for no other reason than looking at them makes me feel… something, i thought i’d start irregularly highlighting some of my favourite sleeve designs of the moment. good ones and bad ones alike can certainly add context to the music contained within, and if you get yourself one of these ace frames they can even brighten up your living room. you don’t get that with an mp3, do you…
the first thing to note is 2011′s trend for including a picture of yourself, as a child, on your album cover. the first to do so was nico jaar, with a picture of him in the no man’s land between east and west berlin shortly after the fall of the berlin wall. “a place at that time” he told me in a dj mag interview “with no ideology, dialogue, struggle or anything else… just a space lost in the middle of two worlds.” as, you might say, is the album.. lost between the old and the new, the digital and the analogue, the simple and the complex…
then came a baby 2562 flicking through his parents’ music collection on the cover of fever
and most recently robag with mother and sibling in a nostalgic shot adorning his shit-the-bed good long player, thora vukk. did i miss any other taking this tact? will there be more this year i wonder?
elsewhere and unrelated, ali perc offers hints at the sort of aesthetics to expect from his forthcoming, brushed and scuffed techno full length… (fascinating notes from the designer here)
on the cover of his latest long player, tony surgeon throws together as many different elements as he does in one of his high-octane mixes with, somehow, just as coherent a result …
brendon moeller manages to capture the same sense of subtle movement with the art work as he does with the sounds of his recent and excellent exploration, subterranean…
john beltran gazes through a damp and misty window which you could a) totally ignore or b) consider for hours, wondering what was behind it in much the same way as you do with the ambient sounds contained within….
and slow hands conjures an immediate sense of awkwardness with the cover of his recent and appropriately entitled ep for more or less.
that was fun, i might do it again…