ARCHIVO TEMBLORARCHIVOTEMBLORARCHIVOTEMBLOR

Discos Temblor pressed regional folk, sonidero, and chamber records in Mexico City from 1971 until its warehouse came down in the 1985 earthquake. The master tapes survived in a relative’s garage in Puebla. The sleeves, the photographs, and the artwork did not.

The label’s new owners asked for four covers that could sit in a record shop today without pretending to be from the seventies, and without inventing a past for bands that never had a picture.

The plant in Tlalnepantla prices sleeves by spot color, and two inks was what the budget could carry at 1,200 copies. There was no archive to draw from, and I decided early not to fake one with period lettering.

If the images could not come from the past, they could come from the recordings. Each cover is a small program with one input from its record: a place, a stereo image, a speaker stack, a time of night. The output goes straight to plate as two separations.

All four share a strip across the top with catalogue number, artist, and label, cut 8 mm from the edge. Filed in a crate, the set reads as one thing, and that strip is all a browsing thumb sees.

I kept the titles as big as the artwork would stand, and knocked the Altiplano title out of the contour lines by hand so that the pink could sit on paper.