Graphic Grooves: Dance Music and Design Since 1983

Musicians love to fall back on the old adage that their craft is "all about the music" (Justin Bieber whips that one out all the time), but it's almost never solely about the audio frequencies coming out of your speaker. Many record labels put a lot of thought and effort into carefully designing logos, sleeves, and artwork for their releases, building iconic visual brands that listeners could recognize from a mile away.

In the past, imprints aimed to make their wax stand out to people browsing in physical record shops by plastering the records and sleeves with garish, eye-catching imagery, but these days, it's more important to have one symbol or logo that can be duplicated and proliferated across many different media, from record sleeves to flyers to t-shirts and SoundCloud players. We put together a list of 15 labels with some of the most iconic artwork as a case study.

CUTTING RECORDS

New York label Cutting Records was founded in 1983, and anyone who was born after that year probably only knows its logo from pixelated photos uploaded alongside Youtube clips.

The vinyl versions featured a jagged circle imprinted on the center of each record, and although the physical copies have been translated into binary code and uploaded to the cloud, the logo lives on as the static image plastered onto Masters at Work's "I Can't Get No Sleep" or Nitro Deluxe's "Let's Get Brutal."

R & S

Belgium's most prolific techno outpost—and there are many of them—is also one of the most well respected techno labels in the world: R&S. After all, how many others are still killing it 30 years after they were launched?

The artwork for R&S sleeves have become almost as iconic as the sounds contained within the grooves, because most of the records were packaged with the same blue and silver layout, which makes them easy to spot in packed shelves. The stamps that go on the records themselves are also pretty consistent, and R&S still prints them the same way today.

STRICTLY RHYTHM

You're probably familiar with Strictly Rhythm's artwork even if you've never consciously heard a record from the legendary New York classic house label. (For instance,

we used it

as inspiration in the early installments of our IMPRINTS series.) Almost every single Strictly Rhythm release was decorated with a brick wall pattern, over which the release information was printed and, the label's logo, which was written in graffiti text—so '90s.

NERVOUS RECORDS

Nervous records tend to leap off the shelves, because each one uses a copious amount of yellow ink—in fact, Nervous chose to make yellow its signature color for that very reason.

The hits that came out of this 1990s New York house label, like Loni Clark's "Rushin'" and Nuyorican Soul's "The Nervous Track," probably leapt off the shelves anyway, but the garish artwork didn't hurt. Nervous is still around, which is why you'll occasionally see their sweating mascot cartoon man on SoundCloud.

RADIKAL FEAR

If you spend enough time digging through stacks of records at a shop, you develop certain habits to discern whether or not a random record is worth plucking from the shelves. One of the tips I've learned is to always check out records that have cartoon animals on them, because they're usually sick.

Radikal Fear started this trend early, as the Belgian outpost was founded in 1994 and spent years cranking out belters from the likes of Armando, DJ Sneak, and Felix Da Housecat.

POWER MUSIC/SEX MANIA

Whenever I talk to fans of Power Music or its Sex Mania imprint, I notice that they usually found out about the label in a record store, when they came across its eye-catching artwork.

The bright pink sleeves aren't even the eye-catching part—the leather daddy and the dominatrix that appear on each 12" are the real pièces de resistance.

PERLON

Perlon's records are easy to spot as soon as you walk into a shop, because each vinyl the minimal house outpost released is encased in a similarly bright sleeve: angular designs often spell the label's title or the name of the artist, and the writing is usually slanted upwards. It's not the kind of illustration that can easily be duplicated onto posters, YouTube videos, and t-shirts, because it's a design scheme instead of a logo or stamp.

It makes sense that Perlon's artwork is aimed at catching someone's eye in a shop and not tailored to viral proliferation, because Frankfurt's seminal microhouse camp still focuses mostly on releasing vinyl.

MR. G

The beauty of Mr. G's absolutely iconic logo is that it's as consistent as his tunes. That is, the logo is the same every time, but with slight variations in color or placement, much like the tech house master's tunes, which are all hewn from the same kit of sounds but vary in details and arrangement.

If someone knows how to get a shirt with the graffiti G logo on it, like the one he rocked in

his epic Boiler Room set

, HIT. ME. UP.

TEMPA

When it comes to sleeve design, pioneering dubstep label Tempa is all about simplicity, which means they can draw from a wide range of images while still holding to their iconic look.

In most cases, the sleeve is stamped with the Tempa logo, and its name reappears on the record itself, usually floating next to a sketch of something simple, like an old man, a building, or a pair of binoculars. Striking and effective.

HONEST JONS

Most Honest Jons records feature distinct artwork on their sleeves, but many of the recent ones were designed by the same artist: Will Bankhead. Bankhead, who heads The Trilogy Tapes and co-runs Hinge Finger with Joy Orbison, has contributed illustrations for many labels, including Hessle Audio, Anthony Naples' Proibito label, and his own imprints.

His most eye-catching and easily recognizable work for Honest Jons belong to the UK label's Shangaan Electro series. Each record is decked out in a mostly yellow sleeve that looks like somebody's pajamas.

FOOL'S GOLD

Fool's Gold, the label founded by A-Trak and Nick Catchdubs, represents a turning point in this narrative of iconic electronic music artwork. While other labels focused on making their designs stand out to those plucking physical records from crowded shelves, Fool's Gold relies on one image that can go viral: it can be made into costumes or duplicated and stamped onto stickers, flyers, SoundCloud tracks, Uncle Sam posters, and, of course, t-shirts. It's hard to go a day in Brooklyn without seeing a FG sticker slapped onto a stop sign or a bathroom mirror at your favorite dive bar.

HEMLOCK RECORDINGS

While A-Trak and Nick Catchdubs were revolutionizing the versatility of iconic record label designs, Hemlock boss Untold was sticking closer to tradition with his Hemlock label.

To this day, releases from future-gazing bass music label Hemlock look like patterned curtains with little tags on the top that identify the name of the artist and label. Sometimes less is more.

PAN

The records that come out of Bill Kouligas's noise-oriented label PAN are always pretty expensive, but you're paying for the extra love and attention his go-to artist Kathryn Politis puts into every 12". PAN's signature moves are quite different from the older labels who emphasized artwork, and suggest the changing role of design in today's industry.

The carefully crafted and expensive tactic, which involves spindly geometric patterns pressed onto plastic polythene sleeves, suggests that PAN is a boutique label catering to customers who're willing to shell out extra money for works of art.

JAMIE XX

The only drawback to Jamie xx's iconic two-tone tilted-square-in-the-corner design is that it makes it hard to put the record back in the sleeve just as it was when you took it out—if you've ever unpackaged a copy of

We're New Here

, you'll know what I'm talking about. Otherwise, Jamie's artwork is genius: eyecatching, simple, beautiful, cute, lovely, striking, versatile.

SKRILLEX

Much like Fool's Gold, Skrillex's iconic artwork is made to go viral—it's not tailor-made to be on a record or its sleeve, like Perlon and Tempa. I haven't seen a single Skrillex 12" since

Recess

came out, but I have seen his alien head mascot everywhere: on five-foot-tall posters around Berlin and Brooklyn, on Skrillex's t-shirt from his

Rolling Stone

cover, on SoundCloud tracks, and on Twitter avatars.

But that's not the only viral visual theme Skrillex has in his arsenal: he also has the OWSLA symbol and the three slashes on the alien's forehead, which reappear on many of his records and fit right into his name when it appears on concert flyers.