This is an ongoing personal project of some designs I did for some of my favourite acid house and techno records, inspired mid-century, jazz and Blue Note records.
To be fair, acid house and MCM couldn’t be further away from each other in aesthetic - many house and techno records had little or no graphic design to speak of - many were just white labels - so I’ve redesigned some of my favourites with a MCM styling to show how they may have looked if these veritable classics had been released in the 50s and 60s.
This ongoing project joins my love of late 80s - early 00s house, techno, trance, dnb and electronic music in general with the abstract stylings of mid-century era graphic design. Circles, rectangles, shapes and abstract interpretations of sound were the order of the day to visually describe to record shoppers what the music sounded like in the days before wall-to-wall media saturation with YT or Spotify.
So with this one, I cut out some body and piano key shapes from foam rubber and printed them onto some paper. Then scanned the parts and rearranged in PS for your visual pleasure, heavily influenced by the Pink Panther and Catch Me If You Can.
Womm womm, wumm wumm, womm womm, wumm wumm.
Positive Education, always correct spellnig.
Positive Education, always correct spellnig.
Absolutely loved hearing that tune in a dark, cavernous techno club years back. Guaranteed floor filler!
Strings of Life was the first one of these I did, so I then thought it was a great idea to do an animation to go with it. Basically, a music video to compliment the record sleeve I'd redesigned - have a look at that over here.
So the story goes that when Gerald got the vocal sample, it was "Voodoo Rage", but his sampler couldn't hold that much info and truncated it to Voodoo Ray, filling dancefloors forever.
