Face Off

Adrian Shaughnessy’s Cover Art By: New Music Graphics (Laurence King Publishing, 2008) begins with a jeremiad of sorts, suggesting that the book is a survey of a dying art. ‘The major labels still commission cover art, but it’s rare to find examples with any resonance or originality,’ he glumly notes.

This degrading of the role of cover art is in part a consequence of the prevalence of downloading, but downloading is only the end-point ofa process that began with the CD. Shaughnessy cites critic Paul Morley’s view that the CD was ‘a banal bastard stopgap between the perfection of vinyl and the moment when music is transported into our lives without the need for any object.’

The music album is doubly dismantled by the iPod’s endlessly reconfiguring data highways. The obsolescence of the physical object inevitably presages the disintegration of the album as a conceptual object: a group of tracks which previously had an integrity conferred upon them have now become repositionable components.

Some – including Morley himself – have found much to celebrate in the freedom this gives the listener to construct their own connections, weave their own webs of association. ‘Attempts to find ways of packaging downloaded music are so far unconvincing,’ Shaughnessy observes. If this is so, it could well be the case that, in the words of John L Waters in Eye magazine, ‘the album cover – perhaps albums themselves – may prove to be a historical blip.’ There is no inevitable connection between music and visual material; classical music and early jazz once appeared without cover art.

Despite all this, Shaughnessy’s book is not an act of mourning for a lost era of great cover art, but a celebration of those labels whose designs have thrived in the digital era. Foremost amongst these are Touch and Ghost Box. The identity of these labels has been defined by their cover designers, Jon Wozencroft and Julian House. Touch began in the early ’80s, but its tactile aesthetic – it conceived of itself as an ‘audio-visual’ label – meant that it was never going to succumb to the digital tendency towards decoupling sound from images. Wozencroft’s cover photographs – austerely, impersonally beautiful shots – do not so much illustrate the music of Touch artists such as Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi and Philip Jeck as they set a tone for how it can be heard.

Ghost Box, meanwhile – the subject of a 2005 profile in frieze – is a label that was started when the ether-era was well-established, and is in many ways a digitally-mediated retrieval and oneiric remixing of archaic modes of packaging, a fusion of the ‘modernism for the common man’ exemplified in Open University textbook designs and Penguin book covers with the paraphernalia of weird fiction.

By retaining a certain abstraction – neither label’s covers feature the images of musicians – both Ghost Box and Touch are at odds with a postmodern pop culture whose tendency is to attach music to the person. The transformation of music into digital code has not led to a complementary depersonalisation of the way in which music is interpreted and consumed. On the contrary. In the lack of abstract visual design, music finds itself once again associated with a familiar palette of emotional and psychological preoccupations – it becomes, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, ‘facialized’.

One of Deleuze and Guattari’s great insights was to have understood how the ‘deterritorializing’ tendencies of capitalist culture were necessarily counteracted by equally powerful ‘reterritorializations’. The current situation – in which the convulsive abstractions of global financial flow find themselves soundtracked by earnest singer-songwriters and indie rockers – would not have surprised them at all.

Underground Resistance, a label that is not mentioned in Shaughnessy’s book, has been explicit in its ‘anti-faciality’. When I interviewed the label’s co-founder and conceptualist, Mike Banks, Britney Spears, as much as the organic archaisms of Jack Johnson, is inseparable from the face of the artist – a face that, of course, is itself a carefully designed commodity. Spears’ last album, Blackout (2007), was a fascinatingly troubled exploration of the way in which her face and publicity-saturated personal life had become transformed into simulacra-for-sale: ‘do you want a piece of me?’ she leered at the listener, a circus barker advertising her own commodification, the eerie sound of a media object reflecting on its own fragmentation and distribution.