A Note From Chris Sommovigo:

For quite some time I have been fascinated with the art that had been produced to promote Absinthe and other liquors during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was the unofficial "official" drink of the bohemian culture of the time, a movement that was monumentally rich with artistic depth and (often) tragic consequences. This was the stuff of intrigue and drama!

This was also the age of spiritual and scientific mystery, the introduction of the esoteric, a battleground among men and women of science, church, art and apostasy. This strange atmosphere on the world stage gave birth to influential players the likes of Aleister Crowley, Allen Bennett, Madame Helena Blavatsky, Inayat Khan, George Gurjieff, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Somerset Maugham, Franz Kafka, Mily Balakirev (and his four buddies), Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and a host of other interesting (and extreme) characters.

Art Nouveau: Influenced deeply by Alphonse Mucha's work (such that it was first spoken of as "Mucha-style") and further influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, especially when it concerns some of the promotional art that I've adopted (and adapted) here.

 

For those who are familiar with the late 19th Century bohemian "scene" in Paris, Le Chat Noir should be a familiar name. Opened by artist Rodolphe Salis in 1881 in the Montmarte district of Paris, this nightclub was the epicenter of art and music. Its quite famous poster, painted by Theophile Steinlen, is iconic not only of the club - but perhaps also of the times.

Out of this fertile ground sprung Cubism (and Orphism), Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, and De Stijl - movements which remain hugely influential on modern art and architecture to this day. Music spread from the late Romantic and Neo-Romanticism of Mahler, Sibelius, and Poulenc to the Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, to the 12-tone Modernism of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. As far as turns of the centuries are concerned, the period between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries erupted with paradigm shift after paradigm shift. Every aspect of modern culture was in play!

So ... while I am not a French-speaker, I wanted to imbue this site and this project with some of the essential zeitgeist of that very strange, fantastical era in Western history when a libertarian (or at least libertine) milieu seemed to produce some of the most interesting art and attitude.

 

And while I had almost endless choices that could have spoken for that era, this "Chat Noir" poster art speaks to me most authentically.

In a way, much of what I'm doing in terms of these cable designs reflects - at least in spirit - that attitude of unconventionality. These aren't predictable designs based in the dogma and doctrine of The Establishment and designed by committee. There are no pedagogues here! These are tabula-rasa designs built by trial-and-error, by empirical evaluation, and with deep affection for music.


- Christopher Sommovigo
Atlanta, GA
January, 2010

ABOUT THE DESIGNER:

In 1992, at 25 years old, Chris Sommovigo introduced the first "true" 75 Ohm digital cable to the audio market, marking a line in the sand (and setting a high bar). By demonstrating the superiority of a 75 Ohm characteristic impedance in a coaxial digital cable (and thereby matching the load impedance of the DAC), he defined the line between pass and fail for every other digital cable to follow from every other cable designer in the industry.

In 1994, at 27, his designs were brought into the distribution-fold of Kimber Kable, and in the years between 1994 and 1997 he contributed no less than six digital cable designs, five of which remain standards in their catalog.

In August of 1997, he sold the intellectual property for those of his cables that were already in the Kimber Katalog to Kimber Kable, and then moved from Salt Lake City, UT to Atlanta, GA. Here he undertook a serious research and development program into new cable designs, locating his facility in the one of the city's industrial neighborhoods known as Castleberry Hill.Those who knew him at the time say he was relentless in his pursuit, often working until the sun rose and living on little other than coffee, cigarettes, and free jazz.

In 1999/2000 he introduced his first commercially-available analog cable designs to market under the brand "STEREOVOX," including the original LSP-600 loudspeaker cable and the SEI-600 single-ended interconnect. His radical, square RCA plugs were easily spotted from afar as being among the most luxuriously interesting designs for connectors and remain unchallenged as examples of excellent industrial design for electrical connectors.

His work with Stereovox continued, and he introduced several more analog and digital cable designs to market at various price points in order to introduce interesting new geometries and processes to the cable field.

In 2004 he began to import a few products from overseas, and in 2005 he introduced the Continuum Caliburn turntable to the world through his distribution company Signals SuperFi, LLC and then later through The Signal Collection, LLC. The Continuum Caliburn remains his reference source.

In 2009, he relinquished use of the Stereovox trade name to its owner and in 2010 brought his mainstream designs under the Stereolab moniker, where they remain today.