Coverscaping: Discovering Album Aesthetics

Coverscaping focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. Working from the assumption that record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right, the essays engage in various ways with what one might call the pictorial component of recorded music. The contributors run the whole gamut from close readings of individual covers to more theoretical or philosophical explorations of the aesthetic nature and artistic value of album covers. Coverscaping aims to carve out an analytical space from which to reappraise the ever mutable relation between the visual and the auditory, thus contributing to a keener appreciation of the challenges which define the art and craft of the genre.