On the Passing of H.R. Giger

Man is nothing

What is finite and transient has relevance only in relation to what is infinite and eternal. Man can make nothing of himself, if he draws only on his own forces . . . . Led astray by humanism and blinded by the belief that man is the centre of the universe, he fails to recognize his true place in the order of things. He forgets the basis of his existence, and therefore he must perish.

--Excerpt from "Panderma 4," Carl Laszlo, art collector/publisher

The artist in 1972, when he was the age I am today.

By now you may have heard the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger has died. The mainstream reaction is, of course, "The guy who designed the monster from Alien died." I don't think a law school colleague of mine will mind if I quote his reaction, which I think is a fairly typical one:

His stand-alone art, without the context of a backstory (such as in Alien), was disturbing, but only to the extent that a Metallica t-shirt appealed to me as a high-school student. Weird and grotesque just for the sake of being weird and grotesque.

This attitude toward the works of Giger bothers me much more than it would seem is rational. He is, after all, just one artist. So what if people don't get it?

In case you can't already tell, this is going to end up being about a lot more than just Giger. This is about the purpose of art, or at least one purpose of it, and what that means to me.

Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, designer, and more, his work has spoken to me on a primal level since my youth. So I will agree with the popular sentiment that there is a juvenile appeal to his work. But art that is disturbing--even disturbing for the sake of being disturbing--is almost the only kind of art that I care about. It's why I care about metal, it's why I care about Lovecraft or Poe, and it's why I care about Giger.

The Future of Digital Albums: Art, and Beyond

Digital music doesn't have to have static album art. With advances in technology, there are some who will take it even further, beyond the art.

These days, one of the main selling points of physical media is the possibility of highly-detailed packaging. Graf Orlock's Doombox, which can be transformed into a cardboard boombox, is only the pinnacle of examples. Most of them have album art that unfolds in unusual ways, plus detailed liner notes. But there's no reason similar attention to detail can't go into a digital package.

Many people seem to think that the digital age is destroying album art, because it's been reduced to thumbnail size. As I've noted before, that's not really the case. There are plenty of reasons it's not true, such as the resurgence of vinyl as a collector's item, the fact merch sales aren't going anywhere, and the abundance of attention given to art in the blogging community. I mean, you can't really have a blog post about an album without any pictures, right?

I've somewhat considered the possibilities of album art in digital media, but South Africa's The Ocean Doesn't Want Me is the first band I've known to begin to take advantage of the possibilities. (Despite their douchy name that screams metalcore, they're clearly not a metalcore band--more Intronaut meets Russian Circles, which ends up being too hopeful-sounding for my tastes.) As the Dust Settles has a true album cover, but after the first song, each track has its own art, a photograph of some natural scene. I hope that this is only one of many.

Metal Art: Birds

 
The above art comes from Serious Beak's Huxwhukw. I don't know whether that album is worth anything or not, since I haven't yet listened to it, but it strikes me that this is some of the best album art I've ever seen. So I started thinking about birds and their significance to the art of metal.

Metal Art: The Eye

Morbus Chron: Sleepers in the Rift

Eyes. Nothing else so everyday is so enigmatic. They are said to be the windows to the soul. They are a major part of human attraction and interaction. But they can also be strange and alien to us. Just look at the eyes of someone like Charles Manson, and they will tell you how insane he is.

A single eye, in isolation, is a common motif in metal art. Divorced from the rest of a human face, it's eerie.

Best Metal Album Cover of 2011

Oranssi Pazuzu - Kosmonument

This album cover is just perfect. I don't know who did it, but it has that classic Dan Seagrave 3/4 underneath viewpoint and H.R. Giger style biomechanical features. If you can mention both of those artists in describing it, I don't see how you can go wrong.

All 2011 List Week Posts:

- The 5 Worst Metal Albums
- Top 5 Rejected Names for New Korn Album
- The 3 Most Controversial Albums in Metal
- The Top 5 Ways Classic Bands Will Shit on Their Legacies in 2012
- The Top 3 Non-Metal Albums
- The Top 3 Metal EP's
- The Top 8 Blog Posts on Full Metal Attorney
- The Best Metal Song
- The 2 Biggest News Items in My Personal Life
- Promoter Exchange
- The Top 25 Metal Albums: 25-11
- The Top 10 Metal Albums

Metal Art: Trees

Trees are usually seen as symbols of life and positive things. So you might expect them to be rare in metal, which is concerned with death and negative things. But it's surprising how many album covers prominently feature trees.

The cover to Opeth's upcoming Heritage combines the tree as a symbol of life with symbols of death and evil.

Let's explore the metalness of trees.

Lo-Fi Photography as Album Art

Is lo-fi photography the next trend in metal album art?

With today's technology, any idiot can create a pristine, technically flawless recording. But it ends up feeling sterile. That's not the way we experience things in real life, so why would we want to experience a recording that way? Analog equipment forces the artist to slow down and carefully consider everything. It also allows the rawness of real life to come through.

The same goes for photography. The ease of creating a "perfect" image with a digital camera and Photoshop has led to a counter-movement of people embracing the quirkiness of film and cameras through techniques like redscale and double exposure. It's not only this, but also bad film, expired film, weird lenses, and really crappy cameras. The most iconic of these is the Holga, a Chinese-manufactured camera which is notorious for its cheap lenses and light leaks.

Cover art for Decapitated's Carnival Is Forever. It appears the photo was taken with a Holga or a similar camera. If even a tech-death band is using lo-fi photography, you know you'll see it a lot more in the near future.

Photography has not exactly had a storied history as metal album art. You're far more likely to find painted, drawn, or even computer-generated art on the cover of your favorite albums. But with the similarities of the lo-fi recording and lo-fi photography movements, I predict you'll see a lot more of it in coming days.

Metal Art: Antichrist Kramer

When I was in high school, I would draw the occasional picture with disturbing content. I remember one occasion in particular where I drew an elaborate arrangement of skulls and occult paraphernalia, implying some kind of demonic ritual. My teacher in that class (who was also a regular usher at my church) saw it and understandably had a concerned look on his face. It's not that I was serious about it, but it was cool to think about it and design it. Maybe that's how cults get started.

Antichrist Kramer's (or Antichristian Kramer) art has that kind of feel to it: fantastic skulls and evil stuff, drawn up completely out of the imagination, suggesting deeper meaning that may or may not be there. His more recent stuff is even better, executed with the kind of baroque detail I've never had to patience to work into my own drawings.

Kramer's work also seems to include--at least sometimes--obfuscated terminology and poetry to go along with the pictures. Above is his work for Inquisition's Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm.

The New Art of Metal

The Impact of John Dyer Baizley on the Look of Metal

The album cover -- once a crucial part of any band's identity -- has been dying a slow death for decades. For the most part, music fans put up with the shrinkage of album art from expansive vinyl records to hand-size plastic jewel cases. But with the music experience moving almost exclusively online, album art has suffered another compression -- this time all the way down to thumbnail images.

--source

That was three years ago, but I think it's safe to say things have changed. Despite the increased focus toward online music buying, more attention is being paid to album art in metal today than at any other time. Partly, this is due to a resurgence in vinyl, and the opportunity to make the art huge. Partly, it's because the record companies are trying to squeeze everything they can out of the CD format before it dies. But even online, the music sellers do everything they can to show off album art. At the iTunes Music Store, for example, you get an interactive virtual booklet with the album. And everywhere, they're still showing it off--just on a smaller scale.

I mentioned just the other day that I bought the debut from Kvelertak based almost solely on the album art. But the art was tiny. How did it get my attention?



Color.