Ghosty 'Hauntology Collection' etching

'Immortal Melodies' [see last post] has temporarily avoided death by laser as I've been busy getting to grips with the etching capabilities of the machinery.

I had already created the various files I needed and saved them as jpegs. One was a variation on Ghostly International's logo that brought in a Victorian/Gothic Revival (or maybe slightly occult) aspect. The aesthetic idea came after considering this 'Hauntology' topic while also wanting something that would be a contrast to both the digital method of production and the smooth plastic.

The text might not be to everyone's taste as it does do the whole Brody-esque, 'blur' filter thing but I wanted to have a title that looked like it was an apparition. It was also a serif font before processes drained all the life out of it. I was also keen to use these as 'objects' - to collect as 'visual anchors' for digital re-release projects - rather than as playable media. Subsequently I lasered the vinyl grooves on the 10" format so that it would be decorative rather than functional.

It took a while to figure out the best settings for materials (this is evident in the final image) but I went on to try out a few more experiments which I'll document later.

Eidolon

ei·do·lon
   /aɪˈdoʊlən/ [ahy-doh-luhn]
–noun, plural -la, -lons

1. a phantom; apparition.
2. an ideal.

Moldover CD packaging

Featured at: http://www.bandsanddesign.com

The CD packaging for this Moldover album actually has an inbuilt Theremin.

Motive Sounds releases

Another label that puts considerable effort into its music packaging is Motive Sounds. It even includes a directory of the designers/illustrators it has used over at http://www.motivesounds.com/.

Fake CDs

This was an idea I wanted to try while exploring this idea of unplayable media as a 'visual anchor' for music: replica CDs.

Compact discs particularly interest me as there is plenty of speculation regarding their demise while, at the same time, they just don't have the cult status of vinyl records or even the cassette tape. Subseqently their form hasn't been championed or even investigated in quite the same way. The standard jewel case additionally comes in for some stick (particularly from a design perspective), so I'm also keen to do some work that uses them as a starting point. This is probably the 'Comic Sans Effect' at work: at trait that my colleagues might recognise where I'm likely to jump to the defence of something which is (perhaps justifiably) maligned. Usually to annoy Dave. ;)

Anyway, these rather lo-fi approximations of the 5"/127mm diameter CD [which could be sanded to lose some of the roughness] may be interesting to screen print in a similar way to the LoAF releases referenced earlier. I want to try some using other materials too but, for now, I like the idea of the ones made from the mail packaging that the other 'proper' formats arrived in.

Another influence behind these is the work by Robert Brownjohn that appears on the cover of the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed album: where a stack of records is swapped for a tyre, a clock face, pizza and a cake [the latter apparently decorated by a then unknown Delia Smith]. (Macedonia's Robert Gligorov has since touched on something similar with his Gramophone Amarillis.)

Formats

A parcel arrived today from the very helpful Alan at Tapeline. It contained an assortment of formats, cases and labels which I'll start experimenting with over the next couple of weeks.

Chris Coco - Feel Free Live Good

Artwork/packaging by Anthony Burrill in collaboration with No Days Off.

Yasunao Tone - Solo for Wounded CD

I pretty much overdosed on the noise/art collision at the Bigger Than Words conference in July. Subsequently I was going to try and avoid looking at that side of things for this project. However, if we're talking about unplayable media and the (mis)use of formats in general, then there is this huge overlap with some of the ideas that were highlighted there.

Echoing discussion that came up via the Digital Noise panel [the one I chaired] is the Solo For Wounded CD project by Yasunao Tone. I first encountered this in the pages of the Background Noise book and it fits in with some of the interesting research into digital manipulation and the technological 'glitch'. Here the Japanese experimental musician treated/damaged the surfaces of CD-Rs before recording what was read by the CD player.

Adventurous listeners who worship at the altars of Merzbow and Fennesz might be interested in the actual sounds produced. I'm more inspired by the destructive processes and the aesthetic qualities of the manipulated discs: especially in terms of it helping to definine the physical format as an exclusively collectable decorative, rather than functional, item. Plus there are potentially other influences documented in Caleb Kelly's book [which came up on a Google image search while looking for examples of Yasunao Tone's CDs]:

Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction
Caleb Kelly


From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage’s silences and indeterminacies, to Paik’s often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.

Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.

