(This is a guest post from commenter extraordinaire dhex!)
Autechre’s 11th LP, Exai, was released this February. The cover looks so much like a QR code that I’m one of only many who tried to scan it with their phone.
For those I’ve just lost, my essay isn’t really about Autechre – as great as they are – but rather about album cover art. The medium is certainly of reduced importance, but not quite dead just yet. If anything, there are almost too many visual artists doing great work for even mediocre musicians. It’s a great time for a medium people won’t generally see unless they buy a lot of vinyl.
One of the many remarkable things about Autechre is that their album art – almost always created by The Designer’s Republic – without fail reflects each record’s emotional tone. The physical packaging tends to be more rich, of course – the recycled cardboard wallet of Exai provides a copper-brown, grainy backdrop for the aqueous coating on the darker blocks. The two internal sleeves that hold the discs are minimally-colored invocations of the external packaging, and the discs themselves zoom in tight on the cover’s stark theme. The vinyl set is even more colorful. Coherent. Beautiful. Hell yeah.
Exai sounds like the story of a QR code, a dark and grimy existence that eventually folds into nothing. No one could accuse this cover of being misleading. Walking backwards through Autechre’s vast body of work one can see how each instance of album art is reflective of its contents. This holds even when they’re deeply mired in the times that generated them, as with Incunabula or the Anti EP. I can hand you EP7 and without hearing a single second the gist will be gotten.
Excellent album art is that which emotionally communicates what you’re going to hear; it adds to the experience and invites you to dream a bit as your ears float away. Truly great artwork keeps giving, much like a great recording’s depths are unearthed with repeated listenings. The greatest loss of the eclipse of vinyl as the dominant distribution format is not sound quality, as that horse has sailed out the gate into the ocean of YouTube. Instead, it’s no longer being able to touch a gigantic physical representation of the emotional world of people you’ve never met in a format with tremendous visual real estate; front, back, gatefold, sleeves, and sometimes spine.
It’s all the more amazing when this works because in most cases the artist/designer is not the musician; even if they do hear the album, they still have to take that leap into darkness and somehow come back with something worthwhile, having listened with their hearts as well as their heads.
For contrast, consider how many generations of adolescents have succumbed to broken hearts and cramped, hairy palms trying to hold this cover with a single hand? That cover is a lie. It certainly gets you to look twice, but it communicates nothing except “we think you’re a sucker and this music is hella corny”. Which technically meets the definition of truthfulness, but without intent it is merely #malegaze upon the wind.
When I think of perfect album art, there are a few works that come strongest to mind. I like most of these albums, but I’ve picked these for how true they are to the content rather than how much the content means to me. Larger versions exist online.
Within a certain North American cohort, this reeks of compulsory school attendance; broken film strips, hazy blue-yellow alienation.
Hey there, girl from the record store with impeccable taste who would have totally dug me had it not been really busy that day. Ditch your two dorky co-workers and tell me about your zine again.
The coolest looking suicide note.
The eternal feminine started a band.
Eternal inescapable persistence grinding you into dust.
I’ve always found this to be a “walking along the river” kind of album. Have yet to see any UFOs, though.
This is an ugly, jagged, self-hateful piece of work and always makes me a bit nauseous.
I’ll never forget that awful cloud.
I have a deeply irrational and intense dislike for this band, but that cover certainly lays it out for you; sea shanty induced out-of-body experiences await.
What about you? Have you been burned by whipped cream? Have you thrilled to melting landscapes, inner and outer? Perhaps more sadly, when was the last time album art forced a record into your hands, knowing nothing more than what you could see and feel?
I leave you with this digitally handcrafted salute to our Manchester boys:
I always thought Ghost in the Machine by the Police was a stupid cover, until I realized it was a portrait. Then I thought it was cool.
My favorite album cover of all time is Hawkwind’s A Space Ritual. It’s not that the front cover itself is so cool, but it opens out, and has various art, stories, etc. written all around it.
Here’s one side of it.
Here’s the other.
Classic Hawkwind.
I actually liked the Ghost cover but I had no idea it was a portrait. I assume the spiky one in the center is Sting, but which is which on the other two?
I need to find that Hawkwind cheap, it is often cited as an influence on my beloved Spacemen 3. Playing it now, I can see why.
Plus Lemmy was in the band, and Lemmy’s the man.
a dark and grimy existence that eventually folds into nothing.
For some reason that line makes me think of this. You ever read it?
