London-based infographic maker Dorothy has been inspired by a lot of different types of prints in their times, creating great prints such as fhorror films arranged as star charts to periodic tables of sex talk. But its latest print, Electric Love, might be its cleverest yet. It's a semi-complete history of electronic music, arranged as a theremin blueprint—one of the earliest electronic instruments.
Loosely grouping together innovators in electronic music as far back as 1857, the Electronic Love chart contains well-known names like the eponymous Léon Theremin, Bob Moog, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, and Aphex Twin, as well as distinct genres such as electronica, musique concrète, and Krautrock. Screen printed in metallic silver on a blue uncoated stock, the finished design contains over 200 inventors, innovators, artists, composers, and musicians.
"The style of the diagram is based on instructions of how to build a theremin," says Dorothy founder James Quail. "There are quite a lot of instructions out there, but we took a lot of inspiration from instructions from the mid-'50s—altered and stylized in order to enable us to construct a structure which we can then use to connect related artists."
That means that if you're inspired enough by Electronic Love, you could take it off the wall and use it as a basis to start your own electronic music career. Not a bad value for a price of around $50.