8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

A Singing and Dancing A-Team

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Why Are K-Pop Groups So Big? → Initially, I thought the headline was referring to the immense international popularity of K-Pop groups. But it relates to the growing membership sizes of these acts. Did you know there’s a K-pop group with 23 members? The article also details how larger groups can have multiple spin-off groups (‘subunits’). And there are specific roles and ‘divisions of labor’ within each act’s membership. These acts end up sounding like elite military brigades — or a singing and dancing A-Team, with each personality assigned a duty or specialty. A typical ‘old,’ I find all of this confusing and fascinating. Check out this bit:

Wanna One, the 5th highest-selling K-pop group of the past decade, was formed in 2017 on the second season of survival show Produce 101. Produce 101 supposedly allowed fans to “produce” their dream K-pop group from 101 trainees by voting on the member lineup. For some, a spot in the final group was too valuable to leave up to chance—the show is currently under investigation for vote-rigging by internal staff and external agencies.

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Jazz Musician Lettering → It’s often annoying when modern album covers ape the classic design style of the jazz-era, but there’s nothing wrong with the aesthetics serving as inspiration. And there’s a lot of inspiration found in this compilation of typography and lettering found in the artist names adorning records from the mid-century. Many jazz covers are so iconic that we overlook the inventiveness behind the text. This format invites an examination without the images and layout that complete the full design. Blogger Reagan Ray says, “Rather than post 100s of covers and posters, I wanted to isolate the lettering for easy browsing and analysis. There’s a lot of lettering out there, and a lot I left out.”

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Newsletter Subscriptions → Haven’t you heard? Email newsletters are a thing! Even I’ve got one. Newsletters are a significant move away from the information chokehold of social media — personalized ‘posts’ arriving in email inboxes with our permission and without the judgment of indecipherable algorithms. Finding the right newsletters for you is a little more complicated. First thing: check out the websites of your favorite authors and thinkers — chances are most of them have a newsletter. There’s also a fun newsletter about newsletter recommendations, Thanks For Subscribing. And, though it’s limited to the growing Substack platform, the search engine Stacksear.ch is useful. You type in a word or interest, and the search results show Substack newsletters where your phrase has recently appeared.

One quick thing you might not know about Substack: each newsletter domain has an RSS feed. That’s great for readers as they can get Substack newsletters delivered to an RSS reader without necessarily subscribing. That’s how I read many Substack newsletters. But I feel guilty as this is also bad for newsletter publishers — if we’re reading via RSS, we’re not actually subscribed, affecting the newsletter’s subscriber count. A compromise is to use something like Feedbin, which gives you a special email address to use to subscribe to newsletters. This email address delivers them into your RSS feed. That’s what I do now, and it makes for a better reading experience and keeps my email inbox relatively sane.

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Khemkhaeng – บ้าน → This ambient mini-album from a mysterious Thailand-based producer is a wonder. It’s not often a release in the ambient genre sounds fresh and new. Khemkhaeng rises to the challenge, and these five songs have a rare quality — I want them to last longer. As I wrote in my short Bandcamp review, “Everything here is beautiful, sublime, and seemingly of its own world — but ‘ดูรู้สึก’ is especially distinctive and fascinating. I may have to edit a seamless loop of this track so I can sit inside it all day.”

Vaughan Oliver’s Invitation to Decode

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Vaughan Oliver - Pixies Cover Art

My first job was at a record shop (Camelot Music, a staple of ’80s shopping malls), and I enjoyed a generous employee discount. That offered the freedom to purchase records based on the cover art — if the cover’s cool, the music’s gotta be cool, right? — and a lot of those records would be released on the seminal British label 4AD. The enticing cover art was by 23 Envelope, the design team of Vaughan Oliver and photographer Nigel Grierson.

