quoted 67 lines Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 10:11:43 -0700
>Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 10:11:43 -0700
>To: Eric Hill <ehill@best.com>
>From: scooper@best.com (Sean Cooper)
>
>came across this in the new emigre...
>
>"...There is a record label called "Warp" for which the Designers Republic
>has designed many covers. Warp releases music by bands like Autechre and
>you never know what these musicians are after. There's an abstraction in
>their music, something unrecognizable. Again, it's not superficial; you
>can tell by the attention to detail and precision. And even though it
>might appear muddled or unclear, it is extremely consistent. And that
>really appeals to me to a point where I'm trying to accomplish that within
>my own work..."
>
> --Marc Nagtzaam, designer
>
>got me to thinking about the possible dialogue between music and the
>packaging it comes in...so-called avant-garde or at least critically
>well-received designers have often been involved directly with the
>packaging and design of avant-garde or experimental electronic music; not
>only Warp, but the Swim~ label (which is a joint project between the
>musicians and the label's designer/cofounder), Neville Brody's work with
>Mute and a number of other independent groups and labels, the person who
>does the New Order covers (don't recall offhand), etc.
>
>the degree of abstraction of someone like Autechre, as Nagtzaam alluded to
>in the excerpt, i find an interesting way of looking at the way the music
>and the packaging design work together in the way(s) in which something
>like "Tri Repetea" (sp?) is eventually "heard." at the simplest level, of
>course (their music is very abstract, etc.), but also in the sense that,
>say, the covers of the Anvil Vapre singles tend to bespeak a highly
>mechanical process removed from the everyday experience of the listener. i
>don't mean to imply that any communication of intent or "meaning" as
>regards the music is to be decoded in this fashion, but there does seem to
>be a sense in many cases in which the music is extended (at least in its
>conceptual components) into other possiblilites of "reading" (hearing,
>thinking about, etc.) by such a dialogue.
>
>anyway, i wonder if people can locate other instances of this in electronic
>music. immediately, whoever designed Oval's "94 Diskont" springs to my mind
>(the operation of various linear and tangential relationships between the
>seemingly random vectors at work in Oval's compositions, etc.), but so does
>Scanner's "Spore" (the repetition and juxtaposition of discreet and
>ultimately quite isolated units of human experience, communication, etc.,
>mediated--in a very visual way, through the silver overlay--by a veneer or
>sheen of technology), Toop & Eastley's "Buried Dreams" (the sort of
>narrative journey hinted at by the stories and the figures that accompany
>them through the cd insert), and even Ntone's static-free bags (which, far
>from a simple packaging gimmick, seems to me to connate something of a
>laboratory or experimental setting--these sorts of bags are usually found
>in computer clean rooms and other highly anispectic environments--which
>much of the Ntone label's product also seems to evoke...).
>
>all of these examples, of course, are not static (especially not the last
>one ;)) and are all open to a wide range of different possible "meanings,"
>and i don't mean to suggest that any one is to be fingered out and decoded
>in some sort of rigorous or axiomatic way, just that these sorts of
>connections seem to be operating very often, and i'd be intersted to hear
>other people's perceptions, though, or examples of same...
>
>sc
>
>onnow: quicksand : slip
>
>
>