A septet of 7-inch single sleeves from Eastern Bloc Songs, a small but well-selected repository of sleeve art from the record labels of the Eastern Bloc. I’d looked at the album art before but had missed the singles, some of which feature more impressive designs than their 12-inch counterparts. Of special interest are designs that show how the psychedelic styles of the decadent West were transmuted for a Communist audience. The Nautilus sleeve above dates from 1969, and uses the lettering adapted by Wes Wilson from a much earlier design by Alfred Roller. Elsewhere the generic sleeves from venerable Czech label Supraphon stand out for their modish graphics. (Via Record Envelope and Things Magazine.)
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive
For a section no, I thought this was going to be a book, rather than blog . . I picked up a few fantastic Supraphon covers when in Prague, and some similar Hungarian generic sleeves, although I passed a lot onto Kevin Pearce who had a genuine interest in the contents rather than covers – for myself, it’s more about finding those elusive dancefloor tracks.
The one thing my investigation of Eastern Bloc music taught me is that the Western narrative is definitely exaggerated – music was certainly censored, but it wasn’t the fun free State music often pictured, and the best – something like Electra Combo’s Uber Feur or Pantha Reis’s ‘Finis’ are as good as anything in the Western funky rock/jazz/prog crossover.