“Before the needle hits the groove and the song comes over the speakers, the record is a visual thrill.”
“It might be contradictory to say, but going to record shops was my first real experience with contemporary visual art. It would be a handful of years before I actually went to a proper art gallery. But at 13 years old, living in Eugene, Oregon, a rock and roll innocent and newly in love with all things punk and new wave, my budding passions would routinely bring me to one of the many record shops in town.
These were strange and intimidating places at the time. Staffed by followers of two extremely polarized aesthetic camps; the affable, semi stoned, patchouli scented Hippy, and the angry, techno-colored Punk. Yes, there was cross breeding but it was never openly discussed.
Upon entering a record shop I was always overwhelmed by the amount of visual information was surrounding me. All over the walls were hand-made fliers for the upcoming TSOL show at the W.O.W. hall. The gloomy posters of pale English bands wearing overcoats. The Fillmore posters with their chubby psychedelic fonts.
The formats for the records themselves were very uniform: 12” x 12”, 7” x 7”, 10” x 10”. For me this uniformity made the weirdness, aggression, beauty, or stupidity of a record cover approachable. The format is platonic but the images are DADA. Everything is the same size and everyone is playing by an agreed upon set of rules. At least on the surface.
I’d known about rock and roll as a sound, but I hadn’t considered it as an image. I’d never grasped how much work and care went into designing a record cover. Even the cover for Sex Bomb by Flipper. As a rain-soaked teen all of this was just riveting. It still is today.
I’ve always loved buying records. I go to the record stores here in DC like Som or Crooked Beat but unlike a serious collector, who has developed their tastes and aural acuity to know a good thing when they hear it, I often will buy a record that looks good.
This makes me shallow. And I’ve definitely bought some crap. But I’m in love with the way music makes the world look. Even before we listen to a record. We hold it in our hands and it’s a world inside a world. Can we judge the sound of a band by their album cover? One would like to think so.”
—Tom Bunnell, guitar
Sunwolf’s EP “Angel Eyes” is out October 8 via El Rey Records and was produced by Fugazi’s Jerry Busher. The band plays DC’s Velvet Lounge on 9/25 with Schooner and Harness Flux.
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Photo: JPZ Photography
