“Writing is intrinsic to what I am”
13 May 2010
We’re very sad to learn that designer and poet David Chaloner has died this week after a long battle against cancer.
Hailing from Cheshire and working in the Manchester area from the early-60s, he moved to London in 1973. After involvement with various projects, including offices for Letraset, he became consultant to Harvey Nichols department store, and also designed for Jean Paul Gaultier, Hit and Run Music, Connie Booth, Capital Radio, Jean Muir and Stockmann department store in Helsinki. He later became Creative Director at Conran Design, and more recently worked in Amsterdam at Chaloner Huisman Studio with Dutch writer and entrepreneur Joyce Huisman.
Two members of the current Hemisphere team attended a design seminar a few years ago at The Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, at which David was the key speaker. I recall him being an engaging and erudite man, but it was whilst listening to his talk that I realised a far greater debt of gratitude I owed to the man beyond the realm of design.
As a 13 year old music-obsessive, my friend and I voraciously consumed records lent by his uncle, who was “a designer in London”. They most notably included Brian Eno’s fourth Ambient instalment, On Land, which was my first encounter with textural, occasionally abrasive soundscaping that seemed to create a whole new sonic language of its own. My dad had played me Echoes by Pink Floyd, and our house was full of prog rock, but for my ears, this was something else entirely.
Another was a compilation of minimal composers on San Francisco’s New Albion label, entitled Portraits, and featuring Ingram Marshall’s seminal Fog Tropes, Stephen Scott’s wonderful bowed piano and the then lesser-known John Adams, weighing-in with an organ piece called Light Over Water.
It was records such as these that expanded my musical mind, and without which I may never have fastidiously scoured Radio 3 listings for occasional snippets of Steve Reich, and taken myself into Decoy Records and Our Price’s classical department hoping to find records by Morton Feldman, LaMonte Young and Pauline Oliveros.
David was also a published poet, and said about the crossover with his design career: “The work I create with words, the possibilities that language presents as a means of communication both directly and indirectly, has for me many parallels in the other creative disciplines. Writing is intrinsic to what I am.’
Sound is also intrinsic to what I am, and for that I have to thank my mate’s Uncle David.
