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When did you get into design in general? growing up in basel/switzerland in the sixties my father had this graphic designer friend i remember vividly, Jim Douglass, he was this very cool guy from the states with a swedish blond girlfriend. 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.
later in 1977 when i was 14, i went to NYC and visited another friend of my dad's, Harry Bertschmann, who did graphic design work for Kent Cigarettes among others. he had this great apartment in the west village on bank st. with a huge drawing table and a "luci" (optical enlarger), that really got me going. he also had some spray-mount, that blew my mind, hahaha
How did you get into album art design specifically? my first job in the music industry was for eighball records back in 1991, designing the company logo. the owner, Alex Kaplan, had this company in NYC called video makers and i was back then an art director/set designer for a director from LA called Moshe Brakha . i was getting tired of working with a huge crews on sets for TV commercials and music videos so i went back to working as a graphic designer around that time, and remember it felt great to be in a room alone again listening to music and being in control of my work without telling 20 guys what to do and waiting hours for them to do it!
Who and what to consider major influences on your design sensibility? before computers i worked with a xerox machines, cutting and pasting things together.paper, scissors and a glue stick are the ideal material for me to work with as-long as i do logos, headlines & collages. these days i do most of my work without a computer again, i even use a typewriter for all the text on the In flagranti covers. getting away from computers was important for all my work, i had a show of my collages last year at gallery Neuropa in Zürich, and all my work there was made like that, cut & paste tear-sheet from books & magazines.
Can you explain the division of labor and how the process of creation works for In Flagranti? IN FLAGRANTI (sasha & me) are seldom in the same city at the same time, so for this project, i created sound files for sasha 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 in california. sasha downloads the files and selects what he likes and arranges the sounds into tracks and ads vocals he records. then we send the files back and forth and i edit & re-arrange them till we,re both happy with it. sasha 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.008) - Alex Gloor 2005 How does the music of In Flagranti affect the design and vice versa? designing the cover for a record first before any music is recorded always worked best at codek, producers are inspired and there is never ever any question about where we,re going with specific release sound-wise. 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. 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?
Lettering for CRE.014 - Alex Gloor 2007 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 asking myself that question and discussing it with an artist friend (Leonard Bullock), here is what he has 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. Interview for
FADER magazine |
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