Hardformat

I love the typeface used for all of the titling, its angularity perfectly suits the music. Also striking, though perhaps a little less successful are the stickers which are applied vertically on the left side of the front and back outside cover. They’re stickers and not printed directly onto the sleeve. The colours are also great: the vivid red almost defiantly offsets and emphasises the black and white portrait. Likewise the lilac inner sleeve.

£6 in a Berwick Street record shop. I bought the original on tape, then bought the CD, have had it on mp3 for years and now back to the original and greatest version, the 12″ vinyl. It’s the only place to really experience the greatness of this design.

See also: Miles Davis, Agharta

Agharta was Miles’ penultimate release before retirement from performance and public view for more than five years. Agharta and its sister Pangaea are concert performances recorded on the same day, afternoon and evening. Davis had assimilated the radical, jump-cut editing his long-time producer Teo Macero had wrought in the studio and imposed structural change in the moment on his band with coded musical signals and hand gestures. Each performance begins with incredible vigour (attributable in no small part to Pete Cosey’s scorched earth guitar), navigates switch-back turns of extemporised funk and acid melody before ultimately descending into silence via passages of Sun Ra-like hand percussion. Both double albums are fantastic voyages into the unknown, sounding as alien and bewitching today as the day they were recorded.

Tadanori Yokoo’s artwork perfectly encapsulates Miles’ music: technicolour trips through sub-aquatic cities peopled by divers, spaceships, coral and beautiful women on the outside cover while inside angels are picked off by huge birds. I particularly love the artist/title text as spaceship taking off against the red dawn. Would the cover be as great without the amazing music? Of course, not, but nor would the music without this cover… The American version of the cover is also interesting, but more mundane than this fantastical creature.

Tadanori Yokoo’s work is fantastic and well worth checking out:

A Journey Round My Skull post
Pink Tentacle: Music and film posters
Wikipedia entry

I realise it’s pretty much a truism, but the design is immeasurably better served by the scale of the 12″ format than the CD package (which I also own). Vaughan expressed a degree of frustration at the degree to which his design was circumscribed by Scott Walker. Given the expressive freedom of so much of Oliver’s work, that’s understandable. His approach is hugely impressive all the same: the typography and layout are formally impressive and the muted colours are striking -  particularly the gold and pale blue against the darkened background.

The layout of the lyrics is by Scott Walker, and is the same approach seen on his previous masterpiece, Tilt. The spindly, tall lines suggest something intensely honed, eked out against the lure of silence (a decade, give or take a few years, divides each of Scott Walker’s last three albums). Dare I say they suggest Giacometti figures? Well I did! The photography is also worthy of note, simultanously touching upon Scott and suggesting disintegration, intensity and alienation.

The only slightly discordant note is struck by Ian Penman’s essay which is unforunately at once hagiographic and rather prosaic. Ultimately, singing Scott Walker’s praises is tremendously superfluous: you will either be immensely moved or alienated by The Drift.