Wall of death/Geneva Express 12" vinyl record. Issued as a special edition for Touch. Issue 4. Inscription. The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone’s record features the soundtracks from two of their large-scale video installations from the late 1990s. The first side is taken from Wall of Death [1979], which featured images and sounds from iconic car chase movies reedited, synchronised, and spun around a 25m 360-degree cyclorama screen, in an endless and futile battle. This re-edited and re-mastered version of the soundtrack slows down and combines the sounds of the chased and the chasing to make what was once sequential, synchronous. The result is an intense and chaotic montage that also suggests the cartoon-like and the darkly comic.

The second side of the record, Geneva Express, is the soundtrack to an installation that was first shown in the group exhibition 'Airport', curated by Film and Video Umbrella and the Photographers’ Gallery, London in 1997. Over a two-month period Ellard and Johnstone filmed the same Boeing 747 in and out of Gatwick Airport, London as it flew out to and returned from New York. Projected onto two opposing large-scale screens in the gallery space, the sound and image of the 747 appeared to travel through the space, as it approached, roared overhead, and receded into the distance. Here the soundtrack from the piece provides a surprising counterpoint to the chaos of Wall of Death as the regularity and rhythm of the take-offs and landings become strangely ambient and meditative.

Touch. Issue 4. Inscription. The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History

The theme of the fourth issue of Inscription is touch. The issue features articles from scholars and theorists on subjects ranging from 19th-century books for the blind; touching cursed books in special collections; handling Nabokov’s Pale Fire; to Hansjörg Mayer’s haptic books. Included in the issue there is also poetry by Veronica Groarke, a vinyl LP by Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone, and art editions by Jen Bervin, Erica Baum, Lenora de Barros, Yoko Ono, Natalie Czech, Harold Offeh, Mohamad Hafeda, Steve Ronnie, Alice Attie, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and others.
Limited edition of 500.