PROCESS

Nowadays, a large and increasing number of LPs are entitled to their cover in addition to specific disc labels, however, during the 80s and 90s, only a few albums were endowed with them while the vast majority of Electronic Dance Music production and more particularly the House Music of Chicago, was mostly presenting disc labels with generic typography and standardized covers.

Like many others, we drew with felt pen on these blank covers or made Jpegs for our iTunes library, but some of these records became cults and deserve proper visuals. We have thought on asking to illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, contemporary artists that we admire and whose visual universe seems to enrich the musical creation of these records, to fill this gap.

It is as fans of this musical genre and lovers of contemporary images that we lead this project. Our aim is not to show alternatives images based on a pre-established visual language, but to create original and unpublished visuals from musical and textual materials.

Amine Ghorab & Scott Renau, Fig.1: Moon (detail)

The curatorial of this project tries to visually extend the themes whose records are imprinted. 

The human-non-human dichotomy, New-Tech design as well as the whole relationship to body and sensuality but also to melancholy are at the center of this project.
From the visual reading of the exhibition, the imbalance created by ultra- contemporary imagery applied to a dated and historical musical material will amplify the distortions effects, characteristic of our project. 

Some artists are chosen because they portray a synthetic world and sanitized where human beings - and even the living in general - have no place because this feeling of ultra-articial universe is characteristic of the musical material we ask them to adapt. 

In return, other artists maintain a relationship to the body or textures evocative of a form of pop sensuality revealing a form of humanity exacerbated, intimist because the House Music also reveals a high degree of internalization. 

The idea is not to produce covers as they could have been imagined at the time of their release but to relate the contemporaneity of techniques and scenes represented, whether figurative or abstract.

Nu Signal Exhibition, May 2019 - Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris

Records Blocks - Nu Signal Exhibition, May 2019 - Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris

Many of these records devoid of cover artworks appeared at a time when the future still aroused great expectations and fears.
Computers and electronics began to invade homes and allowed people often devoid of musical training and nancial means to compose the soundtrack of the future, real sound utopias.

By their innovative use of synthesizers, rhythm boxes and sequencers, all these musicians had a particular fascination for new technologies and presaged the advent of machines (The title “Computer Madness” by Pointdexter sums it up).

A new era began, and these artists expressed it with the Messianic accents borrowed from the gospel spirituality in which they grew up. Glenn Crocker’s “We Have Arrived” (Glenn Underground) and Virgo’s “Free Yourself” evoke this futuristic New Age form.

Sometimes, the future is darkened and the utopia is transformed into dystopia as in “Brave New World” by Blake Baxter, direct reference to the work of Aldous Huxley.
Listening to G Strings ‘”Land of Dreams” (perhaps referring to the short story by James Blaylock) or Richard Davis’ “Methane Sea”, these are fantasized places or extraterrestrials landscapes that are emerging. Terrance Mc Donald’s “Spaced Out” and “Mind over Matter” evokes states of consciousness altered by drugs or musical trance. Virgo’s “RU Hot Enough”, “Sexuality” by Blake Baxter, “Love Mystery” by Joe R Lewis or “When You Hold Me” by Master C & J illustrate the synthetic romances that are born in clubs between two strobe ashes in the heart of artificial smoke.

The modernist aspirations of these discs do not appear only through their titles. They also show through their composition, often minimal in terms of instrumentation, coupled with their maximalist aesthetics (melodies and grandiloquent effects) aimed at pop efficiency (on the dance or from an emotional point of view).