Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 14:58:50 EST From: RBN Ry Subject: AIGA: GUS GUS/v23 >From the American Institute of Graphic Arts Journal of Graphic Design, Vol. 15, No. 3 (the music issue): =========================================================================== ================== GUS GUS: Polydistortion (4AD) All album artwork, when it does its job, involves myth-building. Sorry but there it is. We expect rock bands to carry within them an immersive mythology, some lore that extends the music. Personalities to adore. Art pushed to the brink of ruin by biography. Antics or anti-antics. Few rock bands actually live or work that way anymore, but that hasn't undone the worlds we once built around the Rush 2112, or every obssesive Pedro Bell-scrawled Parliament/Funkadelic sleeve, or even _London Calling_. Not yet, anyway. 4AD Records designer Vaughan Oliver and his v23 studio redirect that expectation while it lasts, seducing us into reading meaning into a visual technique that comes off like a plastic band diorama. The Gus Gus _Polydistortion_ album employs a species of self-referential documentary photoessay with clean, off-the-cuff photos that seem to offer biographical data about the band--except it's a con. One sees the band, all nine of them, plus environmental photos from their native Reykjavik, Iceland--wheat-pasted show posters, the band members as actors in obviously staged but undisclosed dramas involving the police, a man who has nothing whatsoeverto do with the band photoaphed in his underwear,etc. The images all clearly relate to Gus Gus, but the type treatments and photographed logos give them the life-as-scale model feel of a museum set. (The "Polyesterday" single package similarly featured actors loading an accident victim into an ambulance). Much like Oliver's 1996 package for Lush's _Lovelife_ album, in which a man not in the band stands in a garden holding a disk that says "Lush," the photoessay raises infinitely more questions than it answers; it's a tremendously engaging series of images that invite attachment to the band, yet do not allow it. They create a perfectly effective cold Scandinavian Gus Gus mythology for this anti-mythological moment in rock history. Or, since the images also scream Oliver's signature type/image interface, is this actually Oliver pimping our instincts to build the cult of Oliver? -Dean Kuipers (managing editor of Raygun)