Years ago, I wrote about the power of cover art in a tribute to Factory Records boss Tony Wilson. There was a cool record shop in the beach town where my grandmother lived. It was next to the grocery store, so, while visiting my grandmother, I’d pop in to look at records when she’d go for groceries. I was 12 or 13 years old and recall seeing those early New Order records — Movement and Everything’s Gone Green — sitting in the mysterious bin labeled ‘imports.’ These records were strange, not like anything that I’d seen, and it was impossible to resist their vibe. It would be a couple more years until I heard these records, but the sound, the feeling, wasn’t that far off from the cover art’s first impressions. The designer was Peter Saville, often mentioned in influence alongside Vaughan Oliver, and it was like he was transmitting signals to me across the Atlantic.

That’s what remarkable cover art — or design in general — does to us. It’s an invitation to decode, revealing (or hinting at) the intention of the creator. Or, as Oliver told an interviewer, “[An album] cover should work as an entrance door that invites you to cross it.”

Clan of Xymox - cover art by Vaughan Oliver

It’s not a stretch to believe there would be a lot fewer graphic designers in the world if not for Vaughan Oliver and Peter Saville. I can’t think of a single designer friend of a specific age range that wasn’t significantly inspired by the outputs of 4AD and Factory. But it wasn’t only budding designers who received inspiration. There are also a lot more independent labels because of these designs. Or a lot more labels that approached everything they did as a representative package.

Oliver understood that the appeal he added to 4AD was emotional, that fans of the label picked up on common threads and identified a community. Oliver stated, “This was kind of branding before branding—and I generally don’t use the word branding—but it was creating a vibe that made you trust in something.” He continued:

I was always a bit wary of putting an identity on the label itself, but I wanted individual identities for the bands that were consistent. Then, with time, you would see a thread start to appear. There was a unity, but without a corporate branding stamp on it. It was very fluid. Eventually, it became an emotional response that people had with the work. Thirty years later, I’m talking to students who call it “emotional branding”—how people become emotionally involved in what we were doing. I’ve got clients who ask, “How can we have that now?” I say, “We don’t have that now. It builds with time; it also builds with the quality of the product.”

It’s a challenge to create this emotional community without the tangible effects of a physical totem. It’s not impossible — many well-crafted artist websites successfully transmit intention to potential fans. But basing an artist’s vibe on the limitations of a social media platform’s template or a thumbnail in a streaming app is a losing battle. The Guardian’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas said it well: “[Vaughan Oliver’s cover] design tells you that you’re about to go on a journey. With streaming, you’re suddenly teleported in without a map.”

Unlike Oliver, I’m not afraid to use the term ‘branding’ as long as I get to define how I use it. And I define branding, in music, as the promise an artist makes to her audience. That’s the vibe of trust that Oliver refers to above, and it’s essential. An artist or label that gains that trust, that cultivates a community, that repeatedly transmits a signal, becomes a cultural curator. An expectation grows in the listener, and this expectation is a necessary tension. What’s next? Will this label fulfill my expectations? How will this artist continue to reward her community of fans?

That’s how we felt about 4AD. The cover art, the music, the ambiguity allowing us to fill in our own interpretations — these worked together to build our tribe. If, circa 1985, I saw you pick up a Cocteau Twins album in the record store I’d strike up a conversation. We’re in the same club.

I’m sure that Vaughan Oliver, 23 Envelope, and label founder Ivo Watts-Russell partly knew what they were doing. But I also think they stumbled into a lot of this. The point here is that it’s not that difficult. It’s all about developing intention. Understand who you want to reach, as narrowly as possible, and create only for them. Cohesively apply that aesthetic to everything you deliver to the world.

Vaughan Oliver passed away in the final days of 2019. As I commented on Twitter, it’s a triumph to be remembered for a distinctive contribution to culture and style; one that’s identifiably his own as well as freely lent to others. Oliver transitioned to education in his last decade, and that’s fitting. Many of us in the music industry were his students. He taught us all a lot, and, in a more ephemeral digital age, these lessons now serve a higher purpose.

