Salena Jones & Mieko Hirota – Zlatniyat Orfey album art
Contributed by Christopher Bentley on Jan 13th, 2020. Artwork published in
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Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Davida featuring (custom-made?) Cyrillic characters for the cover of Zlatniyat Orfey (Златният Орфей, “The Golden Orpheus”), a split album by Salena Jones and Mieko Hirota. The latter’s surname is here transliterated as “Chierota”. She is notable for being the first Japanese singer of the Bobby Hebb-composed “Sunny”.
The album was recorded at the Golden Orpheus ’73 and released on the Bulgarian state label Балкантон (Balkanton). The smaller all-lowercase text is set in a wide style from Aurora-Grotesk VI or similar.
Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.
2 Comments on “Salena Jones & Mieko Hirota – Zlatniyat Orfey album art”
That’s a great find! I love these charming DIY language extensions. As far as I know, there is no Cyrillic version of Davida (correct me if I’m wrong). The Cyrillic letterforms shown on this sleeve definitely look home-made to me. They were obtained by repurposing Latin homoglyphs, either directly (C for С, A for А, etc.), by flopping (N for И) or flipping (V for Л). Only a few characters required greater effort: Ж is made from two K, and Д appears to be a modified D.
VGC’s original version of Davida came with two forms for A. They were also included in the adaptation by Letraset and Mecanorma (latter under the alias Silva). Both forms were used here. Chances are that the names on this sleeve were made with rub-down type.
Thanks Florian Hardwig, for those informative remarks! I’m not sure how one can “home-make” a font in the mass-manufacturing world of the record business, but evidently the Bulgarians pulled that off!