The Hills are Alive
The Hills are Alive The backstory
In the summer of 1981, I was travelling in Denmark with my girlfriend. Walking through Aarhus we passed an art gallery showing an exhibition of contemporary record covers. We went in.
I was 20 years old. My upbringing had not been a cultured one. I had visited only one exhibition before – a school trip to a surrealist exhibition in London, where I remember being annoyed by a telephone with a lobster as the handpiece. I wasn’t cultured, but I loved the music that surrounded me as I grew up - first from the 60’s and later the punk and post-punk of the 70’s and 80’s. It had an intravenous effect on me. I listened to music for hours, to the exclusion of all else – in order to exclude all else. The record sleeves that protected the music I loved became part of the joy of listening. I would draw and redraw them in my schoolbooks and reproduce them on my school backpack.
The gallery in Aarhus turned out to be an exhibition of graphic design, of the process of designing a record sleeve - mostly UK post-punk bands like the Squeeze and Elvis Costello. There were preparatory drawings, briefs, exchanges between the record company and the graphic artist etc. I was wonderstruck. I never knew such an occupation existed. Imagine, I thought, having a job like that! Imagine being paid to design record sleeves for the music you love! If only I could do that job. Well, I never did. My life went in a different direction, and I became a psychologist.
My love of music has grown as I have grown older. Later in life, although I became an artist, making sculptures and installations, my inability to make music remained an implacable source of frustration. A couple of years ago I came up with a strategy. What if I designed a record cover for a piece of music that does not yet exist, gave it a title, and asked a musician to compose a track based only on the image and the title? Instead of the record sleeve supporting the record, the image gives voice to the record. Vision becomes sound through synesthesia.
Felix Appleby, musician, performer, composer and DJ agreed to take on the sound. As for the vision, I am not a graphic designer. I work in 3D and so the process of making the sleeves was primarily material and sculptural rather than graphic and digital. The Hills are Alive is the outcome of this collaboration – a collaboration not only between two people - two artists, but also between those non-human materials and things that gathered together to conceptualize each sleeve. – real things with their own intentions and their own lives. Each record sleeve developed a mind and a sound of its own, and the exhibition displays not only the six record sleeves and their musical sonification, but the process by which each brought itself alive.
