Printopia

BACKSTORY

This Vinyl record was created to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Tipos en su Tinta, a letterpress project founded in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 2013. The manual printing presses and old wood and metal type used in the workshop are mostly recovered from historic printers on the island. However, far from being a sentimental and nostalgic collection, this material is combined with contemporary thinking and new technology to enrich the graphic language and is focusing on the creative ideas rather than large editions.

In the year 2021, Tipos en su Tinta were offered an artist residency at the Fine Art Museum of Tenerife. At about the same time the experimental musician Ernst Surberg visited our workshop and was inspired by the sounds and interacting movements of the ‘bodies’: machines and humans. Recordings of the activity became musical material, that again was manipulated and performed live together with musician Esther Ropón at the closure event of our exhibition. Later on, Ernst initiated a session at the studio Ensemble Mosaik, in Berlin, again including the original samples and arranging the parts of the improvisation to separate pieces. These harvested sound materials became the fundamental resources from which the five tracks derived. In a rather tedious post-production process, in which Ernst Surberg reshaped them, at times leaving them untouched, at times subjecting them to completely new ideas.

PRINTING THE COVER AND POSTER ARTWORK

The concept for the cover design was to reflect the unique mixture of mechanical sounds from the workshop and their modulations with the synthesizer. We came up with the idea to use recently obsolete material from our short-living-modern-times like computers and other discarded objects and to print them on our restored printing press from the nineteen twenties. Bringing all these obsolete objects to type height (23,56mm), they became usable again for the letterpress printing technique, initiated by Johannes Gutenberg in Europe in the 15th century. 

Just as with the vinyl record, the letterpress technique is living a revival which shows that they are both far away from being obsolete. As a homage to the Golden Times of Vinyl and Rock 'n Roll we chose to create a kind of "Cyborg-Jagger" on the front cover.

All the texts on the cover where handset in lead type and printed manually on our Robel Proof Press in October 2023. The record was produced in a limited edition of a hundred copies and comes with a signed poster.