Dark Side of the Moon has one of the most iconic album covers of all time. The prism transforming the solid beam of white light into a glorious array of colors perfectly embodies the sounds of the album itself: earthly themes of time, death and capitalism seamlessly twisting and melding with guitar riffs along with the occasional saxophone solo to create a beautiful rainbow of emotion.
Album art was at its strongest in the ’70s, as Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin and various other rock groups of the era demonstrated on a slew of covers. This was a time when an album cover could make or break a record. There were no Twitter profile pictures or Facebook cover photos to aid in fine-tuning a band’s visual aesthetic. The album cover had to embody everything the record stood for yet also catch record store patrons’ eyes. It was a make-or-break aspect of music production that ushered in an era of highly stylized and iconic album covers.
Fast-forward 40 years, the steadfast definition of an “album” is beginning to blur. It’s no longer possible for artists to market their sound solely off of their album covers. A Bandcamp album cover might make some waves in the online music-selling community. But what about the Twitter hype posts or SoundCloud images for singles and one-off tracks? In an era where a musician’s work is pouring through several different channels on the Internet at once, it’s becoming difficult for a band or record label to homogenize their visual aesthetic.
However, those that are managing to succeed are doing so with flying colors. Take Arca, for instance, whose visuals are almost entirely created by longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda. His music videos are filled with grotesque CGI characters that all fall in the realm of somewhere between David Cronenberg and David Lynch. Naked, deformed computer babies dance across the screen in the video for “TRAUMA Scene I.” Other videos have the same deformed characters, twisted and contorted by software to the point at which they lose all remaining humanity.
Kanda and Arca’s collaborations have become so iconic and longstanding that it’s possible to consider them an aesthetic “supergroup.” They’ve also done several collaborations with Shayne Oliver, who heads the avant-garde clothing line HOOD BY AIR. The trinity of fashion, music and visual art has created an overall artistic impact that is more poignant than each of the individual artists could produce on their own. Together, the New York artists have ushered in a realm of genderless and urban art that has inspired countless others in each of their respective mediums.
The entirety of the Kanda/Arca/HBA collaboration is fulfilling the same role as album art on vinyl records. When barraged with the constant images of runway models decked in BDSM-inspired garments and distorted naked CGI bodies creeping over a vast, dark 3D plane, people about to listen to Arca will have a good idea of what they’re in for before they’ve even turned on the music.
It’s becoming increasingly plausible for musicians to encompass an entire theme or idea while completely bypassing the typical LP model. Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones, two producers currently collaborating together in Barcelona, just produced an hour-long mix that flows seamlessly through trap, footwork and Jersey club styles. Coupled with the music is the website FRACTAL FANTASY, which has a number of pages dedicated to rendering uncanny models of humans. Some are braiding hair, while others soullessly stare into the viewer’s eye as the tempo of the background songs command the lighting. Even though the majority of the songs in the mix are bootleg remixes of popular artists like Soulja Boy and Sasha Go Hard, the pieces unify with the visuals to create a visceral experience. Whereas Arca and Kanda focused on the monstrous underbelly of computer animation, Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones opted for more video game-esque visuals.
FRACTAL FANTASY also employs the visuals of Nicolas Sassoon and Martyn Bootyspoon. The new unison of music and visual art advances the styles and popularity of both mediums. When the world is making it increasingly harder for artists to thrive both artistically and financially in solitude, it’s collaborations like these that allow artists to thrive in the digital era--much like how rappers cosign producers and vice versa. The new wave of cross-media collaborations is filling artists with new power to cast their influence over the masses with their message and vision.
What’s even more beneficial about the unison of artists across mediums is how it subverts the pitfall of record labels producing material for artists. Aside from the music and maybe album art, most labels produce content for their artists from a marketing standpoint. When the majority of content about a musician is directed and created by another artist expressing their vision through the lens of the original creator, it amplifies both artists’ creative outputs while keeping the motive of profit out of the picture.
Looking forward, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities to think that these types of collaborations will one day spawn something even more immersive than an audiovisual website. With virtual reality already maneuvering into the mainstream with products like Oculus, musicians, either by themselves or with the help of collaborators, can create literal worlds that reflect the nature of the sounds they produce.
Music is a fantastic medium that can cover a lot of ground thematically and emotionally, but at the end of the day only so many feelings can be conveyed by different vibrating pulses. Album covers are an art in their own right, but it’s rare that one can stare at a cover while listening to 40 straight minutes of music and be fully immersed in the single image. With more and more artists melding their crafts into fully immersive artistic worlds, we’ll begin to see aesthetics the likes of which were unable to be achieved in decades past.
