Blonde Redhead – “Misery Is A Butterfly” (4AD, 2004)
Much of the visual and lyrical imagery of this album is reflective of an accident in which lead singer Kazu Makino was trampled by a horse. This image was shot by Carlo Mollino, an Italian architect “who committed equally to art and to technique, embodying the figure of the Italian Renaissance polymath in the context of modernity. He was a sportsman and a cultured intellectual, besides designing buildings, interiors, and furniture, he was a photographer, a writer, a skier, an aerobatic pilot, and a professor at the Polytechnic of Turin. In the 1930s he was among the very few architects, internationally speaking, to introduce elements of Surrealist art and culture into the Modern Movement. Free from any rigid ideological position, he went on to define a synthetic form of eclecticism that prefigured the contemporary. Taking nature as a source for both engineering and harmonious beauty, Mollino was essentially in search of lightness and dynamism, qualities he animatedly infused into his organic architecture and furniture. An innate pleasure for storytelling colored every aspect of his work: ‘Anyone who is not a beast and therefore has the awareness and dignity of a human being, the poorest human being who has never reneged on his own individuality, will feel this need: to be enchanted and to enchant, to express himself.’ In 1949 Mollino published a significant book on the history and critique of photography, Il Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura, whose concluding words well explain his love for photography: ‘On fragile sheets, between one pulping and another of today’s ephemeral life of paper, I encounter photographs, concrete poetry that ferries me into the domain of the ineffable as much as a consecrated painting or other canonical art form; these photographs being ‘personal documents’ or fantasies of an impossible daily life.’”
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Deerhoof – “Friend Opportunity” (P-Vine Records, 2006)
This cover is the work of artist, sculptor and poet David Shrigley. A fan of the band's previous work, Shrigley hadn’t heard the album before he started working on the design yet still was able to reflect the album's cinematic vibe. In 2006, Deerhoof released a picture disc single The Perfect Me from the album and original copies contained twelve different cover variations which Shrigley painted. Shrigley has also directed music videos, written several books, designed a London Underground leaflet cover, has contributed a cartoon for The Guardian's Weekend magazine every Saturday. On the album Worried Noodles, musicians interpret his writings as lyrics - collaborators include David Byrne, Hot Chip, and Franz Ferdinand. He co-directed a short film called Who I Am And What I Want (2005), based on Shrigley's book of the same title. Oh yeah, and he designed a frisbee with the text I Collect Records — I Am Obsessed With them.
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