Not a word I´d heard before, but I admit I have always been interested in the “look of” calligraphic art, although not being very good at it.
I was fascinated by the Voynich manuscript and although unreleted in a way, Im almost always carrying a copy of A Humument, the manipulated book by Tom Phillips.
This was an interesting article by Abigail Leali on the Mutual Art website. (you might need to make in account)
https://www.mutualart.com/Article/On-Asemic-Writing–The-Art-of-Meaning-Be
Almost a page…
Cranes look like a Russian peasant band, don’t they?’ said Robert Smith when asked to compare bands to national football teams. They look like they’ve just travelled across the Steppes barefoot. They get to the semi-finals and everybody says,
*Oh, I really like the Russians* then forgets all about them, which is a bit like Cranes. Oh, and I’ve seen Jim from Cranes drink a whole bottle of vocka, winich I thought only Russians could do …”
Formed in Portsmouth in 1985, Cranes – centred around the sister-brother duo of singer Alison and drummer Jim Shaw, soon joined by guitarists Mark Francombe and Matt Cope – emerged at the cusp of the nineties. They took their name from a David Leavitt story-within-a-story about an abandoned child who emulates the construction cranes he can see from his bedroom window (and also the fact that the dock at Portsmouth is dominated by cranes).
Their recordings, which combined Alison’s helium-high vocals (once compared to the lady in the radiator from Eraserhead) with an unsettlingly austere industrial-gothic backing, were championed by many writers (myself included) at Melody Maker magazine. which put them on the front cover long before they’d developed a significant fanbase. They were once described as ‘a dark reproach to the frivolity of the Madchester and Britpop years, their music a quiet but Insistent clarion call to solitude and seriousness.
The acclaim which greeted early releases such as mini-LP Self Non Self, the Inescapable EP and debut album Wings Of Joy, which exhibited the influence of Siouxsie And The Banshees’ orchestral phase circa Hyna and the etherealism of early Cocteau Twins, brought them to the attention of Robert Smith, who adopted them as, essentially, Support Band by Royal Appointment to The Cure – indeed, both he and Simon Gallup named them in Cure News as their ideal support band, and Robert described them as savagely underrated, a band with a vision”
Cranes did indeed support The Cure globally on the Wish tour of 1992. They missed the show on 15 May at Nassau Coliseum near New York due to problems entering the USA. At one extraordinary show on 15 November in Liévin, France, Alison was too ill to sing. so Robert Smith and Porl Thompson played her vocal lines on guitar. (Sadly, when Simon Gallup was ill on that tour, Alison Shaw didn’t reciprocate the favour by singing his basslines – they brought Roberto Soave in instead.)
The Cure’s patronage of Cranes continued in 1993 when Smith remixed their single ‘Jewel’, helping them towards their highest-ever chart position of No.29. Coincidentally, in 1996 Cranes released an album called La Tragédie d’Oreste et Electre, based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (itself based on a Greek myth), meaning that both bands (see ‘Killing An Arab’, see Camus) had made records inspired by Existentialist literature.
In later years a lightness and liquidity entered
Cranes’ music, displacing the tumult and terrors of their early work, inviting a wholly new interpretation of the band’s name: Cranes are uplifting.
Through my connection with Derek Walmesly we got a big 3 page interview in Record collector.
