Stray Landings

There’s a received wisdom that visual elements of music production (the artwork, light shows and fashion) are merely auxiliary. Music should be appreciated in an almost Platonic way: wrenched from context and understood in terms of sound only. After all, why should your listening be coloured by a dazzling light-show or a flashy press shot? Indeed, there are some artists who have tried to negate this by ‘anonymising’ themselves: Zomby, Burial, Klaus are famous for it. There are degrees of consistency here, from the near-entire invisibility of Klaus to the pseudo-disguise of Zomby. With Zomby, the anonymity is the look. He is always half-hidden behind a coat or a mask, and dressed in the height of designer clothes. His press-shots both hide his identity and confirm it. Even the man who conceals himself nonetheless reveals himself as a self-concealer. There are also musicians who use visual components as a way of making sound. IDM artists have been using spectrograms to encode secret messages for decades, and