{ feuilleton }

A gust, a storme, a spoute, a loume gaile, an eddy wind, a flake of wind, a Turnado. Captain John Smith from An Accidence, or the Pathway to Experience Necessary for all Young Seamen (1626). In an age of storm chasers and increasingly spectacular photos, Lucille Handberg’s celebrated picture may seem undramatic, but for the […]

Jesus Egg That Wept (1984) by Danielle Dax. Most of the examples here are for singles and albums released by Danielle Dax in the 1980s but British artist Holly Warburton has done a lot more besides. The work from the 80s involved the re-photographing of images projected onto canvas or other materials, effects that are […]

BBC Sound Effects No 1 (1969). Design by Roy Curtis-Bramwell. I used to own this album, the first in a series of sound effects collections from the BBC tape library intended for use by musicians, theatre technicians and anyone else who might need a recording of a thunderstorm, fire alarm or creaking door. Going through […]

I wasn’t going to write about album cover art three times in a row but things keep catching my attention this week. Anyone interested in the history of electronic music knows the name Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, the duo formed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff to create music with Cecil’s huge, custom-built TONTO (The […]

Gazette Vol. 2 (1961) by Pete Seeger. More elaborate record sleeve design. Was Pete Seeger the first artist to have a fake newspaper as a cover design? Gazette Vol. 2 is the earliest example I can find. Some of these examples were suggested by this earlier overview. If anyone knows of any omissions then please leave […]

There’s a sub-genre of the psychedelic album cover in which florid, unfocused and vividly polychrome doodles by friends of the band are used as the principal artwork. (The cover of The Parable Of Arable Land [1967] by The Red Crayola is a typical example.) The art which decorates the fold-out sleeve of Ptooff! (1967), the […]

The World’s Desire (1972) by H. Rider Haggard & Andrew Lang. Painting: Astral Body Asleep (1968). The use of Mati Klarwein’s paintings on album covers is well documented, the official Klarwein site has a small section devoted to some of the covers. Less well-known are these book covers which were evidently the product of a […]

The Fool (1968). Many people know the work of design collective The Fool even if they couldn’t tell you the name or the names of any of the individuals involved.  The accelerated career trajectory of Dutch artists Marijke Koger and Simon Posthuma took them from a hippie enclave on the isle of Ibiza in 1966, […]

Strange Days was the second album by The Doors, released in October 1967. It’s the album that veers the closest to what people think of today as a psychedelic sound—which puts it in my favour—and is also unique in the group’s catalogue for minimising their presence on the gatefold sleeve, something Jim Morrison was always […]

More psychedelia (there’s always more psychedelia). Listening to this Small Faces album this week I couldn’t remember whether my vinyl reissue from the 1980s had survived the vinyl purge I instituted a few years ago. It turns out I do still have the vinyl copy, a facsimile of the original circular sleeve. Ogdens’ Nut Gone […]

Kiss Kiss Kiss (1964). A follow-up to yesterday’s post, and three short films by the artist from the 1960s. As animations go these are fairly crude but they do have the benefit of showing Yokoo’s sense of humour, something which isn’t necessarily so obvious in his poster art. Kiss Kiss Kiss is a short sequence […]

Kokoro No Uramado (1969) by Asaoka Ruriko. A few examples of Tadanori Yokoo’s earlier cover designs which are the ones I prefer. Although he’s continued to produce collage art for music releases, the CD format does his work few favours. I lose interest musically in Santana after about 1970 so I’d not looked properly at […]

Wish You Were Here (outer and inner sleeve, 1975) by Pink Floyd. Whenever people ask questions about your work at some point the subject of influences always turns up. Influences for me are usually few, they’re those things which skew your perception to such a degree—or which enlarge the range of possibilities—that they make you […]

Provocative Percussion (1959) by The Command All-Stars. You’d think that the handful of album cover designs produced by Bauhaus artist Josef Albers would have decorated something by Xenakis, or one of the composers experimenting with tape recording and electronics at the end of the 1950s. But no, it’s the easy listening cocktail music of Enoch […]

01: Youth and Recreation; 02: Cycles and Seasons 03: Welcome to Godalming; 04: Familiar Shapes and Noises The Ghost Box Study Series, a sequence of occasional seven-inch singles on the Ghost Box label, is looking increasingly good as a set. The design, as usual, is by Julian House, while the music is by Belbury Poly, […]

Gille Lettmann pictured in 1973 flourishing some of Fergus Hall’s Tarot cards. At the time Ms Lettmann was helping run partner Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s Kosmische Musik, Pilz and Ohr record labels, and thus oversaw the release of many fine albums—and a few dubious ones—before Kaiser’s empire imploded amid much bad feeling. It’s a fascinating saga, detailed […]

Roger Dean’s album cover art extends further than his sleeve illustrations for Yes. His earlier designs for the Vertigo label showed his visual invention to good effect, and a couple of those designs have had their imitators. The cover art for Dedicated To You, But You Weren’t Listening by the Keith Tippett Group is one […]

Scriabin: Symphony no 3; Arensky: Silhouettes (1992) by Neeme Järvi. The Delville painting from yesterday’s post seems popular with classical recordings, this is only one example of its use, chosen here because some of the music is Scriabin for whom Delville created a sheet music illustration in 1912. Delville’s other work is understandably popular in […]

L The P (1969) by Scaffold. Art: Ascending and Descending (1960). A follow-up to yesterday’s post. MC Escher lived long enough to see his work move from curiosities appealing to a small circle of print collectors, through enthusiasm among scientists and mathematicians, to mass acceptance in the late 1960s thanks, in part, to the general […]

Gratifying this week to see album cover art under discussion even if the heat-to-light ratio was as unbalanced as it usually is when pop culture is the subject. Jonathan Barnbrook, who also designed the Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) packaging for David Bowie, wrote about the thinking behind the new cover on his blog. (And […]