(Image credit: Modern Aviation / Sarah Matthews)
We spend eight hours a day staring at screens, sitting in calls, and carefully sculpting sentences across a page. But nobody is just their job title. We contain multitudes. The colleague reviewing your drafts might be an award-winning poet, a competitive baker, or building physical worlds on the weekend.Still, it’s always a delight when the curtain pulls back. By day, Will Salmon is our Collections Editor. He's also a veteran music journalist, a long-time collector and the founder of Modern Aviation, an underground indie tape label releasing physical cassettes to a devoted subculture of music lovers.Making album art a thing again
(Image credit: Modern Aviation / Sarah Matthews)When I asked Will what originally sparked his jump from writing about music to launching a physical label, his answer didn't start with sound, it started with environment and visual design."For Modern Aviation, it was partly an aesthetic thing. A couple of my friends were putting out tapes and I got excited about the visual possibilities. I was living near an airport at the time and obsessed with the planes flying by every hour — the two things merged in my head."On Spotify, cover art is reduced to a 50-pixel thumbnail tucked behind a glass screen. You don't hold it, turn it over, or collect its spines on a shelf. By treating the cassette as a canvas first, labels like Modern Aviation turn an album into something displayable. Originally, Will said that the label was going to be called Aileron, which is a bit rubbish as a title. Then Modern Aviation popped up and away they went."My friend Sarah Matthews, who is a really talented artist, has done almost all our covers," Salmon said. "We came up with the idea of giving each tape a plane silhouette on the spine, rather than a catalogue number. I knew it was going to be predominantly electronic and maybe a bit folky, and that's how it all panned out."That detail, swapping out utilitarian catalog numbers for tiny plane silhouettes, is precisely where physical media wins back ground from streaming.Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.On Spotify or Apple Music, cover art is reduced to a 50-pixel thumbnail tucked behind a glass screen. You don't hold it, turn it over, or collect its spines on a shelf. By treating the cassette as a canvas first, labels like Modern Aviation turn an album into something displayable.The anti-Spotify
