Brooklyn artist Alexander Heir has been drawing strange, other-worldly pictures for years. Previously, these illustrations have only adorned 7" record jackets and Xeroxed flyers across the international punk underground, but now Sacred Bones Records is offering a new collection of the artist's finest illustrations, housed in a deluxe, foil-stamped slipcase.

For those who truly crave the transgressive and are unfulfilled by the commercially "confrontational" trends in current zines and indie publications, Heir's work will connect immediately. Heir has been so prominently involved in designing, printing and producing for countless NYC and international artists that over the years his work has become one of the defining aesthetics in the contemporary underground punk scene. His work has graced the albums, singles and ephemera of highly regarded bands such as Hoax, Forward (Japan), The Mob (UK), Nightbirds, Destruction Unit and Modern Life Is War amongst countless others.

Death is Not the End

Alexander Heir

Arts & Photography

Sacred Bones Books

Misophonia incorporates various mediums and styles from figurative painting and harsh typography to deliriously textural photography and collage. The book serves not only as a master collection of Draxler’s work throughout his career to date, but also as a living organism, in which each piece communicates with the others, the whole, and itself.

Misophonia

Draxler, Jesse

Individual Artists

The subjects of her recent art are a logical continuation of the larger narrative of Benjamin’s body of work: She works to excavate the female human experience as she knows it. Benjamin muses on intimacy, sexuality, self-perception, body dysmorphia, and trauma through her avatars. Her work is diaristic, approaching her subjects through the lens of her own personal experience; each piece can easily feel like a self-portrait. Her women are simultaneously self-assured and crumbled, standing defiantly on their own two hairy legs, yet seeking the shoulder of an empathetic viewer to cry on. Benjamin uses her art to sort through her own trauma and self-analysis, and seeks to give faces, bodies, and narratives to the different facets of her own womanhood.

Cavegirl Monologue

Benjamin, Heather

WARRR2K∞//WORK 2014-17 showcases all of Alexander Heir’s visual work created since the release of his last book, Death Is Not the End, in addition to a new full-color series exclusive to this volume. Expanding upon war, police brutality, political corruption, and death as his canon of punk subject matter, his latest work brings sci-fi and psychedelia influences into the fold, blending them with his impeccable design aesthetic and signature sense of twisted playfulness. The result shows Heir making his most sophisticated, detailed and demented work to date.

WARRR2K / Work 2014-17

Heir, Alexander

Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939) was an artist, collector, scholar, and historian working at the dawn of the 20th century. Her first and most prominent work, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color, provides a comprehensive overview of the main ideas of color theory at the time, as well as her wildly original approaches to color analysis and interaction. Through a 21st century lens, she appears to stumble upon midcentury design and minimalism decades prior to those movements. Presenting her work as a painting manual under the guise and genre of flower painting and the decorative arts― subjects considered “appropriate” for a woman of her time―she was able to present a thoroughly studied, yet uniquely poetic, approach to color theory that was later taken up and popularized by men and became ubiquitous in contemporary art departments. Her remarkable inventiveness shines in a series of gridded squares, each 10 x 10, that analyze the proportions of color derived from actual objects: Assyrian tiles, Persian rugs, an Egyptian mummy case, and even a teacup and saucer. Vanderpoel had a deep knowledge of ceramics and analyzed many pieces from her personal collection. She leaves her process relatively mysterious but what is clear, as historian and science blogger John Ptak notes, is that Vanderpoel “sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination”.

Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color

Noyes Vanderpoel, Emily

Graphic Design

The religious ferocity of Heavy Metal fandom is one of the most fervent in the history of subculture. The display of this fervor has been channeled and distilled throughout time into one sacred object: the battle vest. Often referred to as the Kutten (German for monk’s robe), the battle vest serves a multitude of purposes: as a musical CV, a badge of authenticity, a creative practice of identity, and a fashion statement. Defenders of the Faith documents the timeless and universal concept of fandom through the elevation of the battle vests, revering them beyond the sweaty bodies they adorn and the pits they live in, to the status of religious artifact.
 Photographer Peter Beste has been documenting subcultures for over 20 years. His first book True Norwegian Black Metal (Vice Books) was a portrayal of the extreme end of the genre and the stunning photos contained within translated far beyond the niche fans of the music, selling tens of thousands of copies. His critically acclaimed follow up book Houston Rap showed his breadth as a photographer and Juxtapoz called it “An astonishing and important insight into a great American cultural narrative.” Defenders of the Faith is Beste’s fourth book that has been edited by Boo-Hooray's Johan Kugelburg and his photographic treatment of traditional heavy metal culture and dress code is similarly striking. Metal fans, fashion enthusiasts, and subculture geeks will come to the book naturally but the images have a gravity of humanity that speaks to universal expression of passion and devotion and make the book instantly relatable.
 Heavy Metal has survived and evolved through the decades, always maintaining a deep connection with its audience. The decorative armor of the battle vest serves as a visual history of the genre, memorializing the bands and also telling a personal story of each fan. This collaborative nature has always been at the heart of metal, elevating the individual and the communal beyond the dynamic of performer/audience. As Peter Beste put it himself, “For many, it shows how “true” one is by how authentic their patches are, which festivals they have attended, or which bands you got to see way back when. It is an object that gains in value as it deteriorates, and is pretty much never bought or sold. You have to create your own.” Recognizing these personalized artifacts as timeless and artistic expressions of the universal human experience of devotion helps shed light on metal’s place within our cultural history.

