It’s been years now since I shed all the plastic housings for my CD collection, boxed the inserts and ripped them all to a back-up drive. It took a while to commit to doing so. Almost as long as it took to migrate from the beloved tactile sense of albums and liner notes, to CDs.

In the end and looking back, it seems this was just another step forward along the ever-changing landscape of media. Not to get too verbose about it, but the absence of the physical has irrevocably changed the experience of music. At least for me. Reserving judgement, it seems to have made the experience more about the music itself, it’s value completely contained within itself. The ding an sich thing again. A common theme these days.

But this post about the artwork of Suehiro Maruo is only vaguely related to all that.

That relation being the first John Zorn Naked City release. A compositional workshop intended to test the limits of a rock band format. Featuring Zorn on saxophone, Bill Frisell (guitars), Fred Frith (bass), Wayne Horvitz (keyboards), Joey Baron (drums), and occasional vocals from Yamatsuka Eye, Bob Dorough, and later Mike Patton, Naked City incorporated Zorn’s appreciation of hardcore bands like Agnostic Front and Napalm Death with his other influences and experimented with compositional form and cover versions. (thanks Wikipedia)

To close another tangent, it was this release that introduced me to the work of Suehiro Maruo. A couple of his works adorned the release. Oddly traditional and modern, eastern and western, the plates included stuck with me. Searching for Maruo wasn’t easy, since I didn’t know his name. Even Wikipedia only mentioned the cover shot of Zorn’s release. One of Weegee’s more recognizable shots from his book which gave the group it’s namesake, Naked City.

Decades later, thanks to a blog I occasionally frequent (which I further tangentially assume gets it’s namesake from Gong’s first trilogy release), I was treated to a hefty download of Suehiro Maruo - Maruo Graph Exibition I and II. Post war horror, early American monster movies, and the pantheon of traditional and not-so-traditional Japanese demons are driving themes among the morbid, squirming, eye-licking pieces of the collection, along with those I’ve found since learning Maruo’s name. Heavily weighted in the tradition of nineteenth-century muzan-e “atrocity print” woodblock cuts. It seems there may have been animated adaptations of his manga, Planet of the Jap . I’ll be looking.

For now, several scaled versions are presented above, along with the link to flying-teapot’s post. Let me know if you know more. I’ll do the same.

via: flying-teapot / suehiro maruo

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