![]() (Gallagher also amusingly grouches about how covers have been reduced to phone-screen thumbnails, but with vinyl once more the music industry’s bestselling physical output, the time couldn’t be better for a look back like “Squaring the Circle.”) As Oasis frontman and interviewee Noel Gallagher aptly puts it, vinyl was the poor man’s art collection, the kind stacked on the floor instead of hung on the walls. The movie makes a convincing case that in the counterculture era between the first wave of portrait-centered LP covers and the early ’80s music video explosion, Hipgnosis wase as responsible as anyone in making visual creativity an iconographic extension of a given rock artist’s image and sound. Maybe nothing, maybe everything, according to Anton Corbijn’s highly entertaining documentary “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” which traces the impact of the beautifully confounding rock album cover - Pink Floyd’s star cow (“Atom Heart Mother”), Wings’ cheeky jailbreak (“Band on the Run”), Led Zeppelin’s mystic, tinted children (“Houses of the Holy”) - to the disruptive, sought-after British design outfit Hipgnosis: idea man Storm Thorgerson and photographer Aubrey “Po” Powell. You stared at that cover and drank in the album art, especially when it didn’t show the artist. (Don’t smudge it!) But once the warm analog sounds of your favorite band (or new discovery) wafted from your speakers, that cardboard sleeve wasn’t tossed aside. You rushed home, got the plastic off, let that waxy disc slide carefully out so it met your thumb at the edge and middle finger at the spindle hole. In the vinyl heyday, record-buying was a thrilling process.
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