There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light

Ryan Spencer's There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light is a 272-page paperback that imagines the visual companion to a film that was never made: the unrealized cinematic version of The Afghan Whigs' 1996 album Black Love. Spencer assembles film stills culled from the deep catalogue of neo-noir Los Angeles cinema and arranges them so that the album's track titles and song-by-song narrative drive the sequence, making a found-image storyboard for a record that always wanted to be a movie. The accompanying fictional essay by Rebecca Bengal extends the conceit into prose Chummy Alexanian's illustrations punctuate the book with hand-drawn motifs that play against the cinematic source material. Published in TBW Books' small-format paperback line with colored edges, the volume sits between artist book, music object, and pulp paperback — a physical artifact whose stylized object qualities are integral to its meaning. The result is at once a tribute to Greg Dulli's record, an essay on appropriation and cinephilia, and a meditation on the gap between what an album promises and what a film could have delivered.