Howdy Howdy Howdy Howdy 

It's good to be back into the habit of writing these, even if I’m a day late (what do you mean February only has 28 days? Since when?)

Anyway, we're back with a new, leaner format.

If this newsletter were an 80s pro-wrestler, he'd be up there in the ring giving a sugar-fuelled promo:

“I'm a mean, lean, glitching machine. A datamoshed juggernaut fueled on gummy bears and caffeine!”

But we're not an 80s pro-wrestler. And that's probably for the best. A lot of those guys were problematic.

So what does this new format mean? Does it mean we're full of clickbait and ragebait content?

Absolutely not. It just means we're doing one feature per newsletter. And this month you're getting a cool feature on glitchy album covers.

I guess I just can’t help myself…

News

But, before that, what have I been up to?

Not a ton of stuff, but I have had a little more time for making art this month (well, for about a week). 

Actually, I kinda got addicted to using the JFIF encoder I wrote about in last month's newsletter (check it out if you haven't already)

Also, I've been out and about trying to see art in the wild. First up, I was able to see some of Andreas Gysin's work that has been installed in Shibuya.

If you're not familiar with their work, head over to their profile. Actually, they are responsible for the ASCII Play tool which I wrote about all the way back in Error Logs #2

Here's a little video of me dicking about with it singing Blue Monday.

Anyways, here's a video from the installation which has been installed on LED screens in Seibu Department store - I’m told you can also see more work in Miyashita Park in Shibuya too, but I went a couple of days too early so I missed out (and my next scheduled day off isn’t until 2038)

And if you look very carefully you may be able to find a glitch hidden in the screen (with this being a glitch art newsletter, let's assume it was intentional)

Second of all, I was able to go to Kenichi Nakaya's exhibition in Tokyo, who I also wrote about in Error Logs #9 (what is this, a callback episode?)

If you remember, he creates glitch inspired ceramics, sculptures and carvings based on Japanese folklore.

I was able to take some photos of his work and have a quick chat with him (chat not photographed)

Whilst I unfortunately couldn’t afford to buy any art right now (I’m a poor starving artist myself), I did manage to buy this t-shirt

Glitchy Album Covers - Part II 

Way back in Error Logs #6, I wrote about some of my favourite glitch art album covers. And because I'm an absolute masochist, I decided to write a second list.

Wait, there are more? Wow, this glitch art thing might be catching on.

Actually, I had been keeping a list for a while, but I was inspired to finally put pen to paper (or first to keyboard) when Glitch Artists Collective did some posts on older glitch media (and I suggested to them the Herbie Hancock Magic Windows cover that I wrote about last time)

One thing that really fascinates me is how these musicians use glitch art as a surrogate for their music. But that music doesn't always reflect what I expect, especially when looking back at album art from the 70s and 80s.

Right now we have a certain view of what glitch art conveys and what kind of musical artists use it. Now it's more readily associated with electronic or industrial musicians. So you don't really expect Peter Gabriel body horror.

But what does that really mean? At first, I wondered whether glitch art in album covers has become little more than a visual shorthand for music rooted in technology. Are musicians now drawn to it mainly for its technical and aesthetic appeal, rather than for its conceptual depth or emotional resonance?

I think of my previous list, there seemed to be a lot of different reasons for choosing glitch art; whether that was musicians pushing the boundaries of their genres, musicians making transgressive statements and attempting to break social barriers, or sometimes they just went down aesthetic dead-ends that we just don’t think of anymore.

I’m curious if those themes will continue or if we’ll see anything new with this next batch

Jean Michel Jarre - Zoolook

Artist: Jean Michel Jarre

Album: Zoolook

Year: 1984

Cover Artist: Mark Fischer (Art Direction), Kate Hepburn & Fiona Doulton (Design), Imagine London (Artwork Image Processing)

Standout Song: Ethnicolor

Recently saw a post on Reddit that said "why is all noise music harsh? Why are there no fun sounds?"

Well, this is it; a noise music album full of boings, zwoops, fwabbles and chonky-plonks. Less The Downward Spiral and more Pretty Joy Machine.

The songs were made with samples of speech or singing from 25 different languages, and the vocal samples were used kind of like instruments.

Honestly, to me it sounds kind of dated now (it’s gives off a very 80s new-age jazz vibe), but it does feature some guitar work from Adrian Belew, which is always a good thing.

The artwork was designed by Mark Fischer and Kate Hepburn. The front cover is a portrait of Jean Michel Jarre that has been warped and pixelized, and the coloured outlines that surround him give off a kind of video synthesized look.

