When did you get into design in general?

Growing up in Basel/Switzerland in the sixties my father had this graphic designer friend named Jim Douglas,  i remember seeing his work and liking it. The bold b/w style caught my eye there, i must have been 5 or 6 years old.

“Numerals” – Jim Douglas 1967

Later in 1977 when i was 14, i went to NYC and visited another friend of my dad’s, Harry Bertschmann. He did graphic design work for Kent Cigarettes among others. He had this great apartment in the West Village on 24 Bank St. with a huge drawing table and a Lacey Projector  (Optical Enlarger), that really got me going. He also had some spray-mount, that blew my mind.

“Luci” Projector

How did you get into album art design specifically?

My first job doing graphic design for bands in New York was for a club called The World in 1985. The club was located in an old ballroom on Ave C and 2nd st. in the East Village. One of the owners, Arthur Weinstein, was a nice guy and let me do posters and flyers for different bands like The Blasters, Robert Gordon, Public Enemy and others.

Poster for The Blasters at Club World – Alex Gloor 1985

I remember i stopped doing graphic design work for a few years, this was pre-personal-computer-age, getting anything typeset was a pain in the ass back then, you had to get to a Linotype typesetting machine and wait 24 hours to get a line of text for a headline. A few years later, in 1991, i got to design the company logo for Eighball Records a small independent label in New York and around that time computers and printers got better and more affordable, i got myself a Macintosh II and Apple Laserwriter PRO 630 and started to do graphic design again.

Eightball Records Logo – Alex Gloor 1991

Who and what to consider major influences on your design sensibility?

Before personal computers i worked with a Xerox machines, cutting and pasting things together. Paper, scissors and a glue stick was the ideal material for me to work with. These days i do most of my artwork without a computer again, i even use a typewriter for all the text on the In Flagranti covers. Getting away from computers was important step for me, in 2002 i started to work analog again, going back to what i was doing in the 70s & 80s. The great thing about that is, i end up with an original artwork i can hold in my hands, not a digital file on a screen. I enjoy that very much.

Poster for In Flagranti – Alex Gloor 2010

Can you explain the division of labor and how the process of creation works for In Flagranti?

IN FLAGRANTI (Sasa & Alex) are seldom in the same city at the same time, so i created sound files for Sasa in a program called Peak, i sample drums, guitars, vocals, synth noodlings or whatever from records i find in thrift-stores & flea-markets and upload it to our server. Sasa selects what he likes and arranges the sounds into tracks and adds vocals he records. Then we send the files back and forth and i edit & re-arrange them till we,re both happy with it. Sasa dj’s constantly around the globe so he,s able to test the tracks in clubs before we go to vinyl.

What was overall look or feel you were trying to achieve with the design for In Flagranti? How did you accomplish this? How do the video clips tie into the whole experience?

I like to work with cut-outs, drop-outs & repetitions, very basic graphic design elements. I cut & paste music in a similar way, i like limitations, trying to do the most with almost nothing is what i do best. A reductive simplistic approach is seen in all my work including the videos i make for all our tracks on our website.

Record Sleeve (CRE.032) - Alex Gloor 2010

Do you think their is an overall aesthetic of the Codek label? Do you handle all the design for releases on Codek?

Yes, my overall aesthetic is imprinted in everything at Codek Records, i’ve been designing all the the covers for the label from the beginning in 1996 including the website. To us it was always important to have artwork on our releases, i enjoy working with the format 12″x 12″, a great format, enough space to have an impact, lately i’ve been stripping my covers more and more, separating headlines & pictures and it payed of.

Why did you use that specific font?

about 10 years ago, i had a good look at my font folder and there where to many fonts to deal with. i chose Akzidenz Grotesk, a sans-serif typeface and worked with just that one font, experimented with it over & over every day for years. out of that exorcise i got the idea of cutting my own font, a semi bold sans-serif typeface i called “PROTEST”. a font cut with scissors out of black cardboard with lots of defects and weekpoints but original and mine, like my personal handwriting. “PROTEST” is based on posters from the “may 1968″ riots in paris, i bought this book on a fleamarket called “LES 500 AFFICHES DE MAI 68″ and it showed all these great hand painted & akward fonds that inspired me to do my “PROTEST” font. that’s the font i use now on all my In flagranti covers.

Record Sleeve (CRE.028) - Alex Gloor 2009

Why did you use those specific images (the era they are from and their nature)?

This is not an easy question to answer, i’ve been discussing it with an artist friend of mine (Leonard Bullock), here is what he had to say:

Alex, I don’t know if you intended it, but it is clearly a predilection of yours this sealing or secretly folding this element of time; & by that I mean specific dates within a given period,decade or era; you’ve cut off, or problematized the viewers ability to locate with any certainty when these pieces were made. Using the fodder of the past, published magazine photos from various sources, you’ve made something that kind of reminds one of another era, but if one critically appraises it there’s no convincing way to be sure what era is represented, or when the work at hand was made. It covers its tracks. It does the opposite of what photographs are purported to do: dilate & specify in detail specific moments. This turns our graphically shared sense of an era in pictures on its head; revises the whole thing to your purposes. When I see them I know the time frame; hey, I lived through it in New York, just like you did, but I can’t get a hold on specifics, so you disabuse any notion of the “real” time of photographs. You’re twisting around the details & separating us from comfortable reassurance of what we <should> know. So instead of suggesting a particular time, the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s, you’ve made this all into one continuum, indivisible. This gives one a slightly <unbehagen>, a discomfiture in relation to the “operative” qualities of these works. The way they work; or really more the way the act on us. That’s the way some art critics would speak about it. There are always formal satisfactions of producing such an effect. We all know these decades through the images which are now associated with them; especially, as we discussed yesterday, those that were published. & naturally the power of the published image then was uncontestable. Now of corse with another cliche as the dominant force of what we believe breathing down our necks; ie, that the printed image has fallen into the second level of influence & importance behind the NET!!! The collages you make are a kind of intervention into the <reading> of the era between the 70′s & 90′s, as if the then dominant version can now be rearranged & is, or will be merely one descriptions of that era among many. This process is secondary in your work, but it invokes an undertone. It is the second order poetry of these works. Folded into them smoothly enough that interpretation is rendered problematic. It’s an inverse intervention. It hides itself. Hides within the formal interplay of these images, many of which didn’t get the full play of the publishing media of the time. They are a remainder, a < rest >. Some people might wanna speak of social detritis, but lets stay away from that.

Parts of this Interview are from FADER magazine (April 2007),  i updated a few things since (Alex/2011)