My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Lovely piece of web design for the remastered reissue of the ahem seminal album (etc), even better it’s married to excellent content and technologies. I’m still in two minds about the change in the design. The ‘stretch’ of the original is attractive, but it’s hardly groundbreaking, in fact the technique verged become something of a cliche fairly recently. The original is so spooked and visionary that it’s a shame to lose it (having said that, I know Peter Saville did the original layout, typography, etc, but that always struck me as fairly uninspired.) I understand that the updated design relates also to the Creative Commons licence under which the website is published and the offering up of multi-track MP3s for public remixing and/or incorporation into other projects, but this too doesn’t exactly strike me as groundbreaking when compared to hiphop’s long history of uncondoned appropration.
Ultimately, the change in cover seems almost sacrilegious, and although you could argue that that’s just a convention – book covers change all the time after all – I’d hate to see such a remix culture arise in the music-related visual sphere. In fact, I mourn the loss of any number of great book cover designs, often superceded by far more banal efforts. I’m thinking of Irene Von Treskow’s designs for Paul Auster:
Andrzej Klimowski for Milan Kundera:
and Jeff Fisher’s illustrations for Jose Saramago:
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