iTunes artwork

There's a counter argument to the suggestion that the MP3 has meant music artwork is in decline. The fact that the average iPod now carries around the thumbnails for files means that the music purchaser is now more likely to have immediate access to an associated image. In many cases, they are literally inseperable. And, should they become detatched, a product like Amphonic Designs' Album Cover Finder resets that connection between the audible and visual. Thanks to Nicola for the tip-off.

Peter Gabriel's Scratch My Back Album - deluxe edition designed by Marc Bessant

Dave sent this my way a few weeks back and it's a lovely bit of packaging by Marc Bessant with art direction by Daniel Mason. This format for the most recent Peter Gabriel album features CD, vinyl and USB plus a limited print signed by Peter Gabriel and it retails at $299. There are just 500 copies. [Full details at http://www.petergabriel.com/scratchmyback/]

It is interesting that even basic vinyl copies of chart albums now come with premium pricing and are only available in limited numbers. But as this multi-format version highlights, often the releases aren't about the playability of the music itself. The collectability of the product is potentially more important.

White Stripes work by Stanley Chow

I first saw the name 'Stan Chow' on some elegantly drawn flyers for events in Manchester some years ago. More recently his work has been animated by Aardman for the BBC but, given that I'm on a roll with poster-related activity, I really just wanted to note the one he created for The White Stripes. Notably, this also led to work for the band/label when he was asked to recreate Jack and Meg as cute USB sticks containing the pair's Icky Thump album.

More beautiful illustration at his site: www.stanleychow.co.uk

Methane Studios

Another inspiring gig poster operation is Methane Studios. The following images are by one half of the partnership Mark McDevitt and have a vintage feel, some lovely type and re-appropriated images.

All of the poster producers I have referenced this week - Methane Studios, Aesthetic Apparatus and The Small Stakes - have defined an approach to visualizing music that is more visceral than the simple (and often UK) template of 'insert band photo here, insert date and times here'. Thankfully, this more considered style has proved so influential that it is becoming more commonplace on the British live circuit. Perhaps this shift in focus is directly related to how touring has become more important revenue-wise than music sales in recent years.

Aesthetic Apparatus

Another great studio that has been carrying on a great tradition for U.S. music ephemera is Aesthetic Apparatus. Amy namechecked the company when doing a previous project and drew attention to how they sell 'test prints' as works of art: i.e. the pieces of paper that are solely used to gauge colour and ink before creating a run of screen prints. These are then a jumble of images representing a variety of different artists. Perhaps these would be a great idea for a compilation's artwork. Individually, however, these works generally perform the same function as Jason Munn's previously referenced material and give permanence to what are fleeting performances.

The Small Stakes: Music Posters by Jason Munn

When this project changed direction, one of the first things I did was treat myself to the recent book that gathered together Jason Munn's music posters. Operating under the name 'The Small Stakes', Wisconsin's Munn has been producing beautiful screen prints that mainly promote gigs. However, this supposedly temporary use hasn't stopped them becoming collectable. Anyway, the book arrived today and it is lovely. Especially the metallics.

Matthew Dear - Black City

Another video promoting a music release and this one demonstrates how it is possible to cement a campaign well ahead of the 'product' becoming available. Essentially this is pure graphic design with a combined music/visual aesthetic that should serve Matthew Dear well. This imagery also gives his sometimes more 'pop' alias the edge he desires for, new album, Black City [he also records while using other monikers including the tougher, less vocal 'Audion'] . As his website puts it:

Matthew Dear’s Black City can’t be found on any map. It’s a composite, an imaginary metropolis peopled by desperate cases, lovelorn souls, and amoral motives. Like most literary Gothams, Black City is a place to love and hate, as seedy as a nightclub’s back room and as seductive as the promise of power. Matthew Dear, the musician, may live in New York City, but the Matthew Dear of Black City inhabits a sound-world unlike any other: a monument to the shadowy side of urban life that bumps and creaks, shudders and wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. Black City is Matthew Dear’s third album on Ghostly International, and it’s his darkest and most engrossing work to date.

Matthew Dear - Black City Teaser from Ghostly International

Yet the project also features a further limited edition collectible designed by Boym Partners that investigates a concept central to my own project.

MDBC Totem

Limited Edition of 100

to-tem
1: a) an object serving as the emblem of a family or clan and often as a remainder of its ancestry; also: a usually carved or painted representation of such an object... b) a family or clan identified by a common totemic object.
2: one that serves as an emblem or revered symbol

With Matthew Dear's third studio release, Black City, Ghostly International proudly introduces its newest label release format, the totem. More than a mere limited edition, the totem is a proposal, an entreaty to listeners everywhere to reconsider our relationship to music in the digital era. In producing an object as the embodiment of Black City, Matthew Dear and Ghostly International suggest a new path through which one's physical relationship to an album is again explored.

More information:

"MP3s and digital formats might be convenient and accessible, but sometimes having a physical product—if well-designed, of course—to accompany the music is key."

