New Coffee Table Book Features 350-Plus Silkscreen Concert Posters

CONCERT POSTERS ENCAPSULATE the raw emotions, ringing notes, and fleeting memories of your favorite concerts. Serving as echoes for these short-lived experiences, these artifacts are usually lost in the past.

At Higher Ground, a music venue in Vermont, the stage has seen enough musicians to break the shelf of any record collector. To keep its past in the present, the venue has released a curated collection of more than 350 concert posters titled Echo: A Survey at 25 Years Of Sound, Art, and Ink On Paper. The new book is part of a celebration of the 25-year creative partnership between Higher Ground and design firm Solidarity of Unbridled Labour (formerly JDK Design). All proceeds support Iskra Print Collective, a nonprofit community space in Burlington, Vermont, dedicated to furthering creative work in the community.

Appealing to music lovers and screen printers of all ages, the book highlights acts ranging from Phish, Bob Dylan, and Wu Tang Clan to Maggie Rogers, Anderson, Paak, and Wilco. Other highlights include fold-out interviews, anecdotes on select posters and shows, and a moving introduction by Grammy Award-winning Wilco front man and solo artist Jeff Tweedy. He writes: “What coheres in these images is the work of the music and art communities intertwined and invested in each other … Concert posters are as close as one can get to the solid evidence that we all crave – proof that what happens when we create is beyond the scope of the individual work.”

Produced as a coffee table book, the final product is designed to resemble a 10- x 10-inch stack of silkscreen posters. Iskra Print Collective and Gary Blodgett of Color Shack printed 367 posters using fine-mesh screens, water-based inks, and an American Tempo 2230 screen printing press.

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