Storm Thorgeson and the art of musical visualization
Today’s world is a cacophony of binary data. The world we navigate on an hourly basis is an assault of arbitrary images and generic information. Even music – humankind’s most spiritual claim to artistry – is being clipped and transmogrified into byte-sized bits swept along the cyber slipstream like so much brightly fading detritus.
Album covers (that already near-extinct artform) seem for the most part mere gaudily generic after-thoughts: One interchangeable with the next. Bleep-bleep. Click.
Once upon a time, long, long ago…
It was the mid-Sixties. Rock music, infused with reckless, new-born electricity, was booming into unchartered territories of sound and meaning. The customary album cover – consisting of artist name and album title, accompanied by still photo of said artist – was no longer sufficiently representative of the sonic energy contained in said album. Instead of the standard ‘sit-down with your instrument of choice and we’ll take a photo’ approach, visual artists were commissioned to creatively represent the sonic swirls: to snap-shot the art rather than the artist.
Though millions remain unaware of him, the work of Storm Thorgeson is inextricable from the music of Sixties/ Seventies legends like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. His album covers for Led Zep’s Houses of the Holy and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon are consummately entwined with their sonic scapes. Decades later Thorgerson’s work for the likes of Muse, Audioslave and The Mars Volta are similarly intimate and arresting – leaping free from the global genericism of contemporary album covers.
Over the course of four decades his numerous visual contributions to Popular music have crowned him the undisputed king of album cover design.
Most recently this visual giant of 20th century music designed the cover for Cape Town-based band machineri’s debut album. We were granted an interview with the man.
Picturing the music.
How did it all begin – What triggered the interstice of your visual work and music/bands?
“Circumstance involving a friend who declined to do Saucerful [Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets 1966]; so I offered my services. The band said: ‘What do you know about album covers?’ ‘Not a lot…’, said I. ‘Okay’, said they.”
[Following Saucerful.., Pink Floyd called on Thorgerson for around a dozen of their legendary covers, including Wish You Were Here, Atom Heart Mother, The Division Bell and Pulse..]
Both David Gilmour and Roger Waters attended art school, and the band seems to have always been visually literate. [Thorgerson interrupts, "They have?"] To what extent, if at all, did members of Pink Floyd interact with your ideas and ultimate designs for their albums?
“All four interacted via refinement and criticism but did not design – except for Animals, which was dreamt up by Waters, and Momentary Lapse of Reason, which came about in part from an idea of Gilmour’s.”
What is the relationship between your cover art and a given album’s musical content?
“As close as we can make it. We [Thorgerson's design group xxx] always listen to the music, often many, many times. We unravel the under-currents/preoccupations which inform the music, and use them to inform the cover.”
How did your designing of local outfit machineri’s debut album come about, and what was your vision behind it?
“I met the band in Cape Town through a friend. I went to a gig, we got on, and I offered to design their cover if they’d like me to [Mick: Cough-cough-splatter - tries to catch breath.] My design reflects the mixed gender of the band in the rocks and in the body painting.”
Any albums you would’ve loved to do the cover art for but didn’t’?
“About 100… They’re all in a book cleverly entitled 100 Best Album Covers (Dorland Kindersley).”
Check out www.stormthorgerson.com for more of the humble legend’s visual audacity.
Connect with Muse