John Jansen is squatting in front of his immense printer. Holding his breath, he very carefully places a piece of paper in just the right place. The inlay for the black metal band's new cassette Northward. Black typography on black board. Monk's work. He sighs with relief. "And so I have to do 88 of those. All by hand. Do you understand how many hours go into a tape like that?"
Jansen - visual artist, designer, publisher - runs Zeitgeists Publishing. A one man label on which he publishes idiosyncratic work by kindred spirits from art, literature, metal, hardcore, drone, neofolk and other underground music. All handmade with beautiful, dark design. And analogue, i.e. on cassette.
Jansen: "I see it as a backlash against this whole digital revolution, where everything is going faster and faster. With Zeitgeists Publishing, I'm going back to the craft. I consider it an honour to bring such careful design to artists I greatly admire. Like photographer Ryan Lowry and writer Max G. Morton, but also bands like Pandiscordian Necrogenesis or Natural Assembly. Effort for something beautiful is not a bad thing."
For years, I saw Jansen wandering around crooked squats at shows of obscure bands. We nodded at each other, but somehow never struck up a conversation. Until recently. Janssen studied at the Rietveld Academy and teaches at the Akademie Vogue in Amsterdam, but what shaped him most was the do-it-yourself credo of the hardcore punk scene.
Jansen: "In hardcore, I learned to think critically, about art, about music and about ethical issues like animal rights and straight edge lifestyles. Everything was about self-development and self-reliance - if you wanted to make something, you did it. And you didn't give a damn what others would think about it. Two people helped me enormously in this regard. Marcel Palyama of Coalition Records and Mark McCoy with his label Youth Attack. Both great artists. In their work, you see that the visual goes incredibly well with the music, they really make a kind of gesamtkunst."
"Together with Palyama, I did the design of a number of punk magazines, and we had the label Totalvernichtung // Todesstunde on which we could indulge our love of spherical black metal. That label is no longer active, and I started Zeitgeists."
"I have always been looking for meaning, for a sacred ideal to believe in. I used to sympathise with certain sides of the hardline vegan movement, and I was briefly converted to Christianity. Yet I have let go of all that too."
"Art for me is ultimately the way, however small-scale, to become immortal. If I am no longer around then there are still my tapes and magazines that will live on. I find it comforting that this is how I leave footprints in time. But I don't do that alone. All the artists I admire and propagate have a similar spirit, a Geist, that leaves an imprint in time. We are all zeitgeists."
Jansen is primarily a designer, but also makes beautifully disruptive collage art. In his torn images of oldschool porn, distorted almost beyond recognition with tape and ink smudges, horniness and ecstasy go hand in hand. Old exploitation turns into spiritual rapture.
"I have often wondered what attracts me so much to these dark themes. I have nothing at all to do with goths, but almost all my clothes are black. Still, I am fascinated by darkness. And yes, I like to play with the compelling force of 'foul' aesthetics in my design. This is deliberate. But people who know me know it's a sick joke - me, as a leftist artist with such a cassette in an edition of 88 pieces.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
