Last week I dragged a reluctant friend along to a Race Horses gig: a little known band from Mid Wales, destined for, according to all recent reviews “big things” and as it happens friends of mine from school. Now this isn’t a shameless plug, although they are very good and the gig, despite consisting of myself, aforementioned friend and the only other Welsh people in Edinburgh, was utterly entertaining. I was even compelled to buy a CD. The artwork was instantly eye-catching. The cover of the debut single ‘cake’ is almost an orgiastic celebration of all things confectionery, marred by a sickly and sinister sugar coated veneer. Whether you share my enthusiasm for the above design isn’t massively important. The artwork, regardless of its design merit, represents for me a diminished and once celebrated medium – the tangible expression of music as envisaged through the art of the sleeve.
It was in 1939 that cover art was first conceived but it was in the creative ebullience of the 60s that the true potential of the sleeve was realized both as a marketing tool and a conduit for artistic ‘aesthetic.’ Album artwork not only included extravagant and diverse images but elaborate fold out sections and pop-out souvenirs, epitomized perhaps by the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
I am not purposely viewing by gone-times with overbearing sentimentality, although I do suspect I was born in the wrong era. There have always been fantastic album covers as well as the despicable, however artwork is no longer an essential part of the musical culture. With the dawn of the digital age, (some would argue the damage was done with the onset of tapes and CDs) people now choose to download music. Album artwork bears little more significance than a centimetre square on an ipod screen, and even less significance on an ipod nano.
Luddite I hear you cry! A false charge, I own many pieces of electrical equipment, and have irreparably damaged many more, although I will admit to being somewhat technically backward. In fact, I’ve just been given my very first MP3 player and am phenomenally excited about joining the digital revolution. Where’s my pixelated Molotov cocktail? Furthermore I agree that design creativity continues to play an essential role within the music industry, except that the canvas has now changed: websites, my-space pages and you tube videos are now the dominating visual medium. Album covers are being re-designed and simplified in order to remain striking in thumbnail size. Programmes are available to download Album covers or order prints online and I’m told that flicking through sleeves on ipod cover flow looks very cool indeed (not that I know what that actually means!).
My suspicions aside about how effective an album cover can ever truly be in minuscule scale, it seems to me that album covers are hardly ever downloaded anymore (and if they are it is often by accident. What is this strange jpeg in my album folder?) Albums, although it seems more apt to call them ‘tracks’ exists in some form of weird digital “other-space”, hard to conceptualise, impossible to flick through in a record crate and often void of any artistic context.
In essence I miss having a physical representation of the music in my hand – to be inspired by the artwork, to see the faces of the band members, to flick through the lyrics, to spot the strange details hiding in the corners, and the secret messages for the truly hardcore fans. This all helps to give a context, a familiarity and a connection with the music.
Of course music should be primarily about the music but that’s the exquisite nature of the medium. Music at its best is not solely an audio experience – it tickles and invokes a whole range of sensations. Sleeve design at its best is a part of and intensifies that experience. It stands alone as a piece of great visual art but also wholly compliments and enhances the music. The care and time spent on sleeve design is surely indicative of the care and time poured in to the music it lovingly encompasses.
Overall, in terms of both accessibility and functionality it’s very hard to fault music’s new digital platform, except that is in terms of sleeve design. However I’m comforted by the knowledge that there are bands, such as Race Horses, that continue to create not only great music but great music packaging often strange, sometimes intriguing, and in those rare cases seminal representations to stimulate the visual as well as audio receptors of our brains.
Angharad Hywel is the latest super smart addition to The Gate’s client services team. Born on a farm in Wales, there’s nothing she can’t tell you about livestock.
