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Acid House Art with Golden Sun Movement

8 November 2011 - by Canyon

Golden Sun Movement is an art collective consisting of graphic artists and designers Dave Little, Leo Zero and Luke Insect.

Each artist uses his own unique style and preferred media to create pieces involving brilliant colour, vibrancy and pattern. Being children of different decades, they are inspired by the LSD driven artwork of the 60s and 70s psychedelic art scene and the ecstasy-fuelled creativity of the 80s and 90s acid house art scene.

Having just recently finished an exhibition at the Bang Bang Gallery in Berlin, SpineTV caught up with Dave, Leo and their manager Adrian Darby to talk about their individual influences, how the Acid house art scene got started and the techniques they have developed in their own work.

Spine TV: Firstly, can you introduce yourselves, give us a bit of background and also explain how you are involved in the Golden Sun Movement?

Leo Zero: I am a graphic artist and a re-mixer and we got Golden Sun Movement together last year. My manager Adrian Darby and I concocted the idea along with Dave Little, and then Luke Insect came on board as someone else that we were working closely with, another record producer called Richard Norris. Golden Sun Movement was set up as a collective for us to have lots of fun doing various projects and this ON art show is project number one.

I’ve been working as a graphic designer since college in the music industry. Gone from designing flyers, lurking around recording studios and ended up learning how to produce music. Got very interested in that – now I’m producing music and doing graphics, in tandem. A couple years back I had a project called Rat Salad which was a re-edit re-mix project and I decided it was a good excuse to finally meet Dave Little, who I’d been a big fan of for many years. So I phoned up Dave and explained things to him and we struck up a friendship from there.

Dave Little: Graphic designer, illustrator and fashion designer. I guess, more of the pictorial end of the scale and the history goes back to the mid eighties really, when I first left art college. I’d gone to a man called Martin Heath who started Rhythm King, [which] exploded within a year of signing Bomb the Bass, S’Express, Beatmasters, Betty Boo, Renegade Soundwave.

I moved onto fashion with Michiko Koshino in Japan, who created Motorking which is the first street commercial motorbike modern-wear; not leather chaps and leather, you know, beards and Harley Davidsons. Then I moved onto commercial…more of the commercial advertising arts and I bumped into Leo, Adrian and Luke Insect. We then realised there was an historical continuation. I guess you could say I’m the eighties, Leo is the nineties and Luke is the 2000s.

Adrian Darby: Luke’s lineage weirdly goes back before all of them. Luke grew up in Cambridge and his dad was part of the beatnik scene from Cambridge. He grew up sitting on Sid Barrett’s knee. His dad was part of the UFO movement and Luke got given all of his dad’s Oz magazines when he went to college, which was a psychedelic magazine from the sixties and seventies. He went and worked for Storm Thorgerson, after he went to art college in Newcastle, so his background’s very much entrenched in the sixties.

STV: What is Acid house art?

LZ: Well, I first got into clubbing probably a year or two before Acid house broke. First year in art school, straight out of normal school at 16 and I was buying i-D magazine; really interested in going to London, going to all the shops that were up there and it was much more of an exploration to get that culture. London was very exotic, so I’d go up to London and I’d collect flyers and at that time they were all pre-Apple Mac, so you’d have a lot of illustration. Dave’s illustrations were the ones that stuck out and I got to know Dave’s artwork from collecting these flyers. There was a club called The Raid, which was hugely influential, pre-cursor to the boys’ own parties which were kind of widely regarded as the epicentre of the Acid house movement. I was one of the kids at 16 who picked up all this artwork. That and all the adverts in i-D magazine, really, were the only resource for contemporaries trying to do something graphically. You’d have that and you’d have the music industry stuff, but this was a lot more fast moving and it was a bit more D.I.Y. Lots of photocopy art, lots of Letraset being used and abused and everything, wasn’t it?

DL: Yeah, it was a continuation from the sniffing glue from the seventies.

STV: Was the psychedelic art thing linked with it in that way?

LZ: It was always there because drugs were being taken at these clubs. You had the psychedelic influence, which was always part of advertising for nightclubs. I think it was a slightly tenuous association at the start – Acid house happened at the same time that in London rare groove was massive and everybody was doing very interesting Blaxploitation-influenced cartoons and things like that, people like Mark Wigan. So there was a whole very vibrant, exciting graphic sub-culture going on. People were customising their own clothes. Another thing that was really important was people were subverting all the logos and mucking about with that, so it had everybody in fake Chanel and Gucci t-shirts and all the flyers sort of fed into that. So the scene was set then for Acid house to go: okay there’s already this framework, so you could have how to dress, what drugs to take, a package. It wasn’t a fake thing, it was very organic, but nevertheless, there was a scene there that had a fashion element, a graphic element and it was very psychedelic.

LZ: Lots of people did things with Canon photocopiers where they’d move the image while it was being photocopied and that would look psychedelic and I think i-D magazine was massively influential for all that as well. They were very tuned into a lineage which was Oz magazine and counterculture magazines and they all pioneered techniques for experimental printing techniques, like screen printing negatives and off-setting stuff.  Portobello – where we are now – in this area, that was the real centre for all those sixties and seventies hippie magazines and they are incredible artefacts now you look back at. You can see this lineage where people took a load of drugs and went: “Hang about, why are we printing this CMYK stuff in CMYK colours? Let’s print what’s meant to be black in fluorescent pink.”