According to Hepburn, "The stretching of Jarre's face on the front and back of the sleeve was created by using a synthesizer computer called the Art Tron, and if you look very closely you will notice lots and lots of lines, just like a TV screen." The same computer was used when creating the Zoolookologie' music video.

Here’s the video in question, but I need to give two warnings

Warning 1: Bright flashing lights

Warning 2: It may be the most 80s thing ever created

But how much 80s can one thing be?

Actually, watching the Art Tron in action, it gives off a lot more of a Slitscan kinda feel, or like those TikTok trends with the blue lines where people made themselves look like giraffes or gave themselves giant foreheads.

More interesting to me is the back cover, where the glitch is a lot more like a cross between pixelsorting and the pix2line tool I shared back in Error Logs #11. Which is pretty cool when you consider that those techniques only really gained a name within the last 15 years or so. So while there are parts of the art and music that are quite dated, there are other things that were ahead of the time.

To me, I think the decision to choose glitch art for the album cover really works thematically with the core gimmick of the album; the portraits are stretched, glitched and deformed, with the pixels taking on a new life as they become the brushstrokes of visual art, much like the vocal samples of the songs becoming the instruments themselves in the music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto - /04 and /05  

Artist: Ryuichi Sakamoto

Album: /04 & /05

Year: 2004 & 2005

Cover Artist: Ryuichi Sakamoto (images) and Hideki Nakajima (Art Design and Direction)

Standout Song: Bibo no Aozora (/04)

So, the Godfather of glitchy album covers is back. You might remember that Sakamoto also featured in the last list with his album Async. But that wasn’t his only foray into glitch art.

/04 and /05 are kind of self-cover albums, where Sakamoto takes songs from his extensive career, strips them back to their minimal parts, and reimagines them on the piano (with a wee bit of violin).

The album is a lot less glitchy sounding musically than Async, but I don’t think the decision to choose glitch art as a visual component was meant to reflect the kind of instrumentation used.

I found it a bit tricky to find out exactly who was responsible for with the making of this artwork, but from what I can gather is that the original photos (whatever they are) were from an old digital camera owned by Sakamoto, which were then corrupted (I believe by Sakamoto himself, but I’m not sure if this was done intentionally or by happenstance). I’ve written about how to achieve this kind of effect before by databending with Notepad++ and Hexeditors, but it can also be achieved by using dedicated online tools, as well as just fannying around with disrupting hardware when saving or doing file transfers

Anyway, the Art Direction and Design was done by frequent Sakamoto collaborator, Hideki Nakajima, who also made some cool glitch art of his own. But I believe (and I might be wrong), for this project he was mostly responsible for the layout and text of the cover, not the actual glitching itself.

The back of the album features another broken JPEG, which you can actually make out a little from the original photo at the top (it seems to be tree branches)

/05 has the same concept, and I think I like this pair of broken JPEGS even more than /04.

I’ve always been curious why Sakamoto chooses very glitch influenced imagery, when his music isn’t always the most obviously glitch-influenced (especially for this one). But again, I think it’s because I’ve been trained to think of glitch art matching a certain kind of music, whereas he specifically chose these corrupted JPEGs as a metaphor for the imperfectness of these reimaginings compared with the polished shine of their original versions.

It’s almost like his revisiting of his older works are like faded recollections; corrupted or damaged, like the photos from his digital camera.

Miles Davis - Dark Magus

Artist: Miles Davis

Album: Dark Magus

Year: Recorded 1974, Released 1977

Cover Artist: Teruhisa Tajima (Art Direction) & Tadayuki Naito (Photographs)

Standout Song: Tatu

Perhaps not a place you might expect to see glitch art, but this live album from Jazz legend Miles Davis features some glitches that look like early analogue glitch art, similar to some of the early video synthesizer work being done in the 70s (you can read about some of Howard Gutstadt’s work I wrote about in the last Glitchy Album Coves list I wrote, coincidentally for Herbie Hancock who was previously Davis’ pianist)

The album itself is absolute bonkers and well worth a listen. It’s like dying and being taken on a trip through the underworld; all amazing percussion, demonic guitar wahs, and a trumpet screaming out in pain. There are some parts here that I can’t even tell if it’s a guitar or his trumpet being put through layers of effects (or probably both blended together).

You can see with some of Tajima’s and Naito’s other Miles Davis’s collaborations, particularly the covers of Pangea and Black Beauty, that they tried to use in-camera trickery and physical ‘glitching in the development process, such as double exposure or light trails to achieve a surreal look, but this album seems to be unique in that they used external editing software to achieve this look for Dark Magus.

