An independent archive of typography.
Topics
Formats
Typefaces

Holger Czukay – “Persian Love” French single sleeve

Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Sep 6th, 2017. Artwork published in .
Holger Czukay – “Persian Love” French single sleeve
Source: www.flickr.com Ron Kane. License: All Rights Reserved.

From Of Bandits and Popinjays. Persian episodes in twentieth-century Western rock and roll history by Joobin Bekhrad for Reorient:

[…] shortly after Iranian youth had fought in the streets, set Tehran ablaze, and protested in the Big Apple with Patti Smith, the German instrumentalist Holger Czukay (of Krautrock band extraordinaire Can) found himself picking up strange voices on the radio in his Cologne laboratory. […] Czukay had chanced upon a pair of Persian voices – one male, one female – on a Radio Tehran programme while fiddling around with his radio. Enticed by their ‘soaring minaret vocalisations’, they ultimately found their way onto a 1979 single, fittingly titled Persian Love, with Cool in the Pool on the B-side. […] it was an expression of love, more than anything else, that had captivated Czukay, and listeners such as rock and roll bassist Jah Wobble. ‘The voices on it are so beautiful’, Wobble is noted to have said upon listening to Persian Love, ‘I will never, never try to sing again!’ With its melange of twittering synthesisers, crackly Radio Tehran vocals, and loose form, it strikes the ear as the perfect score to a scene from Khayyam’s Robaiyat, replete with cypress trees, bare-chested beauties, and jugs brimming with blood-red wine: exactly the sort of image depicted on the single’s cover, ostentatiously mimicking the Persian miniatures of Safavid-era Iran. […]

The typeface is Boldiz, designed by designer, calligrapher and teacher Ivan Boldižar (1917–1986) of Novi Sad, Serbia. Together with Janus and Triton, it was issued by Berthold Fototypes in 1975. Boldižar happened to be the first Yugoslav member of the ATypI. It was also he who sparked Jovica Veljović’s interest in making letterforms by showing him a book by Hermann Zapf.

Typefaces

  • Boldiz

Formats

Topics

Artwork location

Post a comment