Grey Wolves: Logo #305

Designed by Trevor Ward of Grey Wolves and perfected from 1988 through 1992. Ward: "I can't claim to have come up with the Celtic cross - this came a few thousand years before me - but it was me who cut out the wolf's head pic and stuck it in the middle along with the rune/lightning bolt. This was also a long time ago, when we use to mess around with symbols a lot more than we do now." Grey Wolves - a.k.a. The Blackshirt Orchestra, Brutal Love, Irritant, Lebensborn, Nails Ov Christ, No Lie G.I., Opera For Infantry, Tactical Aid Group - have constantly pumped out the most abrasive, politically incorrect, intense music, mostly on cassettes for the past twenty or so years. They show no signs of stopping. Their records have great titles: "A Wealth Of Misery," "Open Up Wounds," and "Many Are Called But Few Get Up," and for that they are highly recommended.

Logo #123: Throbbing Gristle

"The TG flash was Genesis' suggestion, based - he claims - on the "Warning! High Tension Cables" signs on electricity pylons. I was pissed off when it appeared he knew it was already used by Bowie for one if his "Ziggy Stardust" tours. If I had known I would have been against it. TG used the flash logo from before the first record - around 1975 when we started practicing at Martello Street. I would say it would be unfair and incorrect to credit it exclusively to Gen. It certainly wasn't his in the first place (see above) - TG as a group would be marginally better, as we all contributed to its wider use and all the variations that subsequently came along." - Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson

Logo #109: Sleep Chamber

The forwards-backwards E logo was created by Sleep Chamber frontman - and sometime railway conductor - John Zewizz in 1983. This particular design was around by the time of the 1990 cassette "Sweet Dreams Sweet," but possibly used some years earlier. For most of the '80s, Boston's Sleep Chamber were the public face of many types of phenomenon now labeled "alternative" and "primitive": piercings, transgressive sex, occult studies, BDSM and fetish manifestations and couture. And this is back when such things were essentially frightening and sincerely bizarre to the world at-large. Restless and incessantly ahead of their time, they're largely forgotten now despite dozens of releases and just as many band members. Paradoxically, their instrumental work has aged remarkably well while their more song-oriented work has rightfully languished in no small part because of the intensely hokey (albeit earnest) lyrics. Their CD "Symphony Sexualis" is in large part responsible for this blahg and everything surrounding my interest in interesting culture and I shall be forever fond of the big terror and creativity Sleep Chamber once wielded. Zewizz is currently incommunicado but reports circulate that he was seen at the PTV3 live action in Boston in mid-2007 and promises new Sleep Chamber material any minute now. Seriously. Any minute now. Just you wait. You'll see.

Somewhat relatedly, "Born With A Nervous Breakdown" by Phantom/Ghost is the Song of the Moment.

Logo #60: Nitzer Ebb

From Simon Granger, designer of the until-now apocryphal crest and sheaves: "The logo was originally drawn manually by myself using Corel Draw in late 1994. The NE initials were initially created using straight forward rectangles then welded together in Corel and 'node edited' to create the circular effect. The lower case type underneath was a font supplied with Corel called Serpentine and is the closest I have got to using a font with serifs (apart from two Barry Adamson sleeves). The Olympic-style leaf element was traced in Corel from a photo of a badge I found on the web, and then flipped and duplicated to form the two crossing over. The initial idea came from Bon (Harris, Nitzer Ebb shouter and percussionist), as he had an idea of using a design that had a look and feel of an classic car type badge. The final overall effect still radiates the typical muscular / military / minimal NE aesthetic but in a more of an emblem rather than just typography. The design was only ever officially used on the inside sleeve of the "Big Hit" album in a small version and a knocked back watermark image behind the lyric sheet - however, I think it is in use on various t-shirts and around the web."

Nitzer Ebb were a British band of pioneers - in the early '80s, along with Front 242, D.A.F. and Stomach Basher - of EBM, the so-called "electronic body music" made up of a relentlessly syncopated series of shouts that affected everything from Parisian haute couture to homely girls in the American heartland looking vaguely interesting because of all the chintzy vinyl, tall stompy boots and pierced-lip sullenness. Apart from that, Nitzer Ebb had a few really compelling pop singles that are great to exercise to and still stand on legs of nostalgia and awkward embarrassment that only a pre-Internet world can still keep hidden.

Logo #47: Laibach

Ivan Novak, prime mover behind Slovenian arts anthem makers Laibach, discusses their emblem: "The authorship of the Laibach logo is a complex one. First of all, it's taken and synthesized from history; from its various uses and contents. Therefore, the author is collective history / memory. Second - Laibach is a collective by definition and we practice collective authorship. We picked it up and created it in 1980 - we found the image, which initiated our choice of the logo, on the street in Ljubljana: the iron lid of the canals system dated from the first half of the 20th century: the cross, cog-wheel and the name Laibach, (which was the) German historical name for Ljubljana. It was all there." On its resemblance to the Malevich cross: "Malevich is only a small part in the cross. The history of cross is of course much bigger and longer and universally more applicable than the one from Malevich." So it's not simply a detourned Malevich cross? "Of course not. Why should it be? The cross was "imposed" on us as the universal cultural, political, and social symbol, carrying "the big mystery" - a big empty "nothing" which could be filled up by practically anything. References to Malevich go only as much as we believe that the cross - even as a purely abstract, suprematist symbol - can never really be without energy, without the "content" and the meaning in whatever ideological context it appears. Irwin - the NSK group, specializing in icon paintings and art - started to relate their later work ideologically more to Malevich than to Laibach, because with their original relation to Laibach iconography there were constantly described only as the "Nazi artists" - even within the very "tolerant" art world."