Omertà Air Instrumental (2023)
Today’s song by the French collective Omertà appears on their second album Collection Particulière. In addition to guitar instrumentals so evocative they seem to be telling a story, the LP also features an equally captivating black-and-white nude photograph of a woman as its cover art. In a 2022 interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, Florence Giroud, the singer of Omertà, explains how this particular picture came to be: When the collective agreed that the album cover should feature a picture of Giroud, she remembered a photograph an artist had taken of her as part of a series of black-and-white nudes. In this photograph, Giroud is holding two playing cards in front of her chest, around which a square frame is drawn—or, as she puts it in the interview, “basically an album cover already.”
There was just the problem that Giroud had never received these photos after they’d been taken. She contacted the artist on social media, but was told that a fire had destroyed the physical copies of the photograph and that he no longer had them. The artist, however, promised to recover a digital file of the photo and to send that to Giroud instead—and then, he died before he was able to do so.
The cover art of Collection Particulière, although very much inspired by that original photograph, is therefore not that picture: Giroud was ultimately never able to recover it.
This chain of events makes this album cover part of a peculiar, intriguing collection of images that are the only remaining trace of a missing original. It’s in good company, though—even some pieces of the western Greats of visual art belong to that category: The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (1628) by Dutch painter Willem van Haecht, for example, includes a portrait of Albrecht Dürer as well as Van Eyck’s Woman Bathing, which have both gotten lost since; French impressionist Bazille’s Studio (1870) features the Renoir painting Landscape of Two Figures, of which only the lower left half remains; and there’s a self-portrait of Josef Albers we only know of today because it was coincidentally included in a snapshot taken at an exhibition of his.
There are many more examples that could be included in this list, but they all fascinate for the same reason: While these artworks can never replace the lost pieces they hint at, they still carry a trace of the original in them—and, of course, become more interesting simply because of that piece of lore they hide in plain sight. In the case of Giroud and Collection Particulière’s album cover, for example, knowing the story behind the featured photograph emphasizes the storytelling qualities of “Air Instrumental” even more, don’t you think?
Start the conversation
Become a paid member of The Rest to gain access to the comments section.