🔗→ Lost worlds of sex and magic: Vaughan Oliver’s album sleeves for 4AD
🔗→ Sight, touch, hearing: an interview with Vaughan Oliver
🔗→ Vaughan Oliver (Interview Magazine)
🔗→ Cover Star: Vaughan Oliver interview
🔗→ interview with graphic designer vaughan oliver

Hitting the Links: Music’s Technological History, Repetitive Pop Lyrics, and Peter Saville

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Technology In Music: A Chronological Playlist Through History:

Let’s start from from the beginning, in 1937: a timeless feel – eerie and alienating at times, permeates ‘Oraison’ by French composer Olivier Messiaen. The song was originally written for an ensemble of early electronic musical keyboards called Ondes Martenot. The Ondes Martenot is a very expressive instrument, meeting Messiaen’s avant-garde composition techniques. If you’re expecting beat drops you may want to keep in mind the release date.



Peter Saville On His Album Cover Artwork:

{Saville on New Order’s Technique cover:} It was a garden ornament and we rented it for the shoot. It’s a very bacchanalian image, which fitted the moment just before the last financial crash and the new drug-fuelled hedonism involved in the music scene. It’s also my first ironic work: all the previous sleeves were in some way idealistic and utopian. I’d had this idea that art and design could make the world a better place. That even bus stops could be better.



Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?:

In 1977, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper called The Complexity of Songs, which is basically one long joke about the repetitive lyrics of newfangled music (example quote: “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced”). I’m going to try to test this hypothesis with data. I’ll be analyzing the repetitiveness of a dataset of 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2017.



Forgotten Tributes: 25 Monumental Relics of Yugoslavia:

If you were to travel today through the area that was once Yugoslavia, you would come across some incredible massive objects that allow an unexpected look directly into the area’s past. Before dissolving into several smaller countries in the 1990s, Yugoslavia became home to a number of large-scale futuristic monuments.



Gary Vaynerchuk on Impact Theory (Podcast):

I think that Steve Jobs came along {and} became an icon, but the sad part of that narrative was he did not treat his employees well. He became an icon and the narrative became he got the most out of people by being a jerk, and that became romanticized. And a lot of people in Silicon Valley today run companies where they’re mean because they think that’s the right thing to do because they put Steve Jobs on a pedestal. I want to become that big {but} what I want to come from that is that kids that aren’t even born today think that they can build a five billion dollar company and {still} be a great guy or a great gal. I want to build the biggest building in town ever by just building the biggest building in town, while I think most people try to tear down everyone else’s building.

Hitting the Links: Talk Talk, a Package from Felix Laband, and Hippie Architecture

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Talk Talk – 10 of the Best:

Engineer Phill Brown, speaking to the Guardian in 2012, recalled “an endlessly blacked-out studio, an oil projector in the control room, strobe lighting and five 24-track tape-machines synced together. Twelve hours a day in the dark listening to the same six songs for eight months became pretty intense.”



Felix Laband – A Life In Collage:

Hailing from Johannesburg South Africa, Felix hasn’t exactly become a household name here in the States. His obscurity made legitimate purchases of his music difficult, so like any rabid fan I resorted in the early 00s to piracy and felt the pain of having shorted an artist that has contributed so much to our well being. But now more than a decade later it’s easier than ever to patronize the artists we love. And so we did, with the largest music-related purchase we’ve ever made.



Psychedelic Supersonic Silicon Space Age: Photos Of The Radical Hippie Design Sense:

In the 1910s, the horrors of the First World War had pushed disillusioned creatives to invent new ‘modernist’ modes of expression. Fifty years later, Vietnam, civil rights, and their political backlash had radical thinkers again refusing to get in line. We all know well the profound musical heritage of this period. But the influence of countercultural aesthetics on the graphic design and architecture of the era is far less recognized, even as its impact continues to ripple some half a century on.



