Tribute to the square

Abstract

ECM is a musical adventure that is very much a personal project. Founded in 1968 by Manfred Eicher in the German city of Munich, it has since released more than a thousand references in two different collections: the one specialising in jazz, to which it owes its early prestige, and, more recently, the "New Series", which focuses on classical music, both contemporary and by great historical composers.

In addition to its carefully selected catalogue and exquisite sound and musical productions, ECM has distinguished itself from its earliest releases for the quality of its cover artwork, the result of the work of art directors Barbara and Burkhart Wojirsch, Dieter Rem and, more recently, Sascha Kleis, although ultimately the real Art Director, and the inspiration for ECM's graphic style is, as we all suspect, Eicher himself. One senses that his has been a way of designing only with ideas, with conceptual proposals, without reaching the concreteness or the material realisation of the photographs, the final composition or the typographic organisation of the cover. The quality of ECM's covers justifies the appearance of Windfall Light, a book recently published by Lars Müller Publishers that brings together his covers in a publication designed as carefully and beautifully as the graphic material itself.