An Album As An Art Installation
Developing an admiration for Peter Gabriel's solo work beyond "Solsbury Hill" was a long(ish) development for me. That song crippled movie trailers and soundtracks of my childhood. Mental Floss has a thorough history of the song and its use/reuse.
His live take of "Family Snapshot" on 1983's Plays Live could be marked as the track that transitioned me from a fan in manufactured-movie-trailer-emotional-arch only to a real listener. So a few weeks ago, maybe a month or two at this point, I picked up his new album i/o in both the Bright and Dark-side mixed versions. Because I am a sucker for high-concept artwork and really any excuse to just by more music stuff.
Along with each mix's presentation of 12 songs in a double-LP format, the liner notes are basically an art book with each song joined with a piece of visual art that Peter Gabriel thought may enhance the track.
"I wanted to connect music and art on this record. Visual artists have the same sort of obsessive focus on detail that we have with our musical work. I wanted to see if the songs might open up a little more with a strong visual piece attached."
The visuals are accompanied by curatorial blurbs introducing each artist and Peter Gabriel's thoughts on how their work expands the intent of the companion song.
i/o is artistic collaboration in a pure form, and the album helped me recognize how some musical artists release albums specifically as a kind of installment or exhibition, or they may be transparent in their admiration for or inspiration from other artistic media.
Peter Gabriel has often worked with Brian Eno who has built plenty of albums into larger-than-music exhibitions. His Ambient series and his album Discreet Music include short essays and diagrams of sonic mechanisms that indicate these albums are more than just songs.
Ambient 1: Music for Airports was created specifically to inhabit the physical space in airports to provide a persistent tone and musical movement for travelers, but not just sound to fill their heads but an experience they can drift in and out of.
Ambient 4: On Land features the schematics for Eno's "Ambient Speaker System," his DIY and surprisingly basic and inexpensive proposal for an environmental and acoustically enhanced speaker arrangement.
Eno's work straddles something between music and environmental design, with a healthy dose of DIY mechanical engineering. Also, Gary Hustwit of The Design Trilogy is currently touring his new eponymous documentary on Eno.
Peter Gabriel and Eno raise their music past the album. Yes, they do function as just an album, and very well made pieces of music. But because of each artist's admiration for other media, the albums act as a larger installation.
Bon Iver, and/or Justin Vernon, is an artist who seems to build his non-musical artistic influences into his compositions very obviously. His most recent album I,I (recent but released in 2019) continues what Vernon seemed to be developing in 22, a Million: sonic collage. Where 22, A Million was saturated with glitchy textures and spastic song structures, I,I seems to pull those collage elements into a formal piece. If 22, A Million is all the pieces of cut out material in front of Vernon, I,I is him gluing all those cut outs onto the art board.
I,I was released with a series of music videos that featured masterful dance compositions in coordination with Vernon's songs and layered over with hectic but exciting digital design.
Music has featured symbiotically with dance probably since bipeds started smacking sticks on stones. But the I,I videos represent an unusual function of music videos, that they don't just serve the song but highlight a mixed media collaboration that is elevating each style.
Not every album is going to be and shouldn't feel pressured to be a high-concept, borderline art installation. Most of the time even I want to just throw on an album and rock.
But musical artists who feel inspired by other media and feel deferential enough to share those inspirations with us beyond their music create albums that are representations of impressive collaboration and artistic expansiveness.
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
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