Inner Sleeve: Mark Titchner

Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation (Blast First 1988)
Painting by Gerhard Richter

Sonic Youth came into my life like a series of rumours: a glimpse on the Sunday night arts documentary The South Bank Show; a free Sounds magazine 7" that partnered them with tracks from Pailhead, Prong and Thin White Rope. Best of all was a bizarre, almost unplayable standard tuning transcription in Guitar Player, my bible of the time. I got the idea that somewhere, something was going on.

Then, strangely and suddenly, the now defunct Our Price chain launched an ad campaign for the ‘Best Band in the World’, and all these records were available in Luton Arndale and Milton Keynes shopping centre alongside the regular chart fodder.

The Richard Kern film stills on Evol and the flaming pumpkin head on Bad Moon Rising were pretty cool, but Daydream Nation was the most beautiful of them all. A lone candle front and back, both epic and fragile, like the sounds within. Inside the gatefold (this record demanded to be a double album) there they were, on a balmy night in an anonymous loading bay. Thurston Moore sums it up; eyes hidden behind shades and finger pointing so directly at the camera that his whole hand becomes some fleshy, amorphous blob. To me this was a vision of both New York and some imagined, clandestine scene.

However, most important of all were these photos of the candles on the cover, only it turned out they weren’t photos, they were paintings by the German master, Gerhard Richter. They were works taken from his Kerze (Candle) series. Of course, the cover was actually a photographic reproduction of two Richter paintings from 1982 and 1983, and despite this being the first time I was made aware of Richter’s work, this to and fro between painting and photography was a pretty good entry into his field of activity. Looking at the sleeve of the vinyl, one can clearly see the reflection of brush marks and the texture of the canvas weave, increasing the sensation of proximity to a painting. I’m not sure this level of scrutiny can be transferred very well to a CD cover or Jpeg on an iPod screen, and one wonderful thing about looking at this sleeve now is that the fragility of painting becomes analogous to the fragility of the vinyl medium itself.

The first ever video work I made was a transposition of the Daydream Nation sleeve, shot live and looped so the candle flickered and spluttered but never burnt down. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m still using candles in my work as a means of illuminating illuminated texts. Music has been very good to me as a means of introduction to the visual arts. For instance, as Daydream Nation introduced me to Richter, Op Art appeared to me via the Vertigo label on Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality, and then again via Faust’s Tapes. This had the effect of beginning to see art as a component of everyday life as opposed to being something that exists only in rarefied institutions. It is an axis that Sonic Youth have continued to explore with later releases and covers by such luminaries as Mike Kelley (Dirty) and Richard Prince (Sonic Nurse), continuing a tendency that can be found throughout their output (I spotted the reference to Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion on the Sister lines notes long before I knew what it was). I only wish it had not taken me so long to interpret this gift, because I was very shortly going to make a decision, which I’m still recovering from, that if I wanted to be an artist I would have to give up any musical ambitions I had.

A few years later, Raymond Pettibon would produce the cover artwork for the next Sonic Youth album, Goo. On reflection, the fact that I came across it in the minuscule new releases section of Dunstable Woolworths was a sure sign that very soon the world was going to change for good.

Mark Titchner is an artist living and working in London.