With the arrival of Brat, it feels like the Y2K revival is finally cresting. Beyoncé has moved on from channeling Corona to country. Pink Pantheress has moved on from singing over 1997 drum n’ bass classics. It’s juiced, I think. Now we can see what it is clearly—the sounds, materials, cuts, and design from a time of relentless newness replayed without any real hunger for newness itself.
Those who were there remember that compulsive uncovering of the new. Take the genres of the time—jungle, ragga, drum n’ bass, goa trance, hard house, French house, tech step, hard step, and on and on. The distinctions don’t seem important now, but at the time this was important stuff. Once a sound was conquered, the rules and norms were drawn up, and with boundaries in place, they were abandoned for new sounds.
Amongst all that discovery, no one took sound farther afield than a group of electronic musicians in Cologne in the mid-1990s, and one designer was responsible for creating their record art. From their perch on the shelves of the new and still slim electronic music section of the record store, Frieda Luczak’s designs pulled us in and introduced us to the new and indescribable.
Her covers from that time capture what brought people to that specific type of left-field music. Not a love of technology, but a new form of beauty that only technology could allow—an alien kind of beauty.
“Frieda is a curious mind,” says Jan St. Werner of the electronic duo Mouse on Mars, “as modest and cautious as she’s into change and new ways to see and do things.” She doesn’t have much of an ego, he adds, “We surely forgot her name a few times on projects, sleeves, etc. and she had never been upset about it.” Luczak who describes herself as “much fantasy, much anxiety,” was born in an evolving rural Düsseldorf that was home to a strange mix of professional commuters and villagers. A next-door neighbor would shoot into a cherry tree to keep the birds from eating the cherries. There, she was first exposed to design through the Letraset letters her father, “an architect with talents in designing futuristic living spaces, but with two left hands,” used for his building plans.
After a rigorous design program at university, she took a break and moved to Cologne, where she would fall in with a community centered around A-Musik, an independent record store and label for experimental music. In the avant-garde, she says, “Money isn’t the key, but changing views of what beauty is.” Amongst their activities—exhibitions, publications, filmmaking, and concerts—Luczak soon found herself as their cover artist. After being introduced by another designer, Mouse on Mars instantly knew they wanted to work with her. She became the designer for Mouse on Mars, St. Werner’s solo work, his label Sonig, and other associated acts, making covers, posters, stickers, ads, and merch.
Her covers from that time capture what brought people to that specific type of left-field music. Not a love of technology, but a new form of beauty that only technology could allow—an alien kind of beauty. Inspired by the destructive punk art and home computer craft, and after what she calls, “absolutely unleashed discussions about why one detail is more inventive than another,” she designed some of the most beautiful and imaginative record covers of the ‘90s. “We wanted to have no reference to anything we had previously done,” she said. St. Werner recalls “playing her our music, telling her the ideas we had around the songs, how they had come about technically, the threads and revelations we had while recording them.” These discussions could have gone on for years and only stopped because of deadlines.
“We never thought of sleeve art as something that would sell the music,” St. Werner says, “but rather [it would] tell its own story in dialogue with the music.” Tom Steinle, who hired her to do covers for several Tomlab records for artists like The Books, also says Luczak’s work was “a second artistic layer,” but adds that she “had a talent for developing a brand for the musician.”
I first encountered Luczak’s work in a small record store in a small Vermont town. It called to me plain and simple, probably because it looked absolutely nothing like trees. Life in Vermont, and all printed matter associated with it, looks like trees. Logcabin.ttf, I’m looking at you. Luczak’s work was pure alien. How did this weird music and art make it from Cologne to New England? Like all great artistic revolutions this period had a lot to do with the supply chain. Specifically, CDs, those beautiful iridescent disks where music was data. The profit margins were much greater, and CDs could be produced much quicker, so the major labels installed CDs as the ruling format of the era. With the addition of new digital recording and mastering technologies, suddenly the overhead for an independent record label became much lower. If you had a unique vision, you could have one tool. Maybe more than punk, this was independence. CDs, that’s how new ideas were distributed and conversations could play out between restless artists across the world.
Cover of Aero Deko EP (1998) by Oval, released by Tokuma Japan Communications in Japan.
Luczak created the packaging for influential albums by Markus Popp, recording under the moniker Oval, whose early records were constructed out of sounds from scratched CDs. Popp would talk about “music as software” and “file management.” That sounds pointy-headed, but the records are carefully composed, abstractly beautiful, and quite listenable despite coming with a hefty thesis. But that listenability was obvious from Luczak’s album art. Using a copy of Cinema4D, which she didn’t quite know how to use (and which looked very different than today’s C4D), she built lush, organic landscapes out of pixelated 3D forms and somehow seemed to reference both Cy Twombly and Microsoft Excel graphs. The writer Mark Richardson, who wrote a feature on Oval’s second album for Pitchfork 20 years after its release, describes it as, “the tension between digital precision and the uncertainty of nature… Luczak’s imagery captured this dichotomy beautifully.”
Frieda’s work is featured throughout a TV special about Oval on German music channel, Viva Zwei.
Tim Saputo, a designer and former Art Director of electronic music magazine XLR8R, says that her records, “tap into an impossible beauty, objects and color bloom and blur. They suggest a freeze frame of some kind of dance, there is so much movement and beauty, and I think it lends those Oval records a certain softness and expansiveness that I don’t know if it would be present if it wasn’t presented with such grace.”