“Caleb Kelly’s Cracked Media is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical writing on the role of sound in the history of modern and postmodern art. It helpfully extends Douglas Kahn’s monumental Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by focusing on a powerful strain of contemporary sonic art: the creative mis-use of audio playback technologies. As Kelly ably theorizes it, the ‘crack’ is a productive break that articulates past and future, archaeology and innovation, analog and digital. Hence, this book combines an exhaustive survey and taxonomy of recent experiments with turntables and CD technology (Oval, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, etc.) with a detailed genealogy of these practices that traces them back to earlier moments of sonic experimentation (Futurism, Fluxus, John Cage, etc.). Informed, but not overloaded, by theoretical accounts of phonography and digital media, Kelly helpfully sorts out what is at issue in cracked sound and places this at the center of contemporary debates about art and technology.”


Caleb Kelly is a lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney

Why the music cassette has never died

From: The Times
Date: 18/12/09

Richard Goldsmith, of the upscale hi-fi geeksters’ paradise Audio Gold, dismisses the notion of a a dying format. “I’m not sure there’s any such thing,” he says. Cast your eye around his North London shop, and you can see why he might say such a thing. Walking past turntables and transistors that look like exhibits from a design museum, he shows me a cassette player priced at a bracing £450. It’s made by Nakamichi, who prided themselves on divining hitherto unimagined clarity from the humble C90

The best thing about it, though, is the way it changes tape sides. Through the Perspex window, you can see a mechanism, tantamount to a small robot hand, physically turn the tape around to start playing it. Goldsmith says he would be surprised if the machine is still here by the end of the week. They are, apparently, popular with middle-aged reggae fans.

Tempting as it is to herald the return of the cassette, it appears that the format introduced by Philips as a dictation aid in 1963 never quite went away. This week Island Records announced that sales of the 4,000 cassettes they decided to produce of Words for You had exceeded all expectations. HMV and the leading supermarkets have long since stopped selling tapes, but the album, on which celebrities such Joanna Lumley and Martin Shaw read poetry while classical music trills prettily along in the background, still managed to sell out on Amazon. By contrast, only 746 of the 200,000 copies of Words for You sold have been downloads. Thousands more cassettes are being manufactured in time for Christmas. “What’s exciting,” says an Island spokesman, Ian Brown, “is that we don’t know how big the market is because no one realised there was a demand.”

You can’t help feeling that this has been a howling great oversight. Having worked out that old people are one of the few age groups that will pay for music, Decca threw its weight behind We’ll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn and saw their efforts repaid with a No 1 record. How many more might they have sold if they had also put it out on tape? It’s tempting to smile indulgently at your silver-haired elders as they persist with their old Val Doonican cassettes. It may just be, however, that older people are privy to specialised knowledge that comes only with the passing of the decades. There are some environments in which the tape wins over all other formats.

As the iconically hip, left-of-leftfield guitarist of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore may be an unlikely bedfellow for the sort of septuagenarians who think Mpegs are what you hang your Mcoats on. But even during the CD’s early supremacy, Moore’s devotion to the cassette never wavered. Four years ago he published Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, a love letter to what he calls “the most personal of all formats”. Occasionally he produces limited-edition cassette runs of releases on his Ecstatic Peace label. “The cassette offers one of the great listening experiences,” he says. “That friction of the tape against the head is unbeatable. Then you’ve got the aesthetic difference. You find a mixtape that someone has made for you, and there is no mistaking the amount of care and affection that has gone into it.”

By any criteria, Moore’s obsession is extreme. He has thousands of meticulously filed CDs released on cottage-industry imprints with such names as Chocolate Monk and Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers — labels that equate the cassettes’ affordability and apparent obsolescence with their underground credentials. He is not alone. In Camden Market, the must-have accessory of 2009 was the bag designed to look like a cassette.

It’s all very well, but does this sort of loyalty have its basis in anything other than nostalgia? Not if a furious essay that appeared two weeks ago on the American music site Popmatters is anything to go by. Despite left-field releases by the likes of Dirty Projectors and Crystal Castles that sold out their cassette runs, Calum Marsh, author of Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture, insists that “at best, the cassette revival is merely a vacuous fad of no genuine value . . . at worst, a confused, cultural misstep more dangerous than most would care to admit”.

Might it not be that tapes offer something that subsequent technologies have failed to provide? Moore maintains that the CD is a vulnerable format that is designed to be re-bought. Anyone who has tried to keep CDs in a car — you might as well attack them with a cheese knife — must surely concur. On CDs the information is exposed. On cassettes it is protected by a plastic shell. The price of cassettes at my local charity shop — a can’t-give-them-away 20p a throw — suggests that, in the neophilia of the 21st century, these are considerations we may have simply forgotten about.

