Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Distorted Pony: Logo #319

I love following up something like Take That with something like Distorted Pony. David Uskovich, guitarist with the industrial / noise rock band, remembers: "Around '88 or '89 - maybe as early as '87 - Dora Jahr, bassist, made an abstract "pony" out of clay. She rolled the clay into ropes. I can't remember, but I think the head, body and tail were all one piece, with separate pieces for the legs and the "eye," which is that big circle in the middle of the head. It was like a 3-D version of a line drawing. She probably still has that thing. One of us, or maybe it was Robert Hammer or Theodore Jackson, had the idea to slap some black paint onto the clay pony and then press it onto a piece of paper. The results were pretty cool, as you have seen, so we decided to have some rubber stamp maker make us a rubber stamp from the original print and Bob's-your-uncle: instant portable logo-maker. We definitely used it for the first single. We were all total industrial dorks, so the fact that the Pony logo resembled the Einsturzende Neubauten logo was not lost on us."

Distorted Pony re-united this year in Los Angeles; sometimes it takes years for people to catch on. The world needs ditch-diggers - and grave-diggers - too.