The 1950s were a pivotal time for record art. The music industry was just beginning to establish rules for how the LP format could (and should) be merchandised, which left quite a bit of room for experimentation with cover graphics. Most were designed to appeal to Middle America, with a simple masthead across the top detailing the artist and title and, more often than not, a photograph of that artist to fill the space. But in some places — mainly Jazz releases, but also some Classical titles — a Modernist approach was able to seep into the lexicon.

A few record publishers were willing to give their designers the leeway to emote the music through sleeve graphics. In the era of hard-edge painting, Abstract Expressionism, and other Modernist art movements, non-representational abstraction provided an alternate way for designers of the period to communicate the feeling of the music, and use shape to describe sound.

The Shape of Sound is a survey of these types of works from my personal collection, gathered over the past couple decades. It is by no means a comprehensive study of abstract record sleeves, but simply provides a window of 100 examples through which we can view some of the solutions that 20 designers came up with to solve increasingly complex problems, resolving formal Modernist approaches with a need to connect with the consumer.

– Scott Lindberg

Listen to playlist here