Jan Müller explains why the streaming age album artwork deprived of its gloss.
The picture that shows me in my column of the previous edition as a young punk has made one of the most charismatic and funniest friends of my parents. I was always happy when Susesch Bayat, mostly very spontaneously, came from Berlin. As a rule, he also had appointments with the German gramophone or Teldec, because as a photographer he worked mostly in the classical area. He worked with Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, Anne-Sophie Mother, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ivo Pogorelich, Alfred Brendel and many more. He photographed over 1000 record cover.
Recommendations of the editorial team
At the end of the 1980s, he grabbed his Leica in my parents’ living room. I think he liked my T-shirt with the rat motif. A few years later, in 1995, I was late for a celebration of my parents. The first one who already came towards me in the hallway was Susesch. In his hand he held the Tocotronic album Digital is better. “Jan, such a shabby cover! Why didn’t you ask me? I would have taken you a nice photo.” It was difficult for me to explain to him that the shabby was just as wanted.
Maybe we had consulted the yellow pages
When we started as a band, we had thought about what our records should look like before the first rehearsal. We then designed our first EP exactly according to our ideas. At the front and back we placed an identical picture. It was a staged band photo in the rehearsal room. The only difference between the front and back was a logo of our “record company” Rock-Otronic Records and a few nonsensical credits on the back. We commissioned a small print shop in Hamburg-Pinneberg to print the cover. For whatever reason. Maybe we had consulted the yellow pages.
It was somehow logical that we then switched to a record company that had also had its origins in Pinneberg. To our great disappointment, that record company called L’Age d’Or gave us that it would not publish our debut album on vinyl, but only as a CD. A CD cover is only a little larger than a polaroid image. That gave us an idea: I borrowed the old Polaroid SX-70-land camera for my parents. In the studio we asked Carol von Rautenkranz (label boss and producer in personnel union) to take a snap in the old aircraft armchairs in the studio’s old aircraft. The SX 70 spat out the picture, the cover was ready.
He laughed and put the plate aside
Ironically, L’Age d’Or then decided at the last moment, but a vinyl edition of digital can be published better. Back to my encounter with Susesch: It seemed too expensive for me to explain to my parents’ friend at their celebration what theoretical considerations had prompted us to do this. So I just said: “It has to look like this.” He laughed and put the plate aside.
When I look at Susesch Bayat’s work today, I am sure that his approach was not so different from ours. The cover of the violin concert by Tchaikovsky for the German gramophone, for example, shows Gidon Kremer and Lorin Maazel in front of empty rows. The two look at each other. There is an egg man and a grading between them. Maazel holds his baton in his hand, Kremer instrument and bow.
More than just music: Why the album cover identity creates
What the Tschaikovsky cover and the Tocotronic record cover unites is not just the brown primer, but the staged casualty. It is astonishing how little attention has been given to artwork in the classical area in contrast to cover artwork in pop and jazz. Rightly, because even in the area of classical music, the printed cover was introduced in 1940 that an album is more than the music released on it.
The market launch of the CD in 1982 also put a lot into perspective here. After all, the classic industry tried to compensate for the aesthetic lower value of the CD by increased focus on the Liner Notes in the booklets. The streaming age has put an end to all of this. The photos of Susesch Bayat and his colleague: inside are only tiny tiles on the end devices. They were robbed of their depth and gloss. The Liner Notes have disappeared completely, as are the credits. I am sure that this loss is just as significant as those that are created by manipulating algorithms and the poor remuneration of the artists: inside on the platforms.
This column first appeared in the music express edition 10/2025.