Hardformat

I mentioned this upcoming exhibition a while back here in the news section. The link at the bottom contains the full details, but highlights as follows. If anyone fancies visiting the show and meeting up, don’t hesitate to give me a shout.

3 September – 3 October 2008, Monday – Friday, 10am – 6pm, Saturday 11am – 4pm, Arts Gallery, 65 Davies Street, W1K 5DA. Admission free.

The Horrors’ Faris Rotter has selected some of the best album cover art of the last four decades to appear at the Arts Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition Spin. A unique examination of the art of the record cover, Spin will open up an often forgotten side of the music industry, to explore the relationship between art, design and music.

Faris Rotter, GQ Editor Dylan Jones and Peter Saville, who famously designed Factory Records artwork including Joy Division and New Order covers, formed the selection panel for Spin, choosing an eclectic array of albums stretching across musical genres and through four decades.

Following London Design Festival the Arts Gallery will host a discussion on the future of album cover art in the digital age. The panel includes author and journalist Andrew Collins as chair, with Peter Saville, album cover expert and author Adrian Shaughnessy and EMI designer Chris Peyton debating this seminal issue.

Press release

Gorgeous and apparently long out of print Delia Derbyshire library record.

Spotted on Create Digital Music

Artist: Kraftwerk
Album: Neon Lights
Label: Capitol Records
Year: 1978
Designer: Unknown
Type of music: Kraftwerk
Notes: This is luminous vinyl – turn the light out and it glows a yellowish white in the dark. My copy doesn’t glow with much strength or for very long as it’s almost 30 years old now. Still, anyone who thinks Kraftwerk are humourless (non) souls is misinformed.

Great gesture!:

These days, there’s nothing surprising about a band releasing a single as a free download. But while Coldplay and the Charlatans mess around with MP3s, and Radiohead put laser video footage online, Deerhoof are trying a different approach. Sure, you can download Fresh Born, the single from their forthcoming album. However, you will have to play the damn thing yourself. Because, for the moment, Deerhoof are just giving away the sheet music.

Seen in The Guardian

Artist: The Smashing Pumpkins
Title: The Aeroplane Flies High
Label: Virgin Records America
Year: 1996
Designer: tbc
Type of music: Alternative Rock
Notes: A personal favourite of mine, both design and music. This is a boxset compiling the five singles from ‘Mellon Collie’. Originally a ‘limited’ run of 200,000 (those were the days) that saw a wider repress due to demand. I remember paying through the nose for my copy from the original run, only to see loads of reprints appear in local record shops weeks later at a lower price.

Intended to mimic a 45 singles record box from the 60′s if I’m not mistaken. The blotches you can see in the photos are patches of mould – it doesn’t appear to be aging too well 12 years on.

For those of us of the Techno persuasion, this poster detailing the genre’s development might be of interest. Given my love of Kraftwerk I’m not going to argue with the group’s placement, but I’ll take issue with the absence of Giorgio Moroder, Manuel Gottsching, Monoton and T++, but then with a project like this you’re never going to satisfy everybody.

Link: The Strange Attractor » Blog Archive » Techno Tree

Artist: Scott Walker
Title: Tilt
Label: Fontana
Year: 1995
Designer: Cover photography and image manipulation – David Scheinmann, Concept and hand – Scott Walker, Studio photography – Phil Knott, Art direction and design – Stylorouge.
Type of music: Devastating
Notes: You might think this isn’t a particularly remarkable piece of design and you might be right. However, the layout of the words, the paring down of sentences into knotted clusters clearly reflects Scott Walker’s stripping away of surface to reach into the essence of experience/sensation/thought/impulse/feeling. (What is left at the end of that process is up to the listener to make sense of.) The main image – hands, feathers, the unblinking eye of an owl or hawk, the implication of darkness, perhaps desperation, flight – is tremendously visually intuitive when related to Tilt’s journeys, passages, angles, feelings. I even love the Fontana CD label with its burgundy red and gold, redolent of the labels of earlier periods.

Scott Walker’s music and words are, in my opinion, some of the very greatest of the twentieth century. It’s with Tilt that visual design and music become nearly synonymous for me. How to separate them? I wonder whether it’s even necessary to contemplate, but it’s entirely relevant to the mission of Hard Format – Tilt wouldn’t be the same without these blurred images, these muted colours, this layout.

And here it is in its scratched and mussed-up jewel case:

I’m going to cover The Drift soon here. Vaughan Oliver’s design is an admirable counterpart to the dark horror of Scott Walker’s most recent recording. While I was writing this post, I wondered for the first time whether Tilt was ever released on vinyl. Turns out it was, in the US only on Drag City. Time to secure a copy.

See also: Scott Walker – Who Shall Go To The Ball? And What Shall Go To The Ball?

Link: Non-Format – Black Devil Disco Club

Artist: Robag Wruhme
Release: The Lost Archive 1998-2007
Label: Musik Krause
Year: 2007
Designer: Toci & Robag
Type of music: Electronic
Notes: Lovely, simple embossed card cover.

Artist: Data 70
Release: Space Loops, Volume One and Two
Label: Enraptured
Year: 2008
Designer: Volume one: Data 70 and Timmy!, Volume two: Data 70 and Sam Combes
Type of music: Analogue electronica
Notes: First seen on the redoubtable Gutterbreakz blog. Delicious retro 7″ styling (5 tracks per side!), not a million miles from Ghost Box, but more unassumingly playful.