Why Time Seems To Speed Up As We Get Older:

If our memories can trick us into thinking time is moving quickly, then maybe there are ways to trick our brains into thinking that time is slowing down — such as committing to breaking routines and learning new things. You’re more likely to remember learning how to skydive than watching another hour of mindless television.



There’s a Replica of the Otherworldly Bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey in a DTLA Warehouse:

{Simon} Birch, a Hong Kong-based British artist, has transformed the space into a series of micro-exhibitions meant to take viewers on a “hero’s journey,” a reference to Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth. The various large-scale immersions feature projections, paintings, sculptures, and, in one instance, a lush patch of real grass. But the most Instagram-worthy is a bedroom—one that happens to be an exact replica of the one in Stanley Kubrick’s Oscar-winning film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Hitting The Links

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The Essential Sun Ra

Sun Ra is often cited as the founding father of afro-futurism, a tangent of thought which extends through the mothership connections of Parliament-Funkadelic, to the astral techno of Underground Resistance, to the aquatic, lardossian narratives of Drexciya; his work examines racial identity and the black experience in America through the eyes of an alien visiting humanity. The language of this deconstruction is peppered with his own neologisms, like the “astro-black” of outer space, the “myth-science” or “solar-myth” of creation, right down to the name he chose for his band, “the Arkestra”, a linguistic riff on Noah’s biblical safe haven.

Giant Abandoned Soviet Spaceship Made of Wood

Buran, the Soviet Union’s answer to NASA’s Space Shuttle programme, wasn’t quite as successful as its American rival. Just one flight-capable Buran orbiter (craft OK–1K1) was completed, and flew only once, unmanned, on November 15, 1988. Today, a handful of relics from the Buran programme lie strewn across the former Soviet Union and beyond, from half-finished orbiters to a series of full-scale engineering rigs and other test articles; among them was this wooden wind tunnel model, abandoned for years in a corner of Zhukovsky Airfield in Moscow Oblast.

Electron Microscope Shows How Vinyl LP’s Are Played

Have you ever wondered how a vinyl player actually plays a record? Well, wonder no more. Microscopic Images shared this image on their Twitter some months back, showing what a record’s groove looks like under 1000x magnification.

The Meenakshi Temple of Madurai, India

Meenakshi Temple was originally built by Kulasekarer Pandya in the 6th century BC, but the credit for the present look of the temple goes to the Nayakas, who ruled Madurai from 16th to 18th century. The reign of the Nayaks marks the golden period of Madurai when art, architecture and learning flourished expansively. The riot of colors, however, is a more recent addition.

Graphic Designer Mark Ohe of Matador Records

Mark’s approach to working with a band always began with hearing their ideas for the project first, because, he pointed out, they always had ideas for it. “It’s pretty rare that someone comes to me and says, ‘Hey I’m doing this record, but I don’t know what to do for the cover.’ That almost never happens. What they really usually need is for someone to edit those ideas.”

Art Of The Record Sleeve

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DJBroadcast:

The ‘arty’ alternative bands of the 80s like New Order and Joy Division rarely used type over their imagery, and Peter Saville (graphic designer and art director of Factory Records) had always sold that as a way to create a global secret. A secret that would only be known by 500,000 fans, but anyone else going into the record shop wouldn’t have a clue who the group were. There were many record covers that came out looking obscure but that certain indie aesthetic wasn’t seen as commercial back then. But now there has been a 180-degree turn as the way that people browse and consume music has changed and is entirely online. – Philip Marshall


DJBroadcast is serving up a great series of interviews with record sleeve designers. It’s both inspiring and a tad melancholic, as I of miss the days when cover design (whether digital or physical) wasn’t the afterthought that it seems to be for most labels now.

Anyway, the site is two parts deep into the series. Part 1 (HERE) speaks with Philip Marshall who has done work for ZTT, one of my favorite labels with regards to design. Part 2 (HERE) features Lindsay Todd of Firecracker Records who uses his own printing press to fulfill his sleeve design dreams. Good stuff … I’m looking forward to future installments.