This holds even when they’re deeply mired in the times that generated them, as with Incunabula or the Anti EP
The Anti EP I maybe get (or maybe not, because when I think of it, I think of the “political” rather than emotional aspects of the packaging, the sticker that was added to explain how the music was in direct response to laws being proposed that would have outlawed “repetitive” beats). But what do you mean about Incunabula* (a word which, I just learned from wikipedia, actually means something)?:
* I read a pretty funny Autechre review of the EPs 1991-2002 boxset** in which the reviewer made up Autechre tracknames, one of which was “Avuncular Homunculi”)
**I actually bought that boxset even though I already had several of the EPs – partially because I wanted the others, partially because it was cheap, and partially because I was liking the minimalist packaging – plain embossed cardboard sleeves, each in a different shade of greyscale).
i tried reading house of leaves but got really bored and gave up. i’m generally ok with metafiction but it just felt so forced to me.
as for the incunabula cover:
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/images/uploads/2009/01/autincunabula.jpg
it’s so mid 90s future cyber warriors needing a mark 4 lead on that telmat signature blah blah shitty.
but yeah that packaging is hot. though if i had my druthers i’d live in a house that was nothing but greyscale, slightly offset, in marching tints.
I read HoL a while back and enjoyed it, but maybe just because at the time it was very different. It’s in my re-read stack but not sure if/when I’ll ever get to it, that stack gets bigger all the time. But plot-wise (and book-cover-wise) it seemed to fit with that line.
their weird titles aside, a lot of them are not that weird. they’re phonetic, which is why it took me a second to get the joke of exai. but a lot of them do make sense in the context (i’m thinking of “recury” from chiastic slide in particular)
though if i had my druthers i’d live in a house that was nothing but greyscale, slightly offset, in marching tints.
OK, so holy crap.
It’s off-topic a bit, since they went with a utilitarian conformity approach label-wide, but I was looking for a picture of Chain Reaction’s infamous CD-cracking metal tin packaging (I had a few), and I found this neat site:
http://www.hardformat.org/
Here’s the Chain Reaction stuff:
http://www.hardformat.org/15/chain-reaction/
But here’s where I went “WANT”, and I don’t even really listen to Amon Tobin anymore:
http://www.hardformat.org/7971/amon-tobin-box-set/
Note: comment edited, it originally said “parent” label Basic Channel rather than subsequent “child” label Chain Reaction.
They also have the legendary Return of the Durutti Column LP cover, which was sandpaper, so it’d wreck the records on either side, a concept as abrasive as the music was pretty:
http://www.hardformat.org/8588/the-return-of-the-durutti-column
man you coulda just deleted my essay and pointed to that site. great find!
Gah, that site is going to eat my afternoon.
http://www.hardformat.org/8408/wow/
If you ever spend time in a real used book store – not a college student run, paperback flipping, “we love Bukowski and ART” – you will quickly learn about incunabula, monographs, broadsides and other joys of physical art. And yes, we do judge the book by its cover.
You’ll have to forgive me for just assuming “incunabula” was a made-up word. These are some actual titles of Autechre tracks:
Maphive6.1
Zeiss Contarex
Netlon Sentinel
Pir
Gelk
Blifil
Gaekwad
And here’s that review that had made-up ones:
http://pop-damage.com/?p=6947
If you work in a bookstore with books that old, I’d like to visit.
20 odd years ago I did. Best job ever, no matter the pay.
The Lounge Lizards, No Pain for Cakes
http://eil.com/shop/moreinfo.asp?catalogid=521800
Have you ever seen Fishing With John (Lurie, of The Lounge Lizards)? It used to be on Netflix streaming. It’s this weird pseudo-nature-documentary show wherein Lurie takes famous people fishing, except he knows nothing about fishing, and there is bizarre voiceover narration. The Willem Dafoe and Tom Waits eps are the best.
I suggest watching it with the commentary on, you get this rather odd set off tales about putting the whole thing together. Apparently Tom Waits just complained the whole time. And there was no fish where they went.
Actually the title is an in joke with my wife and I..
“fishing…
…with Johhhnn.”
“These are real men…doing real things.”
“On January 19, John Lurie and Willem Dafoe died of starvation.”
“I made a mistake! John is still alive.”
http://nakidorinorakuen.blogspot.com/2010/03/c77-love-solfege-note-of-satanism.html
(this isn’t the one that said “I must have this” but… I’m looking for that one…)
I love the title of the image of the cover of Castaways and Cutouts.
yeah, i really dislike them.
a lot.
it’s why i don’t understand the term “hate watching”.
if you hate something, you can’t watch it, because it makes you want to break furniture and scream until you cannot speak or breathe. hate is not a synonym for “ha ha”, just like “sociopath” is not a term for “someone who was rude to me in line at panera bread”.
when you truly hate something, all you can do is gasp as the rage squeezes your heart, blood streaming from knuckles that will soon sport permanent scars. i hate the decemberists. even typing their name makes me angry.
punchline: they’re my wife’s favorite band of all time that’s not called interpol.
i could never go. i even got her tickets one year to a sold out show for her birthday, but i always made her go with friends or her sister, since she wouldn’t go by herself. i’ve been to some really awful wack ass shit because of my wife – because love is an anchor around our necks – but there’s a line i cannot cross and that line is the decemberists.
i couldn’t stand on a lawn in central park while npr white people drank pinot griogot or some other fancy wine i can’t pronounce and somehow not see the proceedings before them as proof that the world is a screaming wound that will never heal. i can’t even imagine what that must have looked like. was everyone bleeding from their eyes? was there vomit? did people curse the sky?
people brought children to that.
pure obscenity.
