Logo #263: Crash Worship ADRV

Polyrhythmic ritualists Crash Worship ADRV had their bird / knife logo designed by Markus Wolff. Wolff: "Very nice that this forgotten psymbol might be featured in your blog. I designed it in about 1987, and it was used on early shirts and stickers. The bird-headed dagger was of course used in a myriad of ways - I even sculpted and cast about six solid bronze daggers of this type. The symbols on the blade are the initials of Crash Worship's bastardized Mexican alter-ego - Adoracion De Rotura Violenta. That was our proper long name for a while, although the ADRV was dropped at some point in the early '90s for simplicity's sake. Two (of the daggers) were bought by gallery owners, one of whom is deceased and the other runs the Museum of Death. Another one got stolen, and I kept a really nice one. I just recovered two that need to be finished/welded, etc. I'll be photographing these when they're done."

Logo #237: Aesthetic Meat Front

The simple sigil of the Aesthetic Meat Front was duly divined in the halcyon days of 1996 by band founder Louis Fleischauer. Fleischauer: "I designed the symbol when I first started the Aesthetic Meat Foundation. It's a bind rune meant to invoke violent change (evolution)." He currently designs fetishwear under the AMF Korsets couture line and quite honestly they're the only thing even vaguely interesting happening in that part of culture these days - vacuum beds and big rubber mummification balls notwithstanding. As with most couture, fetishwear has more than its share of cheap, pedestrian material and tatty, unimaginative fabrications - but AMF Korsets operate as a stylish and incisive comment on fashion-as-skinned-animals covering slowly rotting sacks of meat. Not that some slowly rotting sacks of meat aren't occasionally deeply attractive!

Logo #234: Coil

Coil's symbol of chaos was originally designed by Jim Cawthorn in 1962 and appropriated by John Balance (born Geoffrey Laurence Burton, a.k.a. Geff Rushton; February 16, 1962 - November 13, 2004) and Peter Christopherson in 1987. Christopherson: "I would say (we started using it) around '87, not before. By the way, I would claim some small credit for first deriving the vaguely 'animal-skull-shaped' version of the chaosstar which occurs when you filter a normal one through a Photoshop Polar co-oordinates filter! This version was used extensively by Coil during the '80s and '90s." Perhaps no other shape since the circle has captured the imagination of modern logo design than the chaos star. SFA, Naked Aggression, Psychick TV, GWAR, Skullflower and Fire + Ice have all wielded it as an identity over the decades, and why no one's used it in a movie as a shuriken is beyond me. Talk about a system! Coil was one of the very first bands - along with Sleep Chamber, Master/Slave Relationship, Controlled Bleeding and SPK - I ever got into on my long journey into the nights and noises of experimental music, and I tend to like them on compilations and in little bits. As one focused album of songs - mmh, not so much. Highly, highly recommended: the "Gold is the Metal with the Heaviest Shoulders" and "Stolen and Contaminated Songs" albums. Your life is improved immeasurably for having heard those sounds at least once and possibly twice.

Logo #229: The Residents

The top-hatted eyeball was designed by Homer Flynn in 1979. Seeing as this is the image with which The Residents are most often associated, I wonder if I should include icons that are less logos than they are items with which various musicians are associated. Elton John's eyeglasses? Altern-8's face masks? Digital Underground's Groucho glasses?

Logo #216: Luftwaffe

From Luftwaffe Central: "Our symbol is properly called the "Sigil Trephanus." It is a line-drawn form of an exploded-view schematic of a 17th-century skull trephine, with its final form being credited to the pen of our own J1 Statik. The original device was wound and spring-driven, in order to bore a fine hole in the skull. Our symbol is based upon a Z-plane view of the moving parts inside, with each being shown at all possible points of movement. One of these appeared on eBay once. We did not have the resources to purchase it at the time, sadly. Our use of the Sigil first appeared in 1998."

This Day in Death:
Cristóbal Balenciaga Eisaguirre (January 21, 1895 - March 23, 1972)
Jacob "Killer" Miller (Inner Circle; May 4, 1952 – March 23, 1980)

Logo #192: Contrastate

Designed by Stephen Meixner in 1987. Contrastate, a trio of masked British experimentalists (Jonathan Grieve, Stephen Meixner and Stephen Pomeroy), littered the avant / home taping networks through the '90s with a beautifully insular, eccentric and at times frightening panoply of sound that was at equal points threatening and soothing. The album titles: "A Live Coal Under The Ashes," I Am A Clown Collecting Moments," "A Thousand Badgers In Labour," "False Fangs For Old Werewolves," and "Seven Hands Seek Nine Fingers." Contrastate broke up, but Meixner still makes music as srmeixner and it's eminently worth seeking out.