Taxi: The Global Creative Network

"…now it's time that we make room in our minds for totem to mean something else entirely." XLR8R

"Ghostly is my favourite American record label and the Boyms are my favourite American designers. *And there’s only a hundred of those wacky Boym gizmos, too. That’s what kills me." Bruce Sterling, wired.com

With Matthew Dear's third full-length studio release, Black City, Ghostly International proudly introduces its newest label release format, the totem. More than a mere limited edition, the totem is a proposal, an entreaty to listeners everywhere to reconsider our relationship to music in the digital era. In producing an object as the embodiment of Black City, Matthew Dear and Ghostly International suggest a new path through which one's physical relationship to an album is again explored.

To create Ghostly International's first totem, the company turned to renowned product designers Constantin and Laurene Boym of Boym Partners in New York, recipients of the 2009 National Design Award for Product Design. Widely recognized for their ability to imbue objects with emotional and cultural resonance, the Boym's also have a history of exploring uncharted territory in the world of design. Among their many creations, they have been revered for their "Buildings of Disaster" and "Missing Monuments" series, two ongoing collections which explore the cultural imperative of souvenirs in a postindustrial global economy.

Naturally, they were an ideal choice to task with translating Black City into a three-dimensional object.

The MDBC Totem is both a sculptural representation of the themes explored in Black City and a symbolic conduit to the music itself. Vaguely reminiscent of one of the soot-blackened skyscrapers that might populate Dear's creeping, nameless city, the stacks upon the totem also call to mind the many shaped prongs of a universal power adaptor. In this sense, the totem is not simply a miniature building, but an abstract key to an unknown door. The branding of the totem has been purposefully reduced to its bare essentials—only the letters MDBC and unique alphanumeric suffixes are included—so that the totem's meaning remains discernible only to its beholder.

Each MDBC Totem is inscribed with a unique four-character suffix that will allow users access to a private page on www.matthewdear.com, where Black City may be streamed in its entirely from any web-connected computer, or downloaded. Owners of the totem will also receive an exclusive track, not previously available on the standard album release. Unlike current delivery methods, the totem is a physical format for cloud-based listening, an acknowledgment of two seemingly irreconcilable notions: the need for a tangible representation of music and a future in which music is utterly ethereal.

The MDBC Totem is produced in an edition of 100 units and retails for $125. Each piece has been hand-cast in bonded aluminium with a hand-finished gun metal patina by master-craftsmen in New York City. It is available exclusively at The Ghostly Store.

Kitsune x Ponystep / Album cover photoshoot

To illustrate what I was saying in the previous post about the context changing due to advances in technology, it is worth referencing the campaign for the latest project by French label Kitsune. The album cover here is something that has been devised as 'packaging' yet it also has to exist elsewhere. And not just as the iTunes thumnail either.

Kitsune x Ponystep is also previewed with a video uploaded to YouTube. This demonstrates the process involved in capturing the images via a photoshoot. Yet this has additional advantages by using sample music from the release and also highlights Kitsune's own fashion range. This may not be an appropriate solution for other labels or releases yet it is something that has been previewed when communicated via email newsletters, social networking and blogs. Subsequently it hints at what can be achieved when individuals are not restricted by traditional ideas regarding what constitutes music artwork.

Designing for music

When writing my undergraduate dissertation, I described the reducing of album artwork to CD size as it suffering an "indignity". I suggested that its current thumbnail proportions had created a further challenge for designers and it was one that could eventually see the loss of subtlety and detail. I quoted Charlotte Rivers when she stated that vinyl was "a difficult format to rival" and how the shrinking from the 12" square to the confines of the 5" x 5 1/2" jewel case had meant that "a certain aesthetic was lost along the way" (Rivers, 2003:11).

At the time, I believed that this was true. More recently I've become sceptical about the way that traditional music formats have been "fetishized and adopted as tribal and subcultural emblems" (Shaughnessy, 2000:5). Not to mention dubious regarding reports of the gradual eradication of music artwork. Instead I have come to believe that these are more interesting times: that there is plenty of potential for engaging music-related visuals.

While we may be losing some of the beloved rituals of purchase and play associated with the music experience, it is telling that Shaughnessy highlights how sleeves "unlike other forms of packaging" are not discarded but "treasured and venerated" (Shaughnessy, 2000:5). It has been artwork's description as "packaging" that suggests the problem that many have with changes in the distribution, retailing and formatting of music. However, this could be seen as where the freedom comes into play for the designer. Artwork needn't be "packaging" anymore. We can still have "an adequate accompaniment to, and a congenial visualization of, the music to which it referred" (Pesch & Weisbeck, 1996:9). Designers are still free to "create imagery that captures the emotional power of the music and conveys an appropriate message to the audience" (Shaughnessy, 2000:7). However, the context for all this has changed. And that's what I'm interested in looking at in more detail right now.

New blog = fresh start

I already began blogging material for my dissertation/final major project but the work wasn't gelling. After previously looking at both visual representations of "invisible" entities and depictions of noise, this project is now set to explore the potential for music art in the download era. [The earlier entries are some of the posts imported from the old blog.]

This is proposed as a response to other commentators that repeatedly lament the demise of traditional music formats and insist that purchasers are aesthetically compromised as a result of digital music distribution. It is suggested that the development of practical outcomes that respond to the surrounding issues will also reflect on a selection of relevant material. This may be viewed as supporting both sides of this debate while attempting to decipher how design can add value to music.