Interminable neon

Nick Shinn

From the cover of a truly horrible 1973 record album by Christopher Scott. (The title piggy-backs Wendy Carlos’ epochal 1968 Switched on Bach, which programmed Bach on the Moog synthesizer, becoming a million-seller. Burt Bacharach composed many pop hits in the sixties.)

I assume this is based on a typeface, but I don’t know which; a bit like ITC Neon.

The “ligaturing” is quite interesting!

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

In my opinion, someone started with "S" from ITC Neon and let imagination run wild...

Chris Lozos

I think it was all hand lettered from the get-go.  We did this all the time then.  Frankly, this is not that well done.  The "W" is the least acceptable.

Mark Simonson

Seems like it was probably drawn from scratch with a heavy toke.

(Incidentally, Switched on Bach was performed, not programmed. No computers or sequencers involved.)

Nick Shinn

Sorry, the wrong word. But it wasn’t played live, as “performance” would suggest, but pieced together a few notes at a time, as I understand.

Ray Larabie

I think this could be done with ligatures and a system of top and bottom entry strokes. I had this on 8-track...so terrible. The instrumentation was okay but the lead parts were played completely soulless. Walk on By sticks in my mind as being particularly awful.

Stuart Sandler

I'm pretty sure it's not inspired by neon but rather electric stovetop elements.

Adam Jagosz

Chris Lozos said:

The "W" is the least acceptable.

The /E is worse!

John Savard

Nick Shinn said:

Sorry, the wrong word. But it wasn’t played live, as “performance” would suggest, but pieced together a few notes at a time, as I understand.

The Moog synthesizer that Wendy Carlos used was monophonic, so each part had to be separately recorded, but despite a joke in the liner notes about a lot of splicing being required, the individual parts were played in the conventional musical sense.

So basically it would have been one track at a time - not one selection on the album, but one track on a multi-track recorder - not a few notes at a time.

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

It's computed by an algorithm. Maybe inspired by ITC Neon, but very different. Compare the details of W, A, H, E.

Take normal letters of this shape and then try to fill the areas with a rope (or wire) in one piece. It's a sort of maze-puzzle. Algorithms doing this better as a human were known at this time (e. g. for wiring printed electronic boards).

Mark Simonson

I suppose it's possible, but it seems unlikely that a computer would have been used to aid the design of some lettering on an album cover in 1973. A human following an algorithm more likely.