Gabriel Bruce’s debut single Sleep Paralysis / No Love Lost comes out a week today (December 5th) on Off Modern Records. We’ve called it a ‘hybrid of book and record release’, we’ve said it’s ‘at home in the record box or the bookshelf’ and others have had just as much difficulty explaining it when rehasing our press release.
Hopefully these pictures will go some way to dispeling any remaining confusion.
The fifty page book features three different paper stocks, colour photos, a variety of different printing methods, a card cover, facsimile of rare writings on Sleep Paralysis and work from the artist himself. The cover is hugged by a belly band, available in scarlet, royal blue, sapphire or mandarin.
Sleep Paralysis is available to pre order for a special discounted price via the Off Modern shop.
Check out B Side No Love Lost -
OMR002 – Gabriel Bruce ‘No Love Lost’ (B side) by Off Modern
Bold design, good pedigree and a strong in-house approach have marked out 
The death of J. G. Ballard presents the modern writer- the writer of modernity- with no small stylistic and thematic barrier. The dominant imagery bequeathed by Ballard being dystopian and apocalyptic, how does one write, in his wake, the post-apocalypse (after his predictions have come true, as has often happened)? One way, perhaps, is that related by Iain Sinclair in London: City of Disappearances: ‘Ballard, in an essay on the director Michael Powell, suggested that drama in the “serious” novel of the future would “migrate from the characters’ heads to the world around them.”’
The rise of the modern age, which we can claim to have truly started in 1781 with the American Revolution and then also in Europe with the French Revolution of 1789, represents the abandonment of the belief in the power of theological models and its subsequent usurpation by the supremacy of the ideological. Up until the French Revolution religious belief had defined human history; as the modern era progressed, through industrialisation, capitalisation and then into the twentieth century, theological belief dwindled and stagnated, becoming a cultural petit four with little philosophical power over the populous in general. Theology and ideology are the two primary ways of measuring the progression of man through time. Theology provides a constant cultural id to the pre-modern existence; it gave man the existential solace of a belief in something beyond the sufferings he experienced in his everyday life. As the living conditions in the modern western world got better there was less need for the kind of grand schemata that was offered by religion. Thus, to fill the void left by faith, ideologies begin to take root; they place man as being fully in control of the creation of his own existential definition by actively demanding of man to make the utopian visions of theology into an earthly reality; this is the new historical progression of the modern era. In the modern era time is measured by the progress of man’s achievements, the goal of progress becomes progression itself, it is no longer defined by a development to a promised land that exists only beyond the corporeal.
Football clubs form identities. There are the Jewish clubs, Tottenham and Ajax, who historically have had large numbers of Jewish supporters and whose supporters have become known as yids. In this instance there is a level of Jewish identification that exists between a Spurs or Ajax supporter and the idea of being Jewish, that is by supporting Spurs or Ajax one becomes aware of the club as being ‘Jewish’ and adapts subconsciously to that idea in order to conform to the idea of the club. The football club’s identity is created by its fan base which then becomes part of the identity of the club on a deeper level which then forces a club’s future supporters to adhere too. This is the basis of the identification process of football in which an individual identity is subjugated to a collective idea of identity.
