Description

For the loudest, longest record of their career, Sonic Youth chose one of the quietest images in modern art: a single lit candle against a dark, soft-focus background. The painting is Kerze (Candle), made in 1983 by the German artist Gerhard Richter, and the back cover carries a similar Richter candle from 1982.

Richter painted his candles from photographs, copying the blur of the camera so carefully that the images look like photographs themselves. The subject belongs to a long tradition in European still-life painting, where a burning candle stands for the passing of time, and Richter treated it with almost no drama. On a double album of feedback, alternate tunings and fourteen-minute songs, that calm flame reads as a counterweight to the noise.

The band carried the idea through the package. Each of the four sides of the original vinyl, and the tray of the CD, shows a symbol representing one of the four members, so the record works like a set of personal emblems around Richter's image. Daydream Nation was released by Enigma on 18 October 1988, and the candle has since become as recognisable to rock fans as it is to art historians.

Credit

Cover painting: Kerze (Candle), 1983, by Gerhard Richter