A 1977 Laurie Anderson lyric makes a timely 2013 reprisal.
Archive for the 'music' Category
HOLE TRUTH
16 January 2013PEARED DOWN
6 January 2013
Album cover art rarely comes this spare, and, even more rarely, features still life photography. But Dwight Yoakam’s oddly-titled recent release, Three Pears, features a cover that manages to be at once literal and poetic.
ENCORE
17 December 2012
Designer Mike Joyce’s ongoing project, Swissted, applies classic sans-serif (not Helvetica) Swiss typography to vintage rock music concert flyers. Here, he re-imagines a piece of 1985 R.E.M. ephemera–and I’m willing to bet it’s a fair bit more beautiful than the original.
LAND MINE
19 October 2012
If the great American song, This Land is Your Land, sounds downright quaint in today’s divisive political climate, take heart. Woody Guthrie’s paean to parity (and sobering answer to the saccharine optimism of God Bless America) was a novel idea even back in the 1940s, the decade in which it was written. No matter; I wish I’d found this handmade print (quirky kerning and all) by Chicago’s Uusi studio before it had sold out.
ONE LINERS
12 September 2012
The Swiss graphic designer Marcus Kraft likes music and words. His latest self-initiated project is a book containing “250 of the best songs for the times when solid advice is needed.” Song titles, actually, and they all look terrific, rendered with black brushstrokes on spartan white.
DEAD RECKONING
29 June 2012
How to Dress Well is the stage name of the Brooklyn singer, Tom Krell, whose new album displays startling cover art to match its sorrowful title.
THOUGHT LESS
27 March 2012
A doctored New York City street sign takes center stage on the DVD cover art for a film about the band, The Chemical Brothers, designed by London’s Tom Hingston Studio.
The DVD cover of
NEW ORDER
12 January 2012
If you know Swiss graphic design AND that Jody Foster’s Army and Rich Kids on LSD are band names, you’d have to be Mike Joyce.
He’s a New York City designer, whose equal adoration of highly ordered Swiss Modernism and the nihilistic disorder of punk rock has found expression in an ongoing, self-initiated project of jaw-dropping proportions: the redesign of scores of (presumably) messy vintage concert flyers into poster-size compositions of understated Swiss elegance.
To boot, he’s named the project Swissted. Smart Stuff.
MUSIC LESSEN
6 January 2012
One in a series of beautifully spare and abstract posters designed for a Swedish music festival, by the graphic designer, Klas Ernflo.