Since I started relieving Oxfam of their surplus, I have filled my car with albums by the Supremes, Van Morrison, James Brown and Talk Talk. Surprisingly, the cassette era even extends to relatively recent gems such as Radiohead’s Kid A. Better still, the foetal bass and padded cell production of that album’s highlights — Everything in its Right Place, Morning Bell — is perfectly suited to the warm, cocooned ambience of magnetic tape.

Of course, central to the lingering affection that people have for tapes is the fact that you could compile them yourself. “Home taping is killing music,” warned the skull and crossbones on the back of several major label releases in the early 1980s. I still have the first cassette of songs I ever recorded from the radio. Thirty years after I removed it from its case, my red ferric BASF C90 features excerpts from that Sunday night staple Star Choice, in which a celebrity of the day got to be DJ for a couple of hours. Separated only by inter-song banter from the Birmingham City star striker Trevor Francis are such hits as Chicago’s If You Leave Me and ELO’s Living Thing.

Victoria Hesketh, of Little Boots fame, is 16 years younger than me, but even she remembers sourcing her music by a similar means. “Oh, absolutely. You would sit by the tape recorder with your finger poised on the pause button because you’d want to catch it before the DJ started talking.” Take away the technologies of the era and such behaviour was no different from that of ten-year-olds illegally downloading the latest N-Dubz and Chipmunk hits to their computers. So why did it somehow not feel as wrong?

Moore thinks that the moral differential lies in the aesthetic merits of the two formats: “File sharing is utterly unsexy,” he says. “It takes no time at all to knock up a playlist from your iTunes folder and give it to someone.”

He surely has a point, and one that’s reflected in the monetary decline in the value of music. Everything to do with consuming music has become easier. In the past when you compiled a tape for someone, the time spent making it was central to its perceived value. You would also have a fairly good idea that each track followed on smoothly from the last one because the compilation would have been made in real time.

Moore compares DIY compilations to scrimshaws — pieces of whalebone on which voyaging sailors would make ornate carvings. “Sometimes I go to yard sales to buy cassettes compiled by people who are complete strangers to me. You see something that has ‘Marty’s Mix’ scrawled on it in ballpoint pen. You take it home and you don’t know if it’s going to be US post-punk hardcore or Kenny Rogers. Whatever it is, though, I know I’m getting a slice of someone’s life. Cassettes are the only format that can give you that.”

Concave Scream artwork

From: Junk
Date: 22/05/09

Singapore's much-adored band Concave Scream recently released their fifth album Soundtrack for a Book, and have literally taken packaging to a whole new level by attaching the CD to a second hand book.

The nine-track, 43-minute release is entirely instrumental, and all 1,000 copies will come in specially selected second hand books, including dusty old ones from Enid Blyton, with the CD secured somewhere within the book with a bolt and nut.

The album is priced at S$20, and is currently available through online orders via www.concavescream.com (where you can customise your own virtual book), or physically via The Esplanade Store or at 2 Leng Kee Road, #03-02 Thye Hong Ctr, Singapore 159086 (near RedHill MRT). The band are gearing up for an album launch on 18 September at The Esplanade. For more updates and info, visit www.concavescreamband.blogspot.com.

CD Spines

From: A Personal Miscellany
Date: 12/10/06

The Milkman’s description of his preference for browsing CDs rather than iTunes if he was unsure what to listen to (see my post about iTunes 7) prompted me to finish this post about CD spines that’s been sitting round in my drafts folder for ages…

The migration of music from vinyl to compact disc was widely decried for the diminution of the canvas available to the designer. However, with the advent of the widely-loathed jewel-case, came a slight increase in width of the spine over the average single disc vinyl album (the rarer gatefold was closer in acreage to the CD – I wonder how many new gatefold sleeves are released nowadays?) To my knowledge it’s the admirable Soul Jazz label that has best exploited this space.

Ignoring the multi-CD boxes (Intro designed Stereolab, blank whiteness of the Kontakt Der Junglinge and the 3CD Trojans), when scanning the shelves for inspiration, it’s difficult to ignore anything on Soul Jazz because of their engagingly bold design ethos: bright, often two-colour images and sharp-edged vector graphics, helped in no little part by the label’s adoption of cardboard outer sleeves for their jewel cases and digipaks.

