You could find a Tangerine Dream record in a shop in 1976 without knowing the name. Everything else in the rack had a face on it, or a band standing in a field. These had nothing: a dark square, a small shape, no people, and a word you could not place. They looked like the music sounded. That was not an accident, and it was mostly the work of one woman.
Monique Froese, Edgar's wife, took the photographs or made the artwork for several of the sleeves from Phaedra to Force Majeure: the photographs on Rubycon, Ricochet and Encore, the painting and sleeve design on Force Majeure, while Phaedra's painting and sleeve are Edgar's. Between them they gave the band a visual language: dark ground, one object, no typography to speak of. Outside designers came in at points too, Cooke-Key Associates on Stratosfear. The six below are the core of it.
Covers are shown at low resolution for identification and commentary.
What the sleeves do
Three things, and they are the same three things the music does. They refuse a face: there is no singer, so there is no portrait, and the absence tells you what kind of record this is before you hear it. They give you one object and a lot of dark, which is the structure of a Tangerine Dream piece, one sequence and a lot of space. And they use a word rather than a phrase, Phaedra, Rubycon, Ricochet, so that the title is a place you might go and not a thing you are told.
Who else
Schulze's Brain Records sleeves are the other great run of the decade, and they are a different idea: bright, painted, almost science-fiction, by the German illustrator Urs Amann on Timewind, Moondawn and Mirage. Where the Froeses withheld, Amann gave you a whole planet. Both approaches say "this is not a rock record." Only one of them says "this is not a record about people," and that is the one that stuck. The Brain sleeves get their own piece next month.
If you collect
- The UK Virgin firsts have the textured "Virgin twins" inner sleeve and a matte laminate that later pressings lost. Feel the sleeve before you look at the matrix.
- Phaedra first pressings are darker than the reissues; the reissue painting was re-scanned and brightened. If the small form glows, it is later.
- Framing: these were made to be seen at twelve inches in a dark room. They lose everything on a phone. Buy the LP, put it on the wall, and take it down when you play it.
Where to get it
Where to find the records in this piece. New CDs and LPs are on Amazon; older pressings and used copies are on Discogs.