ECM cover art

The first ECM records were recorded in 1969 and released in 1970. ECM had focused on a predominantly European version of jazz, often incorporating folk elements, and attracted players including Jan Garbarek, Keith Jarrett and Terje Rypdal who have made their lifelong home with the label. Recording as well as musical quality was of the highest standard, reflected also in a cover design ethos which featured beautiful photography and creative typography.

The main ECM designer for the first 25 years was Barbara Wojirsch whose playful layouts and combination of fonts and handwritten titles were highly distinctive. Dieter Rehm joined her in the 1980s with a similarly varied approach.

People who regularly return to the same location tend to become sensitive to slight changes in the view, and quickly incorporate them into the philosophy into the familiar picture, so that everything remains intact.  Similarly, those to whom ECM music has become a cultural staple accept variations in the familiar ECM ‘image’with the same nonchalance as changes in the music itself, whose sound values remain unmistakable, however wide-ranging the styles.

This ingrained habit, like a paraphrase of conventional pattems of consumption, has not led to indifference among the many who have grown up with ECM over the years. On the contrary, it has produced a kind of connoisseurship in which visual recognition exists on a par with its counterpart. ECM’s music has taught many people how to listen – and some how to look! When they play the recordings, the modest rectangle in their hands enjoys an attention and affection for a time span few other visual objects can hope to enjoy. That is why rec0rd covers in general, and ECM’s in particular, are worth talking about [… ]

[To begin with, there were]  the many iconic covers that Barbara Wojirsch created with Manfred Eicher and Dieter Rehm during the long years of their association. Her retirement from ECM in 1999 did not mark a sharp break in c0ntinuity. The vocabulary of ECM’s imagery had been invented, and it was rich enough to be adopted by new artists with new points of emphasis, now focused through Eicher’s work with graphic artist Sascha Kleis. Wojirsch’s artistic development took her from expressive typography and photography in the spirit of the 1970s and 1980s to highly personal paintings and pictures. Her manner of preparing the ground – her scrapes, scratches and scribbles – has found a surprising parallel in the paintings of Mayo Bucher, who entered Eicher’s field of vision in the mid-1990s and whose work has appeared on a number of covers based on his paintings since 1997. Also characteristic of new directions for the label is the collaboration with Jan Jedlicka, whose paintings, sketches and photos have been displayed on many sleeves.

The most obvious change over the last ten years has, however, been ECM’s attitude towards photography and its use in cover pictures. Until well into the 1990s, the photographic motifs on ECM’s covers were often narrative and representational, at times even going so far as to illustrate the title of the album, albeit obliquely. Today the photographs resist easy interpretation and classification. Instead, they are photographic objets d’art that reveal their meanings only upon closer inspection, luring the viewer into an enigmatic labyrinth of interpretations. Other photographs recall stills from motion pictures – ‘unfinished’ images that relate to what has just preceded them or is about to follow, and to the continuum of cinema, the medium perhaps closest to music itself. [Manfred] Eicher used this pictorial approach in his choice of covers from a very early date, but only intermittently. His affinity to photography and the cinema has led him to cultivate a closely related field where an extended family of artists, photographers and graphic designers now join forces with the ECM producer to contribute to the label’s imagery, creating a visual pendant to the music in its collection of covers.

Many things have changed. Today ECM’s photographs are mainly black-and-white, with colour used sparingly or as a jarring accent, while uniformly austere typography also contributes to a visual identity. Even so, ECM’s covers are ‘beautifuI’, yet complex enough to disclose their full meaning only to those who seek to listen visually: ‘Think of your ears as eyes’.
– Lars Muller, from Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM

Barbara Wojirsch  and Dieter Rehm (design)

A larger collection of  Barbara Wojirsch and Dieter Rehm covers can be viewed here.

Jim Bengston (photography)

Roberto Masotti (photography)

Caroline Forbes (photography)

The shapes in the photograph still please me and I am always reminded that if you stay out on the hillside long enough something will change and not always for the worse.
– Caroline Forbes

Christoph Egger (photography)

Jan Jedlicka (artwork/photography)

Gerald Minkoff  (photography)

Confucius said that an image is worth more than 10,000 words. I am allowed only 250. Perhaps I should be relieved. This photograph, taken in January 1990 in Moscow, seems to me in perfect tune with the title of Heiner Goebbels’s disc Surrogate Cities, whose musical armature is interwoven with the words of Heiner Miiller, Hugo Hamilton and Paul Auster. The picture is of a Soviet swimming pool, a heated one, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, a pool that no longer exists. On the site, before the Revolution, there stood a basilica, which Stalin demolished with the intention of  substituting a colossal hollow statue of Lenin (on the scale of NewYork’s Statue of Liberty), whose outstretched hand was going to contain a library. But the ground was unsuitable, and the foundations were filled with water and turned  into a swimming pool. One evening when I was walking there, a swimmer emerged from the dark depths (he can be seen in the lower left of the shot) and seeing my camera asked: ‘Are you from the New York Herald Tribune?’  I answered ‘N0’ and he vanished. When communism collapsed the swimming pool vanished too, because the Orthodox clergy wanted to reconstruct the basilica on the site.You can still get sprinkled with water there, but now it’s holy water. As Paul Auster says in In the Country of Last Things: ‘When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted.’ That is why I always know that I am seeing everything – and hearing it – for the first time; but also for the last time.
– Gerald Minkoff

Muriel Olesen (photography)

The light touch of foot-soles as a woman dances at the centre of the ritual maze, a fragile flower with petals of chalk, a propitiatory choreography traced each morning on the ground.  As if in echo, the faint coughing of a white tiger from the zoo nearby. Rustlings, variations, in persistent notes that extend through the air and disappear into the night. Silences and erasures. A few magical movements will make both the pattern and the music reappear on the doorstep at dawn to greet the ephemeral beauty of the new day. Black the dress, black as as a monsoon cloud suspended over those white furrows, alreadyworked, henceforth fertile: Monodia . . .
– Muriel Olesen

Links

• Barbara Wojirsch and Dieter Rehm bring a mysterious beauty to the record label graphics of ECM by Adrian Shaughnessy (Eye Magazine)
• ECM album covers [update, Feb 2013]: ECM have added to their recently-launched Facebook page collections of all the album covers
• CDs Know That Ears Have Eyes: New York Times