DL: That became very passé very quickly…by the mid sixties, certainly by ‘67/ ’68, it becomes generically copied style. You had some quality stuff by Stanley Mouse and Kelley, the real proper air-brush dons who were very, very talented. We had a lot of crap as well; photographs of Buddha with a few flowers strung around her.

STV: What and who were heavily influential to you?

DL: When I first went to Spectrum when I saw strobe lighting and lasers. Did you know strobe lighting is a light machine used to time timing belts on carburettors on an engine? It’s an engineering device? And Ken Kesey and the Magic Bus, when they created their happenings at Haight-Ashbury, were the very first to use it as a light source in the disco.
I was a massive reader of anything by The Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was mad on Ken Kesey, I just loved that whole era. I loved Hunter S. Thompson.

You’ve got your low end, you’ve got your Oz, you’ve got that, then you’ve got your Rick Griffin, your high end. Then you’ve got your higher end which is Stanley Mouse and then on your British end you’ve got Alan Aldridge and a few artists who were literally craftsmen, high end illustrators. He was a proper, proper psychedelic airbrush artist. And this is a guy that will spend months on a piece, not something for two days. And that’s where it started to evolve for me; I always took reference from the dons really. And that’s why I’ve spent so much time air-brushing…I mean, that’s why, no doubt, my pieces stood out and, you know, Leo saw them. Most other flyers were done and packed together…

LZ: Most of them were pretty. You had all this technological stuff that, kind of, gave it this forward-looking thing, and you had ecstasy – a new drug – and then you had people like Terence McKenna who was experimenting with ecstasy but had been part of the other generation with the acid stuff, so..

STV: So, how would you describe the Golden Sun Movement?

LZ: Well it’s a loose collective is the best description. Nobody’s in charge. It’s a vehicle to get ideas out and get ideas completed. I think anybody can come in to the fold who’s needed to make the ideas work. And it could evolve. I think we’re all really excited by not just doing screen prints or digital prints. [We've] worked in, you know, different mediums, you’ve done jewellery. I’d love to get into some sort of three dimensional stuff. I’d love to have a website that we treat like our little boutique where we put things on. I’d like to do some more special record packaging. I went through a period of doing very elaborate record sleeves when I was in a band a couple of years ago.

STV: How did the Berlin exhibition go?

LZ: It went great. Berlin’s a place that is, I think, unique in the world at the moment in that people from all over the world have flocked there because it’s cheap to be an artist. Whether you’re a DJ, club promoter, an artist working, they all flock there, and it makes for a very interesting environment.

STV: So how do you all link together in the project? Are you quite separate or do you come together?

LZ: We work separately. There’s definitely, kind of, mutual respect. We’re always swapping ideas and there may be software and things and stuff like that. But yeah, we work separately and then come together. We’d thought about doing proper collaborations on a piece and I think that may happen, but most of the time we’re doing our own thing. We’re kind of all big in a way, we just get the work together. They balance each other out nicely, our styles. Luke’s got a great photographic cinema take on things. Its very, sort of, film art.

DL: Lovely colours.

LZ: Yeah, colours are great.

DL: Great coloursmith.

LZ: I’m collage and Dave’s got huge detail. You know, the line art work and the colours again. It’s like three of a triangle, you know?

DL: Acid etching. That’s the one, acid etching. Painstaking. Eyeball-watering. Went blind on one piece. It just went on forever.

STV: So you were saying that there were quite a lot of different media that you use. What different ones are involved in the exhibition?

DL: I’ve sort of stuck towards screen-printing really. I was trying to get away from anything digital and most of the stuff I’ve tried to hand draw it. I’ve tried to bring ye olde craftsmanship back.

LZ: So, rotring pens?

DL: Rotring pens, Pentels, french curves, rubylith, which is the hand cut red film.

AD: Luke’s got the windows. We’ve got one from an asylum, one from a French château, a couple from pubs and he’s powder-coated his designs onto glass, which is a brand new process. In fact, the company that did it are doing Bloomingdale’s windows this Christmas.

LZ: There’s a company I use called K2 who do Peter Blake’s screen printing and Damien Hirst’s screen printing and they’re very, very skilled. We got in touch with Printspace in London where they print direct from RGB files. You have the old fashioned way where you had a Photoshop file and you’d always have to convert into CMYK to be printed normally and it would get dull and now you can print straight from RGB and you have these amazingly vivid colours. You just get a much more vibrant print.

STV: Was that a big problem then? It wasn’t coming out how it was?

LZ: Psychedelic – you needed it to be kapow! It was really good. You were able to get a little closer to what you had on screen.

STV: So what is the next thing for you guys? What are you working on now?

LZ: We hope to take it onto Japan. I was in Japan recently and we’re going to look to partner with someone over there. I think the future is partnering with like-minded companies that have a manufacturing side of things.

DL: I think the word ‘bespoke’ is resurfacing as well. You know, I’m an older man now; I don’t stand out side of a Supreme shop holding a skateboard. I’m 47 and I want to see craftsmanship. I think there’s so much variety out in the world, be it graphics art and everything, yet everything looks the same. You don’t get any popstars anymore, you get the odd few heads popping up but a lot of it looks the same. So I think maybe bring it back to a bit more bespoke.

AD: We’d love to do a little clothing line.

DL: I’d like to get back into it, definitely.

For more information on Golden Sun Movement’s prints and artwork and upcoming shows, check out the following sites.

http://www.goldensunmovement.com/

http://bangbangberlin.culturelabel.com/

http://www.firmamentberlin.com/categories/artworks.html

Images: Firmament – Jorg Haas, Spine TV – Stuart Stafford