on permanence: album art as aesthetic object
When I was in Pittsburgh last weekend I bought several beautiful books, one of them being a book length essay by Laura Lopez Paniagua called Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions. In it she says there is no way to separate an object from the way it appears, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. Music can sometimes be just auditory experiences. Albums cannot. Albums are objects — pieces that are inextricable from the visual art you experience it with. That doesn’t mean it’s static, but it does feel permanent.
I think this might be the reason I’m obsessed with listening to albums, never single tracks or playlists. Albums feel different, they mean more, and that’s partly because they have a visual identity — I know what they look like.