Beck-Ola (1969) by The Jeff Beck Group. Painting: The Listening Room (second version, 1958). An inevitable post considering the shape of the week, and also a continuation of an occasional series about paintings used as album cover art. Given Magritte’s continuing popularity I’m sure these can’t be the only examples, especially when his work had […]
Until the end of his life, [Magritte] preferred to take the tram. Now there’s an attitude I approve of. George Melly in his BBC film about Surrealism mentions visiting Magritte at his home in Brussels, and we see Magritte’s house at the beginning of Adrian Maben’s 50-minute film about the artist’s life and work. Maben’s […]
Scream With A View 12″ EP (1979) by Tuxedomoon. Design credited to Belfer/Roques. I’m pursuing a Tuxedomoon obsession at the moment so this gives me the opportunity to examine some of the group’s early record sleeves, all of which are designed by Patrick Roques. Tuxedomoon are an American group, and their early releases were on […]
Signals (2014): vinyl front cover. Photo by Nico Hogg. Seeing as my design for the recent Signals album by Wen has been deemed one of the best covers of the year so far I thought I ought to mention some of the other albums I’ve worked on over the past few months. I tend to […]
Terretektorh / Nomos Gamma (no date; late 60s) by Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis and Victor Vasarely are paired again on this album cover from the late 1960s. Given how often record companies have used abstract artwork on the sleeves of classical recordings, especially those by 20th-century composers, you’d expect there to be more examples. There may […]
Discovered via the latest issue of The Wire magazine in a feature about compilation albums, The Rock Machine Turns You On (1968) was the first budget sampler album. Given the success of this release I’m sure I must have seen it over the years but that cover wasn’t familiar at all. I have to assume […]
LSD (1966). A handful of album covers, all for the vinyl equivalents of the books and magazines in the Acid covers post. The album-as-documentary/essay is one of those curiosities that no one would ever produce today but in the 1960s there were still many of them around. All of these albums have been plundered for […]
Artwork & photography by Abbie Stephens, Zoë Maxwell. Design by Thomas Caslin. Passing through a record shop the day after looking at photos of the Winchester Mystery House I couldn’t help but notice this sleeve for the debut album by British band Temples. Yesterday I described Sarah Winchester’s house as a folly, which it is, […]
Sebastiane (1983) by Sex Gang Children. A 12″ single using a still from Jarman’s film. A final post for this Jarman week. Derek Jarman sustained his film career with regular music promo commissions (see this earlier post) but he never produced any album covers as such. What you have here are music releases which happen […]
Well this was a revelation. Einstein on the Beach (1976) is Philip Glass’s first opera, a collaboration with theatrical producer Robert Wilson, and the only Glass opera with which I’m familiar. With a running-time of almost five hours it’s not light listening, and when many of the pieces consist of little more than slabs of […]
Two cover designs from Eliash Strongowski’s 30 Days—30 Covers project. My thanks once again to Dennis Cooper for placing this blog on his end-of-year lists. Meanwhile. one of the albums I designed earlier this year, Cold Mission by Logos, made the 30 Best Album Covers of 2013 list at FACT. • “Many of their more […]
Wilburn Burchette Opens The Seven Gates Of Transcendental Consciousness (1972). Art by Caren Caraway. For the next two weeks I’ll be playing out the end of the year with a 2-CD compilation from Light In The Attic, I Am The Center (Private Issue New Age Music In America, 1950–1990), 20 tracks of ambient/meditation music, most […]
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, […]
Stay updated via RSS.