Logo #186: Nonhorse

G. Lucas Crane of Brooklyn experimental psych band Nonhorse: "The nonhorse logo was designed by me in 1998. I encountered the logo in a dream - actually a super bleak urban nightmare, post-apocalyptic style. Radioactive fashion zombies picked over the rubble for promotional Pepsi-embroidered leather jackets and such. I got mugged for the AA batteries in my pocket by injured skinheads in front of a huge partly-destroyed billboard. So, in the dream I was aware that it was some previously existing ad campaign that was rendered immediately useless when the bombs fell and the plague hit. That fact coupled with the perspective trick of the actual design combined to create an "information-paranoia-confusion" symbol of the transition in the mind and in the world from a ordered but superficial reality and a post-civilization chaotic natural state. For a while, the symbol itself was seriously bad luck for me. The "nonhorse" was some sort of evil thing, a malignant confusion created to sell but now taken on a horrible new meaning of non-thing-ness. Later, it was pointed out that the symbol also contains the word "yes," which I took to mean some subconscious contradiction on my part - my own brain vs. itself - the confusion being internal. About 2001, I started playing music under the name nonhorse. The original ideas involved in the dream and what the symbol became - a curse - were ideas I wanted to explore performance-wise. Sometimes when I'm in NYC, I play as "G. Lucas Crane vs. Nonhorse," which is a throwback to the dream. It's a little personal, and I don't talk about it a lot."

Logo #183: Painslut

Created by Painslut founder Matthias "Matze" Erhard. Matze: "The logo was designed by me somewhere around 2003 and appeared the first time on a 7" release in 2004 named "This Is My War" on Steinklang Industries." A Google search for "painslut" brings up over 59,000 results, so be sure to get in on the ground floor for this exciting fetish today before everyone else knows about it. Painslut released a split cassette with Oregon experimentalist IDX1274 (in an edition of 22 - eat it, numerology!), the notes for which are as follows: "Each cassette was placed into a sandwich baggie and then into a two-tone stenciled paper bag, and each bag was personally huffed by IDX1274 after shooting a generous blast of spray paint inside to inhale."

The Song of the Moment is "Party Train" by The Gap Band, which boasts one of the most emotional and sentimental keyboard riffs coming out of the chorus of any song from the '80s.

Logo #175: sunn O)))

sunn O)))'s sun was designed by Bob Selby for Sunn Amplifiers in 1965 and was borrowed by Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley in 1998 when they embarked upon their doomy drone metal voyage. Pity the poor rock journalist who forgets how many parentheses come after the big O! In case you might feel inclined to ridicule their eldritch affectations, their cloak roadies or their conquering the charts in a manner not seen since Coven, just remember: Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley live in many luxury homes and fly Gulfstream© jets around the world. You live in caves and eat cold worms. The end!

Logo #171: Maeror Tri

Stefan Knappe of metaphysically ecstatic band Maeror Tri: "It was an idea of Helge Siehl (now in the band Tausendschoen), probably back in 1987. He said he dreamt the "wheel" and just reproduced it from his dreams. The original idea was that it moves & blinks in different colours, and in different speeds, symbolizing the mind, like a paddle-wheel that moves through water (the water being the unconscious), swirling around consciousness material. As it had three sides, we thought it was perfect (as Maeror Tri had three members)." Knappe and third Tri member Martin Gitschel went on to form Troum, another group contemplating similar territory. Knappe's label Drone Records is one of the greatest independent record labels of all time; they release beautiful 7" records in more colors than there are in Heaven.

The Song of the Moment is "We Want Your Soul" by Adam Freeland.

Logo #165: Negativland

Can you copyright the copyright symbol? This modern moneylender-table (which really would make a lovely end-table) was appropriated by Negativland in 1992. Mark Hosler of Negativland: "We first used it as a huge banner that we unfurled at the end of our live shows in 1992 or '93, and then we began using it on all our CDs. We use N©. and N©! on our work, and sometimes in a "logo-ish" fashion - though we stole that idea from a guy in England who stole our "Copyright Infringement Is Your Best Entertainment Value" idea to make shirts and buttons." Remember when the other cultural scandal of the '90s was U2 and Casey Kasem suing Negativland for that "U2" record they put out? Way to back up the artists on your roster, Greg Ginn - guess you were too busy working on solo albums like "Ginnspiracy" and "Out of Ginntrol" to care. By the way, speaking as someone who worked (vaguely) in radio many moons ago, it actually is kinda difficult to come out of an up-tempo song and go right into a death dedication. "These guys are from England and who gives a shit?!" does pretty much sum it up lately, though.