Defenders of the Faith: The Heavy Metal Photography of Peter Beste

Beste, Peter

Photography & Video

Iconic New York bands Crazy Spirit and Dawn of Humans were born of separate but complementary points of contention towards everything punk had to offer―or more accurately, what it didn’t. What began as vibrant felt tired and stale, resulting in most bands merely going note for note with the glory days. Both Crazy Spirit and Dawn of Humans twisted and mangled the punk formula to create truly bizarre and sinister sonic experiences (a Dawn of Humans live show, for example, would usually feature the singer confronting the audience covered only in paint, his genitalia choked off by heavy chains), achieving instant international acclaim and recognition. Sam Ryser says of his involvement in the projects, "We sought to move in a new and lateral direction, harkening back to an ethos of not only creating with your own hands but breaking down genre and medium walls to sculpt an entire world. By tying every facet of the bands together―sound, practice, live performance, visual aesthetic, and personal connections―we created our own moving worlds within this one, with the end product of a vinyl record becoming merely a blurry porthole.” Ryser’s influence on the global DIY punk scene has been enormous, through his musical output as well as elaborate designs for his and other bands’ artwork. 
After years of designing flyers, record covers, t-shirts, and tour posters, he opened up the art and oddities shop DRIPPER WORLD in a converted shipping container in Bushwick. This space gave him a headquarters for not only distributing this art but also acting as a sort of showcase for his own projects and artwork, alongside those of his contemporaries and influences. Speaking to this process of creation, Ryser says, “When approached by a band for a commission―whether it be the full packaging for an LP or a shirt to be duct taped behind a merch table―I seek to carve out a part their world. I wonder what exploring the far corners of their map can do to expand the borders of their own point of origin: punk band. Comic, pastoral settings of glinting clouds over blue skies and lush meadows give a refractive lens to a band focused on the morbid and dystopian, while grittily photocopied talismans of darkness can cause a pressure drop in the atmosphere of a more sensual and romantic band, bringing out previously hidden subtleties in their sound and character.”

Welcome to DRIPPER WORLD: Sound and Vision by Sam Ryser

Ryser, Sam

When The Source Family: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and The Source Family first came onto the scene it made a huge splash, winning the 2008 Independent Publishers Book Award and becoming an LA Times bestseller. The New York Times called the book "a style bible" and Paper magazine revered it as "THE talk of the town." The book has been out of print and in-demand for years and now finally it is coming back to the market with an expanded and revised edition, just in time for the current wave of cult-mania. It was 1972, time of the cult-occult-commune explosion. By day, the Source Family served organic cuisine to John Lennon, Julie Christie, Frank Zappa and others at the famed Source restaurant. By night, in a mansion in Hollywood Hills, they explored the cosmos through the channeled wisdom of their charismatic leader, Father Yod. Father was an outlandish figure who had 14 "spiritual wives," drove a Rolls-Royce, and fronted the rock band Ya Ho Wa 13, now considered by collectors to be one of the most singular psychedelic bands of all time. The Source Family's true story--kept secret for over 30 years after Father's spectacular hang-gliding death in 1975--is revealed here by the Family members themselves, with over 200 photographs and a digital download of rare Ya Ho Wa 13 live performances and Family recordings. This expanded and revised edition has 30 new pages of never-before-seen photographs and additional text containing deeper history and updates on everything that has happened after the first edition. It also contains a new foreword by Jodi Wille, the original editor and director of the critically acclaimed documentary The Source Family.

The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family

Biographies & Memoirs

Aquarian, Isis

Leaders & Notable People

THE SOURCE FAMILY SCRAPBOOK provides an intimate view into the world of California's most iconic utopian commune, The Source Family.This lavishly illustrated book will act as an immersive historical artifact, a facsimile of the original scrapbook assembled by family historian Isis Aquarian. Devoid of essays, the vivid life size scrapbook page reproductions are presented as they were originally assembled and laid on the page. Edited only for brevity and flow, these pages illuminate the group's private world in a way never before seen. Hundreds of unpublished photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, manifestos, and flyers comprise these richly textured pages, guiding the reader through the group's daily activities, secret rituals, triumphs, and eventual downfall. The book tells the Source Family story as it unfolded, from controversial leader Jim Baker/Father Yod's spiritual awakening under the tutelage of Yogi Bhajan and the founding of Baker's Source Restaurant to their meteoric rise, wild experimentation, and public and private provocations that led to the group's paradise lost in Hawaii. These collaged images and ephemera provide a visceral immersion into the complex and widely misunderstood phenomenon of communal and cultic groups of the 60s and 70s, at a time when hundreds of thousands of disaffected people across the country joined together to create their own visions of utopia.

FAMILY: The Source Family Scrapbook

Wille, Jodi

Kitchings, Charlie

First released in 1901, Thought-Forms was an in-depth exploration on the visual manifestations of thoughts and the notion that they exist as objects. Conceived by renowned theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, the book consists of 58 illustrations based on Besant and Leadbeater's clairvoyant observations on how music, emotions, experiences, and colors affect thought forms. Expanding beyond its original readership, the book would have great influence on twentieth-century art and go on to inspire many artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee. This updated edition features a new introduction by famed occult author, Mitch Horowitz.

Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation

Besant, Annie

Leadbeater, Charles-Webster

Study & Teaching

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