Vinylart / Hildebrandt
There are a lot of reasons why I collect vinyl. Sometimes its cause I want to recapture what my parent's lost. Most of the time its for the music. In other instances its cause I'm trying to collect every single record by a particular artist or group. Sometimes its for a sample. Sometimes its for a mixtape I'm working on. And there have been times where its for other people.
Collecting records has been a steady hobby of mine for exactly fourteen years. I grew up a child of the 80s observing my father's collection, watching my parents dance, party, and hang out with their collection of wax in the background.
Over the years, life's work+study+time for everything else has subsided the collection routes I'd take on a typical day off. Especially as the collection continued to grow beyond what I was actually taking the time to listen to. It made for the occasional visits to a Goodwill, an antique spot, an estate sale, All That Music, etc. a lot less frequent.
Lately, I've been digging in the storage stacks that I've forgotten about reminiscing of digs in ABQ, Santa Fe, El Paso, the Bay Area, and Austin. The record above I didn't get for the sound... as a matter of fact after revisiting the record, I didn't like the sound at all. Looking at the cover, I do recall how it caught my attention when I discovered it. I thought of the old
He-Man Masters of the Universe cartoon I use to watch as a kid... couldn't get that visual out of my head, but it also struck a nerve with memories I had of other unusual record covers that dealt with planets and space... maybe some of my father's Earth, Wind and Fire records. I liked the tone, the feel of this record cover. It felt rich in color, in detail, vintage.
Fast forward present day and I stared at the record one morning, observing the details, listening to the album itself. I shared it with a co-worker who's into art. For the most part I was wondering about the artist responsible... how much time went into it and the significance of the name appearing on the album cover itself... "Hildebrandt". To me it said a lot for an artist to have their name on the cover with the group. Not knowing much about art... I had no idea who it was and it turns out that the artist was also the illustrator for old Star Wars promotion, of which the co-worker I shared this with is a big fan. It opened up other stories about the artists themselves and their work... "Brothers Hildebrandt" which in a quick search I stumbled across the video below.
It made me think all these years collecting and how much of it was determined by the cover art, itself... not only the music or the reasons mentioned above. It's what led me towards the waxpoetics book on Cover Art and a project I envisioned in Book Arts to create a vinyl-cover sized book of my own personal collection. Or maybe a definitive collection with story/reviews. Not just your standard review about the album, but of what the album itself means to my life.
For this blog I've been inspired to create a label for posts called Vinylart. This is to include standard covers with actual portraits, photographs, etc. To scan the covers I use a large printer scanner or sometimes I'll try to get the lighting where I need it and shoot a shot with a digital camera.
Here's the vid about the Brothers Hildebrandt.