Logo #164: The Hafler Trio

Originally appearing in the cultural lexicon in a 1965 issue of MAD Magazine, The Hafler Trio's logo was appropriated by Andrew McKenzie and Jon Wozencroft in 1989 for the "Ignotum Per Ignotius" LP. Wozencroft: "It was Andrew's idea to have that on the cover. I then drew it by hand (well, Rotring pen and ruler)." The optical illusion, also known as a devil's fork or a blivet, was dubbed a poiuyt by MAD as a riff on the reverse of the six rightmost letters on a qwerty keyboard. By that same token, "In July, oh my killjoy Molly, I'll look in upon my jumpy polo pony up in hilly Honolulu" gives your left hand such a rest! The Hafler Trio, over almost three decades, have made such an interesting catalogue of beautiful and enigmatic music that your life is less beautiful for not hearing it. "Kill the King" is a great place to start - if you can find a copy.

Logo #155: Instagon

Designed by Instagon founder Lob in 1980. Instagon is a long-lived, multi-faceted rhythmic experimental jam band that hail from the Temple of Psychick Youth spoke on the wheel of advanced global consciousness - a space into which many people seemed to have vanished throughout the '80s. Where are they all now? Deifically transcended, or just heavily invested in laser tattoo removal? It's a little difficult slipping back into boring ol' normal life after an extended and altered state of consciousness - but people tend to point out one's typos less readily these days, so that's always helpful. TOPY typos? Yes, please - but hold the maple syrup, thanks. Lob has recently relocated Instagon from the thankless wastes of Orange County to the heedless wilds of Sacramento.

The Song of the Moment is "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches.

Logo #133: Con-Dom

Created by Mike Dando in 1983. Dando's noise assault unit Con-Dom has been active for almost 25 years, not so much pushing the envelope as destroying and utterly mutilating it. This logo depicts a stress position in which captives are placed so that their captors may better annihilate their wills; in his MTV/MySpace appearance on 4 December 2007, presidential candidate John McCain described this technique's use on him as a hostage of VietCong elements during 'Nam. From my review of the Con-Dom live action on 6 August 2005 in San Francisco at the San Francisco Bay Area Harsh Noise Fest: "Con-Dom employs two vocal microphones and projections of films of Martin Luther King Jr., KKK rallies and the civil rights struggle. He strips to the waist and smears white- and black-face over his body – then over the faces of aghast concert-goers. Confronting the audience directly with emotional trigger-words crawling along the more racial end of the spectrum, he's attacked by a petite girl who doesn’t want to take his shit. He keeps on going regardless, rampantly frottaging another girl as the shrieking feedback mounts and the hateful coda of N-WORD, N-WORD, N-WORD, N-WORD, N-WORD plays on in a loop. Regrettably, sound problems preclude the nuances of what he has to say, and yet it must be remembered that Con-Dom = control-domination and all the mediation, ironically enough, thereat."

Logo #93: Current 93

This cheery little alpha-and-omega figure was designed by Andria Degens and David Tibet in 2001. About its presence, Tibet writes:

"I would walk a million miles, I said
And Alpha-Omega smiles, and red
Scars appear on the Logos face
And he winks and laughs
And fades into space."

'Nuff sed!

Logo #72: Nurse With Wound

Steven Stapleton - a.k.a. Babs Santini for this 1992 cover of Nurse With Wound's "Sugar Fish Drink" and its smiling girl mascot - is one of the greatest living artists. Here is where you go to find out more about Steven Stapleton. This is a possible video. Anything else I could say would detract from your enjoyment of this image. It would be, to paraphrase Frankie Poullain from The Darkness, stopping halfway up Mt. Everest to self-fellate.

Logo #43: Bastard Noise

As pioneering California powerviolence ( a strain of radical street-level politics and hardcore punk) unit Man Is The Bastard wound down in 1997 after seven years, co-founder Eric Wood simply ramped up side project Bastard Noise. Fellow wizards conferring and hobnobbing on this front included Amps For Christ's head seer Henry Barnes, and Bill Nelson, longtime art director at Larry Flynt Publications and later of rhythmic miasma merchants Unicorn. Wood: "It was me that found it an anthropological reference guide in the Claremont Library back in 1989 - I merely "flipped" the image around so that there was an "about-face" version to match and the rest fell into place. This exact skull was the first "modern man" skull found by the species of "Mancruel." People rip off this image so much you'd think we were all dead!" A logical progression to all those nights and noises is Trogotronic, their business of making "analog electronics hand-built in the U.S.A.".