I wonder how useful coverflow in iTunes 7 will prove to be for browsing. Time will tell I guess, but it should offer a significant improvement as long as people can be bothered to add the covers that aren’t supplied automatically.
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1. Gutta 13.10.06 / 11am

haha that Kraftwerk jpg was like looking at part of my own collection! I’ve gone right off itunes and virtual music collections. i’m sure its a way of life for some ppl, but it ain’t for me…
2. themilkman 13.10.06 / 1pm

I must say that if the coverflow thing amused me about 5 minutes (especially when I imported the covers I created for a couple of compilations), I don’t use the music library enough for it to be of much use to me. Plus, it considerably slows down my rheumatising Mac.

Although mixed CD spines can rapidly become a blur if you have more than 20 CDs, I find it makes spotting a particular CD a lot easier than spotting a particular vinyl (even gatefold). I find I have a mental image of a particular spine I am looking for if I am looking for something specific, and I also roughly know on which shlef I am likely to to find it, so it all helps.

I especially like the treatment applied by The Designers Republic on some Warp releases especially to have small text on two lines, as they did recently for AFX’s Hangable Auto Bulb, but I find I like the use of small text anyway usually… wherever. Even my hand writing is quite tiny!
3. Peter Skwiot Smith 13.10.06 / 4pm

It’s funny you should post this on your site, as I recently made a similar post on mine concerning digital versus physical music. Last week I sold my iPod, in an effort to reclaim my physical music collection and actually start using it. I am not opposed to digital music (Napster and SoulSeek introduced me to more music than I still know what to do with), nor do I condemn it and wish it go away.

The physical packaging to me is important (especially as graphic designer) and I refuse (99% of the time) to purchase digital music (as I am paying a similar price to a CD and receiving an inferior product), so why bother having an iPod?

I have been using straight CDs for the last two weeks, and have rediscovered much of my collection again, simply because so much was passed over in iTunes and on my iPod. This might start happening with CDs only, but at least I am using the object I am spending my money on.

Cheers on the post.
4. 11V 18.10.06 / 8pm

Good to hear from you Gutta, hope you’re doing very well.
Milkman – my particular focus on this post was spins that stand out, but I know what you mean about small text – Rune Grammofon being a distinct point in that regard – it’s like almost not having text when it’s that small and standardised.
Peter – funny that this is the point at which CDs are virtually old school… Like you, I’ve returned to playing CDs recently when at home.
5. themilkman 27.10.06 / 5pm

I realised your post was about spines that stand out, and I was kinda making the same point starting from a completely different angle. It always fascinates me to see how people react so differently to the same thing, but I suppose this is what makes life in general so interesting.

Peter, I thought your post was very interesting, and I am glad that there seem to be more people around who enjoy the physical aspect of music than I at some point thought. I wouldn’t go as far as selling my MP3 player though as I certainly enjoy the practicality of having 20Gb (in my case) of music wherever I go, which means that I will most probably be able to find something to suit my mood whatever it is if I get stuck on a train or am away from home for a few days. In that respect, I actually prefer carrying one MP3 player than a portable CD player and loads of CDs in my bag, It spares my back for a start!

At home though, it is very rare that I listen to MP3s. I occasionally use Soulseek, mostly to download something that I am interested in but have never heard before, and more often than not, I end up buying the album on CD once I’ve come to the conclusion that I like what I’ve downloaded. If not, it usually end up being pushed into oblivion, sometimes quite roughly, via my trash folder.
6. Justin 20.12.06 / 9am

what a great post, it echoes my sentiments exactly, I’ve spent the past couple of months slowly backing up my CD collection to two 400GB external drives in FLAC… I thought the convenience of having everything in one place would revolutionise how I listened to music – instead I found the experience of browsing through the folders soulless and uninspiring.

Nothing beats browsing shelves of physical objects, carrying them over to the hifi and kicking back on the sofa to listen properly.

As an aside, with the lifespan of harddrives taken into account, CDs are actually still one of the best ways to store digital data for the long term.
7. 11V 19.02.07 / 5pm

Hello Justin, I usually receive an email notification of new comments, but this one never arrived hence the lateness of my response. I think I’d be more interested in the digital backup if I could store the drives remotely – one of my occasional fears is the idea of losing my music collection through fire, flood or similar. As with my laptop backup being onsite, if I get robbed I’ve lost the lot. This is a slightly tricky problem to solve.

