Calculating the effect of design in music: my red lines

 "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator"

Yeah, incredible but true. Yesterday I bought this er, pocket calculator in a charity shop because I had an urgent need to do some complicated calculations.  

Or ... maybe not. No, I picked up this little plastic device - for the sum of £1 - solely because of how it looks. Strong horizontal lines, a slimline "landscape" rectangular shape, keys offset to the right leaving a blank space to the left, simple but effective black-white-red colours, the pleasingly "yeah, that's what it is" block-caps description: it's all there. Not too much. Just enough. "ELECTRONIC MINI CALCULATOR." What a good description. None of your tacky manufacturer's "brand" name disfiguring the product-as-design. Evidently, this type of calculator was mass-produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the late-70s/early-80s for export to Japanese and European markets - hence the English, Japanese, German and French rendering of "8 DIGITS CALCULATOR" on the slipcase cardboard box (the white-on-indigo-blue of the box is also rather nice I think). Apparently, the blank white space top-right was sometimes used for a retailer's name or some kind of marketing-related addition, but many - like this one - were left empty and unbranded. The blank generation of pocket calculators. For a post-punk generation like mine, all these minor details of design are, somehow, bound up with deep memories (as well as quite recent memories) of music as the door to excitement, wonderment and lasting pleasure. As I said a few years ago in a post about Andrew Krivine's book Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die: Punk & Post Punk Graphics 1976-1986 (2020), for people in the right state of mind something as simple (though it isn't that simple) as a record sleeve or record company advert could very easily set off minor explosions in your brain. Maybe not immediately, but at some point. So, with this humble calculator, I think I liked it when I slipped it out of its box because - at some subliminal level - it reminded me of this ...

    ... or, more specifically, it reminded me of the red lines in this excellent Peter Saville design from 1981. Back in those heady days of the early-80s, I didn't like Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (too insipidly poppy), but now I do. I picked up this Architecture & Morality tape a couple of months ago and have been playing it non-stop ever since. The pop stuff is fine (Joan Of Arc, Souvenir, She's Leaving), but the killer track is Sealand, a majestically gloomy composition which seems to be the soundtrack to the extinction of life on earth (or something). So that's it. That's why I bought the calculator (not because of the Kraftwerk song, good as it is: I'm the operator with my 8 Stellen Rechner). Yes, I bought the £1 calculator because its lovely design reminded me of the dark loveliness of Sealand. Good design makes good music better - and vice versa - but the music needs to actually be good in the first place. Yep, these are my basic principles when it comes to the endlessly fertile combination of design and music. These are my red lines.