Cover Art of the Week #12: Klang, The Rakes

How do you translate sound into image? There’s no easy or simple answer, and certainly each person has a different opinion, but in Germany it seems like someone came up with a good looking solution for this a long, long time ago…

Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack and Kurt Schwerdtfeger were two German artists who in 1922, while at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, developed various devices that could generate moving projections of colored light, built to represent sound or to accompany music in a visual medium. As it often happens, accidents lead to unexpected things:



(text taken from Minimal art: a critical anthology by Gregory Battcock)

This is an image created with such an apparatus:



How does all of this lead us to Klang, the third and final studio album by the English indie rock band The Rakes? Since the record was recorded in Berlin, the Work Associates studio thought that taking inspiration from something invented in the same country would have been a good idea. They were totally right. In its simplicity, the image manages to transmit a sense of movement and precision, and looks retro and very modern at the same time.

Even the back cover – which nobody usually pays much attention to – is very nice:

As you might have noticed, we love the color green here at AUPEO!

Now that you’ve seen the cover, are you curious to hear the music? A selection of tracks from this and other albums by The Rakes can be found in our Indie UK AUPEO! Station (see Rock section).