Hardformat

Just to let you know what we’ve been doing lately on Hard Format:

• We’ve got a new section called The Collections where people can display themed collections. Our first one of Jamaican 70s designs is courtesy of Dave Hendley. If you’ve an idea for one please get in touch!
• We’re gradually building up The designers section with pages on Peter Saville, Julian House and Hipnosis in preparation. We’ve been promised material from ECM (Dieter Rehm and Barbara Wojirsch), Vaughan Oliver, Non Format, Malcolm Garrett, Trevor Jackson and Jon Wozencroft. Ian Anderson from Designers Republic was initially enthusiastic, but he’s not replying any more :-(
• With today’s post (Susan Archie’s wonderful Charley Patton box) we’ve increased the image size a little from a width of 760 to 900 pixels and increased the gaps between the images, this hopefully shows off the designs better.
• It’s taken a long time, but I think our photography has improved a lot in recent months. We’re standardising around black backgrounds (except for very dark designs which are on grey) and we’re sorting out pesky barrel distortion in Photoshop to make the images look right. It’s been a real learning curve.
• At the top of each post there’s now a Next and Previous link so you can navigate through the site without having to return to the Contents page every time. Unfortunately my WordPress skills (or any coding at all in fact) aren’t great, so the link takes you to the next post in temporal order which may be a news item rather than the next weekly post. Hopefully it’s still useful though.
• Numerous smaller tweaks – we’ve tidied up the main navigation in the sidebar and the information box below the images should be more legible. Oh and at time of writing we’ve nearly sorted out how to split up the news section so it’s not one incredibly long page! Many thanks to Houndworld for his help with that.

That’s about it, but we’re always on the lookout for great new design or guest posts, so don’t hesitate to let us know if you see anything. Thanks for reading.

Artist:48 different artistes, from Groupo De Totoko Francois to Vishnudass Shirali via Goebble Reeves The Texas Drifter
Title: Victrola Favourites
Label: Dust to Digital
Year: 2008
Designer: Book design and layout by Uncle John Hubbard and his boys (Robert Mills and Jeffery Taylor)
Type of music: 78s from around the world
Notes: A visual and musical cornucopia and a reminder of the stupefying amount of musical culture secreted on 78s.

Artist:1-4: Artur Nowak, 5-8: Daniel Menche
Title: 1-4: Guitar Granulizer, 5-8: Animality
Label: emd.pl records
Year: 1-4: 2004, 5-8: 2007
Designer: 1-4: Cover art by The Tag Artist, a Reaktor instrument designed by Chris List, 5-8: Wojtek Bednarski
Type of music: Granular synthesis/abstract
Notes: Artur Nowak writes:

The music on “Guitar Granulizer” is an experiment with granular synthesis. Since the music is highly processed by the computer, I wanted the cover to be “digital” or “technical” as well. I have used same software, which generated the sound, to produce a graphical representation of the sound as an oscillator graph running in a circle. I hope it mimics the dynamics of the music and aggressiveness of it. Also, the tracks are very short and can be played at random to create new, surprising combinations – the cover art can be also randomly “mixed”, four pieces of translucent paper can be re-arranged. It’s up to the owner of the CD, how the cover looks like. It’s a kind of “invitation” for the listener to use his creativeness, open eyes and ears for the sound, which is not easy to absorb. We are trying to cover of every album unique, through different and usual materials, printing techniques and graphic.

See also: Zbigniew Karkowski and Lin Zhiying – Switch

Artist:Tristan Perich
Title: One Bit Music
Label: Cantaloupe Music
Year: 2004-5
Designer: Tristan Perich
Type of music: 1-bit
Notes: This is one music project where expensive headphones aren’t mandatory. See also: FME, Buddha Machine.

Artist: Various
Title: Goodbye, Babylon
Label: Dust To Digital
Year: 2003
Designer: Susan Archie
Type of music: Gospel
Notes: Another jaw-dropping design from the house of Anarchie/Susan Archie. Five of the CDs are filled to the brim with wonderful gospel music captured between 1902 and 1960, while the final disc contains 25 sermons recorded between 1926 and 1941.
See also:
Dock Boggs: Country Blues
Rhys Chatham – An Angel Moves Too Fast To See
Albert Ayler – Holy Ghost
Fonotone Records, Frederick, Maryland

Just stumbled upon this frankly amazing collection of jazz album sleeves at Birkajazz, a Swedish record shop. There are so many wonderful designs there, go go go!