July 2008
“MUSIC IMPLIED
CD cover designs for music you’d love to hear
Music Implied” is the title of this unusual show of original cover designs for imaginary CD’s, including band names and album titles, created by writer Ellery Littleton and graphic artist Mark Blaney.
“The images on the covers are fully realized designs for CD’s from entirely fictional bands and musicians,” Littleton says. “The designs represent music we’d love to hear, from the finest musicians we can imagine. A fantasy trip, to be sure.”
“Although we designed the images for ourselves,” Mark Blaney comments, “our intention is to create images and words which suggest what the music might be like, or who the musicians could be. But we leave enough space in the designs for people to imagine for themselves what kind of music they ‘hear,’ which is the really fun part.”
All the cover images utilize photographs taken by either Blaney or Littleton. They tend toward the abstract, the suggestive, and the implied (hence the title). They frequently include reflections and other vivid images of light, water, landscape and people in the elegant designs, which are often subtle and mysterious
“We’ve tried to cover many basic musical genres with the designs, and suggest various types of music,” Littleton says, “such as jazz, rock, pop, new age, classical, movie sound tracks, etc. In some cases we created an entire detailed discography for a particular CD, including musicians and instruments, track titles, recording studios, even fictional magazine reviews – the whole package, pretty much as you would find in a typical commercial CD.
“But we’ve left all that out of this show, and stuck strictly to the front cover designs,” says Blaney. “We want people to be free to create their own musical fantasies, with the cover designs as a starting point.”
Mark Blaney, Ellery Littleton and the MUSIC IMPLIED cd design show, will be profiled in an article in Victoria’s BOULEVARD MAGAZINE in the May, 2008, issue.
