, “It likely won’t last long, but thanks to Mediafire doing away with file size restrictions, I’ve finally shared the *truly* complete ‘1981’ box set, with the never-before-shared-online ‘Briefcase’ disc.”

If you have a couple of spare gigs on your hard drive, act now. Download them here. You won’t be disappointed.

More after the jump…