Progressive Art: The Most Beautiful ‘Album Covers’

Progressive Art: most beautiful small pockets of discs
Written by Pierre Dulieu, BELGIUM
Improved and adapated in English by Ian Alterman, USA

Progressive music, like other styles of music, is easily identified with the superb images reproduced on the CD covers (i.e., the covers of the booklets). Drawings, sepias, watercolours, photographs… Many of these images are taken from science fiction and fantasy (often including the books of J.R.R. Tolkien), but they all have something in common: they create a dream-like atmosphere. When "records" were still produced on vinyl, the most beautiful album covers were often "double" and, once unfolded, displayed vast frescos of 60 X 30 cm which showed the album's "direction" even more strongly.

Some of these original works are worth fortunes today and are sought by collectors. Reduced to the miserable size of a CD (12 cm), the covers have lost much of their impact, but have nevertheless retained much of their quality and emotional power: groups such as FLOWER KINGS, SPOCK'S BEARD, TRANSATLANTIC and DREAM THEATER always include "album cover" images that have a strong capacity to capture the attention of potential future listeners with a simple glance. And incidentally, if the desire takes to you to listen to the "wafers" hidden under these attractive album covers, do not hesitate to do so! It happens that the music rises to the level of the pictorial works which they inspired (and vice-versa!)

I- Hipgnosis: surrealism and mystification
II- Kim Poor: diaphanism
III- Paul Whitehead & Genesis
IV- Worlds of Roger Dean
V- Mark Wilkinson & Marillion
VI- Hugh Syme: exploiting the words
VII- Simon Williams: the carnival of the masks
VIII- Single works
IX- The changing
X- The Art of Ed Unitsky