Join us for the Moonface Experience on March 11th at XTR Studios, with music and sound curated by In Sheep’s Clothing.

If you visited the In Sheep’s Clothing listening bar back when it was open, you may remember a selection of art books that welcomed guests at the entrance of the listening room. Those books, meant to inspire and weave connections through music, photography, and art, were curated by our good friends from Hat & Beard press, an independent, Los Angeles-based publisher and print collective creating original, illustrated nonfiction books of pop-cultural and historical significance that draw on existing cult audiences. They recently collaborated with dublab on the independent radio station’s gorgeous 20-year retrospective.

We’ve been working closely with Hat & Beard for years now, and feature a selection of their books at the In Sheep’s Clothing record shop. A few current titles include: Resist Phony Encores!, Chicago 1968: The Whole World is Watching, Manny Farber: Paintings & Writings, Earth Room by Rachel Mannheimer, The Doomsday Clock at 75, and others. They also designed and co-published the first edition of our new “Listening” book series, which is now sold out. More on that soon…

Coming up next, Hat & Beard will be working with another longtime friend of In Sheep’s Clothing, artist and musician Christian Letts, on his latest project Moonface, a wordless novel featuring monochromatic images. Christian created a similarly monochromatic graphite piece for the In Sheep’s Clothing listening bar. “It was an attempt to create something that accepted color and reflected it back. The pieces are alive in a sense. The viewer is reflected in the surface, and at once the viewer and the work become tangled. Each work is effected by the time and weather of the day.”

You might remember it…

Read about Moonface below:

“MoonFace is a visitation into a collapsing mind, It’s a negotiation with a memory thief, it is a quest into the abstraction where we can find ourselves, our thoughts, and our history more clearly. The images shared from Christian Letts’ latest offering allows for an individual reflection. However differed the story presents itself to each viewer, the course of the images will unite the experience through the reduction of the color palette, the stillness of thought, and the curiosity of what lays within.”

In Sheep’s Clothing’s Bryan Ling wrote the forward to the book. Read an excerpt:

“When Christian first described the concept for Moonface—exploring the distance between him and his father, the relationship that they had and more poignantly, the relationship that they didn’t—he outlined the imagery that he associates in dreams about his father. Caliginous not only in environment, but also within the characters themselves. A man’s fading memory; devoid of his own child’s greatest talents.”

Below, Christian shared a selection of records from the In Sheep’s Clothing collection that inspired the images presented in Moonface.

Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois – Apollo 

Steve Roach – Quiet Music 3

Midori Takada – Through the Looking Glass 

Moonface is available to purchase now via: https://hatandbeard.com/products/moonface-by-christian-letts

Join us in-person for the “Moonface Experience” on March 11th at XTR Studios.

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