According to Tajima himself,

Inside, the sleeve has some less surreal glitches and gives you a better idea of the effects of the glitches when applied to more standard images and portraits. I really like that alternative, less-edited version of the cover photo. I think it gives him a mad scientist kind of look, and the reflection in his glasses almost make it look almost proto-cyberpunk.

Overall, this kind of artwork feels perfectly suited to an artist pushing music into new territory, building a dark, psychedelic atmosphere by using electronic sound in ways it hadn’t been before. There’s no way the same visual style from his ’50s and early ’60s work would have captured that shift.

Joy Division - Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979

Artist: Joy Division

Album: Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979

Year: Recorded 1979, Released 2001

Cover Artist: Peter Saville

Standout Song: Day of the Lords / Transmission

Les Bains Douches? Another Jean Michel Jarre album? A French Frathouse?

Actually, it's a lesser-known Joy Division live album recorded at historic swanky looking Parisian nightclub, Les Bains Douches.

And what a live album it is. Joy Division were a different animal when playing live. Their recorded output was much more minimalist, surgical and mechanical due to the input of Producer Martin Hannett - listening to it was like being trapped in a void. Whereas their live performances were a lot more raw and volatile; less ‘post’ and more ‘punk’.

Designed by Peter Saville, who was responsible for the majority of the visual identity of Factory Records, the cover artwork is a glitched image of the original poster design for the live performance.

I think it’s a nice counterpoint to the album cover of Unknown Pleasures, which I described before as “[seeming] like a stark series of white lines set against a black backdrop. They look like remote, isolated mountains surrounded by darkness. The unconquerable, unknowable, complex structures contrasted by the void around it.” The artwork for Unknown Pleasures perfectly encapsulates the music on it.

On the other hand, this artwork for Les Bains Douches takes that black vacuum and fills it full of Disorder, which mirrors the switch from their studio sound to their more aggressive live sound.

Petbrick - Liminal

Artist: PETBRICK

Album: Liminal

Year: 2022

Cover Artist: Chris Reader

Standout Song: Primer

So you've pretty much got to the end of the list and I'm sure you're thinking "Crikey, Grandad, haven't you got anything more contemporary on this list?", but you'd probably say it in a more Gen-Z kind of way. I'm not sure what that would sound like because I don't know any Gen-Z in real life.

Probably something like "Grandad, my guy, this playlist looks like it owns a fax machine. Don’t you know anything that isn't fossil-maxxed?”

Fine, 2022 is pretty recent, isn’t it?

PETBRICK is an experimental industrial/noise duo featuring Iggor Cavalera (of Sepultura fame) and Wayne Adams (of Big Lad).

Their music is an mix of industrial crossed with noise and actual drumming, but with a lot of random chaos thrown in, like drum and bass, hip-hop beats, tribal drumming.

The cover features a pixelsorted background, and it has that sand-dune-esque pattern that is a common feature of ASDF pixelsorting, which I wrote about in a past Error Logs, and reminds me a little of older works by jrdsctt (who I also wrote about- wow this really is the callback issue)

I love the blend of colours; the pinks blend into the emeralds, which blends into the teals, kind of like the way the different genres of music blend together.

I’m not a huge fan of the black metal style album name, which I don’t think really meshes with the pixelsorting well. I can see what they were going for because the music works as a blend of different styles, but I’m not sure that particular element works visually (at least not for me.)

The back cover fairs a little better, and while I still have the same issues with the track listing, I think the band name glitch looks really cool the way it blends with the pixelsorting.

So while this is an album that does have an electronic edge, I do think the decision to go with a glitchy album cover has more to do with the experimental nature of the music, rather than it just being visual shorthand for “computer music” like a lot of contemporary music covers.

Anyway, that brings us to the end of the list. What conclusions did we make? I think I learned a bit more about why musicians choose album artwork, and it’s not always an aesthetic choice. While the music may have a specific genre, the concept of the music may be something completely different, just in the same way that a glitch art piece may not have anything to glitches or technology.

It sounds really obvious when you write it like that, but the I wonder how we have arrived at the point where “glitch music = visual glitch art” - it does a disservice to both mediums to think in such binary terms.

I think this needs further investigation to determine whether my initial hypothesis; that glitch art has become a visual shorthand for technology-driven music, actually holds. It might be worth compiling a third list focused exclusively on more recent albums to test that idea (that’s a project for 2028!)

Anyway, that brings us to the end of another issue.

If you're looking for glitch inspired artwork for your own album (whether that’s computer music or your AirBnB Folk album), don't forget you can check out my ArtGrab profile where you can license some of my work.

Thank for reading and I’ll see you next month, probably with a tutorial for some glitch art tools (and maybe some more sassy ragebait titles)!