25th January 2011

Video with 3 notes

Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-inch Records from the USA

Part of what’s cool about records is the fact that they’re actual artifacts; not only are they a means to transmit sound, but they’re a physical art object on their own. Touchable Sound is a book celebrating and chronicling notable efforts of the past 25-ish years in record design and packaging.

It’s about 400 pages of interviews of and essays written by designers, and tons and tons of pictures of records and record covers. The book is, in itself, an interesting work of design, which you can see in the flip-through video at the top of this page, the smaller width of the essays serving in some ways to place priority on the images (and also to divide the book into sections).

The Locust’s Flight of the Wounded Locust, a four 7-inch release in which the records fit together as puzzle-pieces, shown in the book.

Some of the stories get kind of samey; lots of stories about how the designer had to figure out most of this stuff along the way, and get friends, family, and housemates to help put together packages before they could go out, but then they always manage to save it by describing some bizarre process by which a certain record was made, or simply showing the beautiful results of this work.

Man or Astro-Man?’s UFO’s and the Men Who Fly Them!, an EP that contained a cut-out of a flying saucer, also featured in the book.

There are dozens of creative design ideas in the book (one of my favorites was theHoudini release by Jessamine, which was sealed with a tiny padlock, and required the owner to pick said lock in order to open it and find the key inside), far too many for me to list here — and that would spoil things for you anyway. The whole point of the book is that the packaging can be interesting art in itself, worthy of consideration on its own merits, but I still can’t look at this book without wanting to hear the records.

Grab a copy here, or wherever.

Tagged: Touchable SounddesignThe LocustMan or Astro-Man?Flight of the Wounded LocustUFO's and the Men Who Fly Them!getting into a serious thing