By Joshua Rotter
Few of the MP3 generation can recall a time when music-lovers excitedly listened to entire records. But putting needle to groove was only half of a process that included poring over the often arty jacket itself and the internal sleeve to uncover the album’s many intricacies: the song lyrics and the names of the band members, studio musicians, and producers. To many aficionados the packaging was as prized as its contents.
But once vinyl became mostly obsolete in the age of iMacs, so did these once-cherished album covers. Conversely vinyl’s rarity has turned its “frames” into an art form for diehard record fanatics – and nowhere is this more apparent than in the art of so-called sleeve face, where one conceals oneself with the face or body on an album cover in a seamless fashion so that the two merge harmoniously.
In today’s climate of non-contextual music downloading, some feel compelled to buck the trend, attempting to more intimately access the artistic process by riffing Guitar Hero, lip-syncing on YouTube, or even just aesthetically, by getting “into the artist’s head” via sleeve facing.
