Ugo
Group: Members
Posts: 5495
Joined: April 2000 |
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Posted: July 18 2001, 18:23 |
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Hi everyone. The inspiration for what follows originally came from seeing the picture at the very end of Brian Farrell's wonderful Amarok analysis (you can find it here, and the pic is at the bottom of this page) . That picture was based on a drawing by Maurits Cornelius Escher, or simply M.C. Escher. For those of you who don't know him, he was a Dutch drawing artist, who became famous in the '50s-60s by turning mathematical abstractions into recongnizable shapes (animals and things) and by depicting what he called "impossible worlds", i.e. fantastic buildings based on geometrical forms which cannot exist because they are made up of absurdly twisted links between their parts.
Thinking over Brian's picture a rather strange idea came to my mind: if Escher had been BORN in the 60's and he had lived well into the 70's and the '80s, and if Mike got in touch with him, he would surely have used many of Escher's drawings as cover art images for his albums!!! 
So, what follows is a list of Escher pictures, with by web links, that I think could have been used for the covers of Mike's albums. I consciously omitted the TB trilogy and TMB because, to me, the TB shape is too perfect and too beautiful for Escher, with all his talent, to have created anything better... Some of these associations are derived from album titles, others from the musical content of the albums.
Here I go.
Hergest Ridge Many people think of this album as peaceful and "pastoral", yet there are some moments, in it, that cannot be defined "peaceful" at all... and I am not only talking about the Thunderstorm. To me HR has a kind of double soul in it, so a picture like "Double planetoid", combining a cosy village with a rugged and wild mountain landscape inhabited by reptiles, can illustrate the double aspect of HR.
Ommadawn Although it is known that this means "fool" in Irish, it can be still viewed as a partly nonsense word, especially in its English spelling. But Ommadawn as a music work is so thightly structured that it is built with an almost mathematical precision. "Sky and water" is a nonsense Escher picture built according to a very precise and exact plan, in which fish and birds are perfectly joined.
Boxed The original cover of this IS based on an Escher picture... so why not use the original one? "Another world I" looks very like the Boxed cover, but Escher, after a few years, 'improved' it into the very beautiful "Another world II".
Incantations The title suggests something magic... The upper side of the building in "Belvedere" is so absurdly twisted that even the most daring architects would never be able to re-build it... in fact this extraordinary building is held together by the sheer force of magic. 
Platinum Platinum suggests the idea of reflection, but some sections of the music (i.e. Woodhenge) have a kind of eerie atmosphere in them. "Concave and convex" is an image where almost everything is a reflection of something else, yet Escher's "impossible" inversions between the three little houses create a very eerie feeling.
Five Miles Out "Day and night", another of Escher's seemingly nonsense tessellations, is a work that IMHO suggests very strongly the idea of flying, although it does not suggest planes (but then only two songs in FMO are about planes, aren't they?)
Crises When does a crisis happen? When something, in a situation, does not work properly, or goes wrong, according to the rules and to the environment of that particular situation. In "Relativity" there seems to be a total crisis, because everything is wrong according to the conventional rules of our world. But there are three simultaneous worlds in this picture, and three groups of people, unaware of each other, live in these worlds. When any one of these persons go up or down the stairs in his world, everything is normal to him, but in our [i.e. the observers'] world, of course, it is all so absurd that it seems on the verge of falling apart every moment.
Islands The US cover of this is a good example of an Escher-like image, but there is a better one. The lyrics to the song "Islands" say: "We are islands, but never too far"... just like the two faces (a man and a woman) in "Bond of Union".
Earth Moving A "watery" kind of cover is required for this...not because of the original cover, but simply because the title suggests a liquid surface. Something like "Three worlds" is very fitting.
Amarok 'Nuff said at the beginning of this message. Here is the source of Brian's image,"Ascending and descending".
Heaven's Open Take a look at "Liberation" ... no other words are needed.
OK, that's all. Please tell me what do you think of all this.
PS: Some albums are missing from the list, for three reasons:
1) (Exposed, QE2 and The Complete) I have in my mind some Escher pictures that could be fitting for these, but I couldn't find them anywhere on the WWW. If anyone's interested, I'll scan them from a book I have.
2) (Discovery, Voyager and Guitars) I couldn't find anything suitable for these. Any ideas?
3) The Killing Fields. This is a movie soundtrack, so movie images are enough fitting as cover artwork.
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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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