Promotional poster for Ovalcommers (2001) by Oval, released by Tokuma Japan Communications in Japan.
Promotional poster for Ovalcommers (2001) by Oval, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA.
There seems to be so much depth to these covers because they were mere snapshots of an expansive world developed through a years-long collaboration between Luczak and Oval. Popp explains that he would imagine a scene—a virtual location—and then Luczak would attempt to realize it. They would explore and document this environment by capturing stills using the software’s virtual camera. “We developed these fantastical 3D worlds, following the logic of an imaginary… game engine.” He points out that this was “decades before 3D game engines like Unity were on the horizon” and adds that he doubts Luczak has ever played a modern immersive video game.
Her designs and design language would also extend to the user interface of Oval’s Ovalprocess software, an interactive musical tool that allowed users to create their own version of Oval’s music. This software was made available in several art installations that featured a large sculptural kiosk—a small part of the world they built made tangible through 3D printing.
Left: Ovalprocess software’s user interface, 2002; Right: The Ovalprocess software’s help screen, 2002
An installation of Ovalprocess by Markus Popp.
Her work for Mouse on Mars is some of her most noteworthy. Like the band itself (which can go from a sound that I can only describe as a “tiny squish” to a full marching band in a matter of seconds), her work dips in and out of abstraction and joyful associations. Her cover for the US release of Niun Niggung features a crude, amoeba-like 3D hairbrush combing what is presumably hair. As a bonus, the liner notes were a fold-out poster of the hairbrush in an oddly intimate position with another hairbrush. St. Werner suspects but does not know for sure, that the cover features an image of Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor at the time. Unlike the maximalism of this 3D work, her designs on their Idiology and Agit Itter It It albums were flat black-and-white dadaism via MacPaint and seemed to predict the anti-design of studios like Hort.
Cover of Niun Niggung (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Sonig in Europe.
Left: Cover of Niun Niggung (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA; Right: Poster insert of Niun Niggung (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA.
Left: Cover of Agit Itter It It (2001) by Mouse On Mars, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA; Top right: Cover of Diskdusk (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Sonig in Europe; Bottom right: Record label of Diskdusk (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Sonig in Europe.
Today, Luczak has no social media (“too shy,” she says) and primarily focuses on corporate design work. One of her most important clients is a funeral home. She tells me, “The key is empathy and modernity,” when working with a funeral home. While the music industry has changed, and there’s less design floating in its orbit, she’s still designing records. The back cover of Kid Millions and Jan St. Werner’s Imperium Droop is a pattern that is hard to place. It could be Mesoamerican-inspired? Or maybe thermal imaging of a refrigerator evaporator coil? From this pattern, two glyphs are placed on the front cover, perplexing, totemic, and mischievous as ever.
Left: Front cover of Imperium Droop (2021) by Kid Millions & Jan St. Werner, released by Thrill Jockey; Right: Back cover of Imperium Droop (2021) by Kid Millions & Jan St. Werner, released by Thrill Jockey.
I no longer have a CD collection, but I do have one CD, Oval’s Szenariodisk—a digipak, made of print cardboard that, unlike a plastic jewel case with a locking mechanism, swings open naturally like a book. For this article, I had to rebuild this design from Luczak’s ancient QuarkXpress file and discovered a beautiful hidden forest. Not a metaphorical forest of meaning, but an actual photo of a forest hidden in the design, mapped onto 3D cubes. Twenty-five years later, I fell in love all over again.
Front cover of Szenariodisk (1999) by Oval, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA
Gatefold artwork for Szenariodisk (1999) by Oval, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA
Back cover of Szenariodisk (1999) by Oval, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA.
Cover design for Szenario USA (1999) by Oval, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA.
Left: Record label of Szenario Europa (1999) by Oval, released by Form & Function in Europe; Right: Record label of Szenario USA (1999) by Oval, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA. Note the subtle type changes.
Why is this work so interesting all these years later? Tom Steinle explains it like this (although many others I spoke to said the same thing): Luczak always focused on the content of the object she was designing, not what was happening around her aesthetically at the time. What was happening around her at the time? Mostly the cool, ironic corporatism best embodied by studios like The Design Republic. TDR loved to revel in the transactional nature of the whole thing, but, to be fair, that was another thing CDs are known for. Luczak’s work isn’t couched in irony—she seems unable to approach anything with irony. Her work is earnest and big-hearted. And so this is a story of genre. You can borrow some of the genre’s energy, some of its buzzy interest, and put it right into your own work free of charge. But that energy is on loan and you must give it back. One day, sooner than you think, it will look tired. This is what the economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen describes as “the process of developing an aesthetic nausea.” And it is doubly true if you borrow from a genre in revival. Luczak never touched that genre stuff; she was too curious for that, and it helped that the musicians she worked with were too. This is the real work of creativity: to make the unknown so beautiful and intriguing that we are lured farther and farther into the new.
Phillip Nessen is a Brooklyn-based designer, strategist, and educator. He is the founder of Nessen Company, a studio with a focus on building distinctive, performant brands and consumer packaged goods.
Header image: Promotional poster for Ovalcommers (2001) by Oval, released by Form & Function in Europe.
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