Hardformat

Hurray! I’ve been trying to figure this one out on and off for ages (I’m not exactly technically great), but you can now subscribe to Hard Format by RSS. If you’ve no idea what RSS – also known as a newsfeed – is, this from the BBC’s guide might enlighten you:

In a world heaving under the virtual weight of billions of web pages, keeping up with websites can be a chore. RSS feeds let you keep up to date with the latest info on all your favourite sites without having to take the trouble to visit them. In effect, bits of their sites come to you instead.

The rest of their guide can be found here. I’d recommend Google Reader, it’s what I use.

You can always find the link to our feed in the sidebar of every page or you can just click the link below:

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Artist: Gas
Release: Nah und Fern
Label: Kompakt
Year: 2008
Designer: “Musik/Fotos/Kunstlerische Gestaltung: Wolfgang Voigt, Foto und Gestaltungsassistenz: Veronika Unland
Type of music: Ambient/techno
Notes: Gas’s music is at once airy, claustrophic, minimal and dense which the artwork does justice to.

Bleuch is all I can say. This is rear end of a limited edition Zune. There are further pics of this assault on the sensibilities of any right-thinking aesthete on Gizmodo.

Now I wonder what’s worse, this or the Joy Division training shoes?

And just in case you’ve forgotten the original…

[From Matthew Wahl's photostream].

Okay, it’s only a miniature cardboard cut-out, but it still looks nice in this pic:

Comes free with the GAS0095 CD release. While stocks last.

Link

Spotted yesterday on the London Underground. The blurriness around the posterior of that running man is nothing to do with the quality of the camera on my phone and everything to do with London Transport’s squeamishness :-0 Here’s the original:

Artist: Sigur Rós
Album: ( )
Label: FatCat Records
Year: 2002
Designer: Alex Torrance , D.C. , Sigur Rós
Type of music: Icelandic post-rock
Notes: -

Adrian Shaughnessy seems to have pretty much cornered the market in books about music-related graphic design. Cover Art By: is his fourth following on from the Sampler trilogy. These are sadly now out of print, but well worth tracking down by the way. I bought a copy in what used to be Zwemmers on the Charing Cross Road on impulse last week (thereby spending approximately £6 more than if I’d ordered it from Amazon). I’m still gathering my thoughts about it, but in the meantime here’s Mark Fisher aka k-punk’s review in Frieze a couple of months back.

Stereos, Tapes, CDs and Vinyl Records: My Frustrating Romance With Old-Fashioned Audio Gear [Gizmodo]

Artist: Spiritualized
Album: A&E
Label: Sanctuary Records
Year: 2008
Designer: Farrow/Spaceman
Type of music: Rock
Notes: I’m not a particular fan of Spiritualized, it’s not really my kind of music. So this one’s featured because the packaging is rather marvellous. The eery colour scheme is chillingly redolent of pharmaceutical care: sterilised, anonymous, corporate. The precision of the design echoes this, particularly the precisely calculated length of ribbon that protrudes from the book. Makes an enjoyable contrast to the music it precedes. Let’s see if I can get into it. Thanks to Is for the hand modelling :-)

Here are a couple of reissues whose packaging is significantly less wonderful than the original. In a time of falling sales, you’d think more, rather than less, effort might be made on design…

Monolake – Hongkong, which although remastered apparently offers one less track than the original. View the original (well, at least its spine – it’s the first on the left on the shelf!).

Fennesz – Endless Summer. Though I generally like the design of Touch releases, I find this one really uninspired, perhaps the rest of the package is more interesting. View the brilliant, limited edition, Tina Frank original.