What the Sleeve Was Holding
On ECM, Barbara Wojirsch, and the slow realisation that a record cover is the first thing you hear
By Rafi Mercer
The two records I took from my father's collection were the White Album and Songs in the Key of Life. I took them for the music. What I remember most, though, is handling them.
The White Album was barely there. A white sleeve with the name pressed into it, almost nothing printed. Inside were the four portraits, and I went over those photographs again and again: four faces, one each, looking back at a boy who didn't yet know what he was looking at. Stevie's record was the opposite. It was heavy, with a booklet and an extra seven-inch tucked in, as if one record couldn't hold everything he had to say.
I didn't think about any of that as design. I thought of it as the record.
For most of my life since, I've treated the sleeve as packaging. It was the thing that kept the vinyl clean and got it from the shop to the shelf, the part you flicked past in the racks to reach what mattered. I bought jazz for Virgin in London. Sleeves came through my hands by the box. I read the spines and the catalogue numbers and the credits, and I took the pictures for granted.
This morning I went looking for who designed the cover of a Paul Bley record. It was a small question. It turned out to be a door.
The record was Open, To Love, solo piano recorded in Oslo in September 1972 for ECM, the Munich label Manfred Eicher had started three years before. The credit on the sleeve reads B & B Wojirsch. I must have read that line a hundred times across a hundred ECM records without wondering who they were.
They were Barbara and Burkhart Wojirsch. They met as students in Stuttgart. Eicher had met Burkhart in Lindau, on the shore of Lake Constance, and from 1970 the couple designed most of what ECM put out. Eicher is a producer who loves the cinema of Bergman, Godard and Angelopoulos, and he didn't want sleeves that sold records. He wanted sleeves that belonged to them. He had a phrase for what he was after: the inner landscape. That meant sea, distance and weather, usually with no people in it. Pictures you could step into.
The early B&B covers carry large type and heavy texture, two people working things out together. Then, in the middle of the seventies, Burkhart died.
Barbara kept going. The covers she made in the years after his death are lighter. There's more space and less type, and the image is allowed to carry the sleeve on its own. One writer reads grief in that change, and I can't unsee it. A designer who has lost the person she made everything with starts taking things away. She said later that she wanted to remove as much as possible, until only what was essential remained.
That is also a description of Paul Bley's piano.
In 1978 a photographer called Dieter Rehm arrived and sat down beside her. Rehm did strange things to film. He left the shutter open until light ran through the frame like water. He developed slide film as if it were negative, so the colours, in his words, gallop away. For one series he cooked his slides in water until the emulsion began to come apart. He shot roads, again and again, often from a moving car. Highways at the edge of being visible.
None of this is decoration. Put Pat Metheny's New Chautauqua on and look at Rehm's road as it plays, and the music has somewhere to go. It isn't illustrating the record. It's telling you where you are.
That's the part I'd missed.
I'd always thought of a sleeve as the outside of a record. ECM treats it as the first track. It's the first thing that happens to you, before the needle drops, and it decides the pace you'll listen at. A loud cover tells you to turn it up. A cover of grey water and a sliver of horizon tells you to sit down.
Eicher once said that holding an LP cover was like holding a book. I understand that now in a way I didn't at nine or ten, when I was holding exactly that. A book you read before you hear.
I've organised my days around a simple order for a long time. Listen first. Then read. Then look, then watch. It's how I start every morning, and it's the idea underneath most of what Tracks & Tales is for. Sound before image. Attention before distraction.
So it's an odd thing to admit that the sleeve breaks the order. Every time. You see the cover before you hear a note. You can't help it.
The more time I spend with ECM sleeves, the more I think the good ones don't break the order at all. They set it up. They're looking in the service of listening, an image made to slow your eye so your ear arrives ready. Barbara Wojirsch spent twenty-five years taking things off covers so the music would have room to enter. Rehm blurred the world so you'd stop trying to read it and start feeling it instead.
That's a kind of design I don't see much any more. Most covers now are made first for a thumbnail, something to stop a thumb on a screen. They're built to be seen at the size of a postage stamp, in the half-second before the next one. The ECM sleeve was built for the twelve inches in your hands. That's a different kind of attention, and an older one.
Not everyone thinks the label kept it up. In 2010 the designer and writer Adrian Shaughnessy wrote that after Wojirsch retired in the mid-nineties, the covers drifted towards the safe, towards monochrome winter after monochrome winter. He has a point. The later sleeves are beautiful and they rarely surprise you. The early ones take risks. You can feel two people, and then one, working something out in public.
The covers themselves have become collectable. Sleeves of Desire, the first book of ECM artwork, published in 1996, is long out of print, and copies change hands for the price of a good pressing. The second, Windfall Light, has gone the same way. People want to hold these images without the records in them. That tells you the images were never just holding the records.
There's a version of me, standing behind a counter in London with a box of new stock, who would have found all this a bit precious. A sleeve is a sleeve. Get it on the shelf.
I don't think he was wrong, exactly. He was just in a hurry.
What's changed is the pace. Tracks & Tales started from the idea that if you give a record your full attention, it gives you more back than you expected. I'd applied that to everything except the first thing I touch. The sleeve was the one part of the ritual I hadn't slowed down for.
So this week I'm going to try something. Before the needle drops, I'll hold the sleeve for as long as the first track would take. I won't read the notes or check the credits. I'll just look, the way Eicher meant, at the inner landscape, until the room settles.
I suspect I already knew how to do this. I did it at the age of nine, with four portraits from the White Album spread across the floor, looking at four faces until the music started.
The sleeve was holding more than the record. It always had been.
Who designed the classic ECM album covers?
Most of ECM's early covers were designed by Barbara and Burkhart Wojirsch, credited as B&B Wojirsch, from 1970. After Burkhart died in the mid-1970s, Barbara continued as the label's main designer until she retired in the mid-1990s. The photographer and designer Dieter Rehm joined in 1978, and Sascha Kleis and Mayo Bucher shaped the label's later look, always working closely with founder Manfred Eicher.
Are there books collecting ECM cover art?
Yes. Sleeves of Desire: A Cover Story (Lars Müller, 1996) covers the label's first 500 releases, and Windfall Light: The Visual Language of ECM (Lars Müller, 2010) picks up from there. Both are out of print and turn up second-hand, Sleeves of Desire usually at a serious price.
What is The Listening Club?
The Listening Club is the Tracks & Tales monthly listening session. It's held online on the last Sunday of every month and is open to members anywhere in the world. We play one album on vinyl, in full and in order, the way it was meant to be heard.
If you'd like more on the quieter corners of listening culture, subscribe and I'll write to you each week.
Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.