These aren’t necessarily on-topic, since they don’t seem to say much about the music emotionally (and are maybe more “packaging” than “art”), but here’s a few more interesting (some might say gimmicky) examples:
I’ve always been partial to die-cut sleeves. This Mahogany LP cover, which has what appear to be some sort of semaphore signals, was clearly a tribute to Peter Saville’s OMD covers.
Menomena’s first CD had a cool photo flip book on it.
Massive Attack’s singles box set had heat-reactive ink (think Hypercolor t-shirts, if you are old enough to remember those) so that it would lighten from the heat from your hands wherever it was handled (actually, this one could be sort of an analogue for Massive Attack’s music – cold & dark on the surface, but subtly-shaded and volatile underneath).
They are really no different than book art. Somewhere above you mentioned HofL, and if you look on the colophon page, it talks about different editions, with certain words printed in different ink. It takes the experience of the art to an even sharper point.
If you ever see an old book with gilt edged pages, on some of them if cocked to an angle against the page, they have little hidden drawings, put there by the printer. I love sh*t like that, it puts you closer to the people who put the whole thing together, closer to the vision that created it.
puts you closer to the people who put the whole thing together, closer to the vision that created it.
One thing I struggled to put into words is the “totemic” nature of it all, for lack of a better word. I was afraid people would just dismiss it as fetishistic collector obsession-nonsense. But I think the way you just put it is better.
Vinyl records also had all these fun little “tricks” or in-jokes – things like locked (plays infinitely) or concentric (plays different music depending on where the needle is placed) grooves, grooves that ran “backwards” from inner to outer edge of the record, etched messages in the vinyl deadspace.
Holding an object in your hands and looking for this stuff is just plain fun.
I am a collector. Some people are, some aren’t. I don’t buy vinyl because I already have enough bad habits, and kinda worry about hording…
I love dust jackets, and old, but am really wanting this:
http://www.foliosociety.com/book/R3S/richard-iii
Oof. Man, I have never spent anywhere near that kind of green on any single item (though the total on an annual pilgrimage to Amoeba, or to see some band, have hit near that number on occasion). I passed up a couple of recent box sets in that price range (that Deluxe Pixies set designed by Vaughan Oliver, and that Smiths Complete footlocker thingy) because I already bought those albums, and I just could not justify that kind of money for something I already own (sometimes in multiple formats), no matter how much I love the music or design.
You just gotta keep telling yourself that 🙂
Hello from Portland – glad to have stumbled upon your post today. Since the artist Storm Thorgerson (creator of many iconic album cover images) died last month, there have been a number of “tributes” to him in the press that inevitably lead to a statement about “the death of album cover art”, so it was good to read your article as it reflects not only my attitude, but those of many of us who are involved in the world of music product-related design, photography, packaging and promotion. I’ve been sending notes to a number of these opinionators trying to bring them up to speed concerning the broad range of talent doing this sort of work today and just why many musical acts – particularly, independent acts that rely on unique imagery to draw attention to themselves and their music – still value these collaborative efforts and invest whatever resources they have into their development.
In any case, I know that we’ll keep working hard to promote the works of these talented individuals while, at the same time, reminding music fans that “we’re not dead yet – in fact, we’re feeling pretty good” (sorry, Python fans!).
Keep up the good work – regards, Mike G, curator, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com, Portland, OR, USA
Thanks for visiting, Mike. How did you stumble across us?
FYI, the text was posted by me but written by frequent commenter dhex. We are thinking of doing semi-regular posts here on album art, so check back once in a while!
I post articles about album cover art every week day on the ACHOF site, so I have a number of related alerts set (on Google, Bing, etc.) for articles on the subject and yours (i.e., your posting of dhex’s comments) showed up in yesterday’s alert.
I write regular articles on the topic (mostly based on interviews I do with well known album cover designers, illustrators and photographers), so I’d invite you and your followers to check out our site on a regular basis as well (lots of info there on the people that create great album cover work).
Glad that we met – let’s stay in touch. MG
If you’d like to do a guest post here (quick thought: five of your favorites and what’s great about them, with links to your full articles on them), we’d love to have it.
Mike – thanks for the invite…I’m assuming that you mean five of my favorite interviews and not my five favorite album covers – I’ve done about 80 interviews in the last 6 years, but they’re not only with folks who’ve done work that I like, as I’m working to maintain a non-partisan approach to my reporting. There are about 40 music industry writers and art/photo experts who’ve worked with me to select the initial class of nominees and inductees into the ACHOF, so the names included currently reflect a wide range of tastes and opinions as to what’s “good” album cover art. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Boomer (my first concert was The Turtles in 1968), so I tend to prefer “classic” album cover art but also have a great appreciation for some of the work being done today. For example, I just finished interviewing Ben Kweller about the package he helped design for his latest release and am impressed with the passion (and creative resources) he put into it (this will be posted in the next week or so). In any case, I’ll think about your idea and will get back to you with something. Cheers, MG
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