Well Deep - 10 Years of Big Dada by Oscar and Ewan

Compilation CD and DVD
Art direction and design
Client - Big Dada Recordings
2008

Big Dada's ten year anniversary compilation CD and DVD. All record releases were collected and exhibited chronologically in a glass vitrine. The museum context brought a grandeur to the cover not usually associated with hip hop. For the inner photography, highlights from the Big Dada catalogue were exhibited in St Bride's exhibition cabinets.

The sleeve was then exhibited in Spin: The Art of Record Design - an exhibition of some of the most iconic cover art of the last four decades selected by GQ Editor Dylan Jones, The Horrors' Faris Rotter and Peter Saville, at The Arts Gallery, University of the Arts London, September 2008

Photographed in St Bride Printing Library
Photography - James Musgrave
http://www.oscarandewan.co.uk/

Garden discs

Speaking of odd, my mum had suggested that I use CDs in the garden to stop the local cats using the flower beds as a litter tray. Apparently, the reflected light spooks them. So I've had some out there for a while (with limited success) although my niece - not realising their purpose - thought that they looked really good: twinkling away and that.

Some of them have been out there for a while and have braved the elements. I noticed that a few have started to deteriorate and wondered if these might be useful in terms of 'unplayable' media. The silver is what's left of the contents but is completely useless. Maybe this kind of representation also fits in with all those reports I've posted about the death of the CD. Especially should these be overprinted to further the idea of a physical music item being about carrying something other than the sound files.

MIMEO - Lifting Concrete Lightly by Bravo Charlie Mike Hotel

From http://www.bcmh.co.uk/

"As part of a wider commission for the Serpentine Gallery we were asked to design the identity for a new record label called Sound at the Serpentine that the gallery was launched with Lifting Concrete Lightly by MIMEO as its first release. MIMEO (Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra) is an ensemble of 12 of EuropeÍs leading electronic music specialists including Kaffe Matthews and Christian Fennesz.

The album is a 3-hour recording of a unique performance in the Oscar Niemeyer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery when the group used a range of instruments and the architectural environment to produce the work. Taking a physical and instinctive approach to digital music in their performance we decided to embrace a similar spirit in the design by having the CD engraved with the group's name and then photographed for the album's cover."

Eulogy for the Compact Disc

From: PSFK
Date: 30/08/10


Last Friday was the 25th anniversary of the Compact Disc. Rather than a celebration, however, I think a Eulogy is in order. In only 25 short years, the format is on the verge of extinction. You know the culprit.

The first commercial CD rolled off the production line on August 17, 1982 in a Phillips factory near Hanover, Germany. It took almost six years for CDs to begin outselling vinyl records, but the format would only shine for around a decade more, with the launch of Napster in 1999 signaling a change in the future of music consumption. According to CNN, sales of CDs peaked in 2001 and have declined nearly 22% to date.

Perhaps the fate of the cassette tape can offer some insight into where CD sales will stand in 10 years. According to the LATimes, sales of cassette tapes dwindled from 442 million in 1990 to 700,000 last year. I know what you’re thinking… who in the heck bought those 700,000 cassette tapes this year?

Why not embrace the death of the CD? Certainly all those compact discs being thrown away can’t be good for the environment. With the growth of hard drive capacity and online storage, we don’t need them anyways. The automotive industry seems to share this opinion. According to a Detroit News article from June 17th of this year, CDs may be gone from the dashboard as early as 2012. In fact, DaimlerChrysler already introduced MyGiG in 2006, a system that allows you to save your music on a 20GB hard drive. Countless other auto manufacturers are allowing portable music players to integrate with stereo systems.

Soon enough, we will file away the memory of the compact disc with the likes of the LP and the cassette tape. Until then, we’ll just have to let them take up space.

Jeff Mills - 'The Occurrence'

Before vinyl enthusiasts started bitching about MP3s, CDs were often cited as a bugbear.

Techno deity Jeff Mills may be a turntable maverick, yet he recently united the two formats in one product. 'The Occurrence' - a CD/Vinyl hybrid released as part of his 'Sleeper Wakes' series - has two playable sides to appease both analogue and digital fans.

Work by Non-Format

There's already a picture of Non-Format's Red Snapper artwork on the Hard Format post but, looking through their portfolio, there are so many perfectly realised music projects. The sort of stuff that would make it worth trekking to the shops for.