A bassist, a borrowed sum and a Mal Waldron record, 1969.

ECM stands for Edition of Contemporary Music. In a profile published on 21 November 2010, Stereophile’s Robert Baird wrote that Manfred Eicher founded the label in Munich in 1969, and described him as its owner and the producer behind nearly 1,200 of its records. The label had marked its fortieth anniversary shortly before the interview, which Baird said had taken a decade to arrange.

Wikipedia, in both its English and German entries, names three founders: Karl Egger, Manfred Eicher and Manfred Scheffner. The German entry describes Egger as the initiator and financier, who paid for setting up the company and for the costs of its debut release, and says he remains a managing director alongside Eicher. The English entry says that debut, pianist Mal Waldron’s Free at Last, was produced by Scheffner, and the German entry adds that it was recorded at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg.

Stereophile traced Eicher’s route to the label. Baird wrote that Eicher began on the violin at six, studied double bass at Berlin’s Academy of Music as a young man, and then spent several years as a production assistant at Deutsche Grammophon. To make Free at Last, the magazine said, he borrowed money from the owner of a small record shop. Eicher described the start without ceremony: “We began in ’69. We had no plan, no idea, no concept for a business. I was a musician — or I am a musician: I studied contrabass and music science.”

Film was part of the picture early on. Eicher told Stereophile that in Berlin the music school stood on one side of the Hardenbergstrasse and the Cinema Steinplatz on the other, and that he studied music by day and watched the French and Italian new wave by night. He called the French director Jean-Luc Godard an important accomplice over the years. Wikipedia says Eicher co-directed a film adaptation of Max Frisch’s Holozän with Heinz Bütler in 1990, that the label released Godard soundtracks on the New Series, and that stills from Godard films were used on several ECM covers.

The roster built on that start. Wikipedia lists jazz musicians including Paul Bley, Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Pat Metheny, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Ralph Towner. In Stereophile, Eicher said he and Jarrett had worked together for forty years, and the magazine dated Jarrett’s The Köln Concert to 1975.

The label stayed in the Munich area. The German Wikipedia entry gives its present home as Gräfelfing, on the edge of the city.

A producer in the room, an engineer in Oslo and a classical line.

ECM’s identity begins with the way its records are made. Wikipedia says Eicher produces the great majority of the label’s recordings himself, with other producers such as Steve Lake, Thomas Stoewsand and Sun Chung also working on releases, and that a typical session runs three days: two to record and one to mix. Many albums, it says, were recorded with the engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug in Oslo, at Talent Studios and later Rainbow Studios.

In Stereophile in 2010, Eicher explained what he looks for in the room. He said he likes musicians to record without headphones, because with headphones “everything starts with mezzo forte”, and that the music flows differently when players listen to each other acoustically in a good-sounding hall. He prefers, he said, music that can be realised without overdubs, though he accepts them where a recording needs them.

He was wary of the phrase that critics attach to the label. Asked about the “ECM sound”, Eicher said he knew what people meant but did not hear it himself. “What you hear at ECM is a personal choice of mine, probably slower music than music of presto,” he said. “It is a kind of adagio. It’s a chamber-music approach rather than a symphonic approach.” He pointed to the Art Ensemble of Chicago as a contrast to the composer Arvo Pärt, and said each album is produced to find the right shape for its music.

Finding artists is also personal. Eicher told Stereophile he has no assistants advising him on signings and no formula; he hears music on the radio, while driving or in unremarkable places, and decides on impulse. He described meeting the Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen through tapes lying around a studio in Norway.

A classical line was added in 1984. Wikipedia says the ECM New Series was created that year for Western classical works, initiated for Arvo Pärt’s recorded debut Tabula Rasa, and Stereophile called the 1984 world-premiere recording of Tabula Rasa a high point for composer and label. Eicher told the magazine that before every recording Pärt tries the music out in several concerts. The New Series, Wikipedia adds, has ranged from Thomas Tallis and Gesualdo to John Cage, Steve Reich and John Adams.

Distribution changed hands while the label stayed independent. Wikipedia lists distribution through Warner, PolyGram and BMG, and through Universal Music since 1999. On 14 November 2017, it says, ECM announced that its whole catalogue would go to streaming services, while calling CD and vinyl its “preferred mediums”.

A label, a producer and a way of making records.

A record label’s identity rarely lives in one place. It is spread across a series of small, repeated surfaces that a listener meets again and again: the logo printed on the centre label of a vinyl disc, the mark that sits at the top or bottom of a sleeve spine, the run of letters and numbers that make up a catalogue number, and the rule set that decides how a front cover is laid out. Seen one at a time these details are modest. Seen across a shelf of releases they become the brand.

Spines matter because records are usually stored edge-on. A consistent spine treatment — the same typeface, the same position for the logo, the same order for artist, title and catalogue number — lets a run of releases read as a set. Catalogue numbers do similar work: a prefix and a sequence turn a list of records into an archive that collectors can follow.

Some labels go further and give their sleeves a house style, built by a single designer or studio over many years. Others let each artist lead and keep the label’s presence to a small mark. Imprints, sub-labels, shops and mail-order operations extend the same identity into new places, from a carrier bag to a shop sign. In each guide below, the question is which of these surfaces a label has used, and how consistently.

Two designers, photographs and as little text as possible.

The sleeves are where ECM’s identity is easiest to see for anyone who has never heard the music, and the German Wikipedia entry names the people behind them. It says the label’s distinctive cover design was the responsibility at the outset of the graphic designer Barbara Wojirsch, and that in the 1980s she was followed by Dieter Rehm, who worked with a very similar approach and, for the label’s Works series, used photographs by his teacher, the artist Gerd Winner. The same entry says ECM covers avoid accompanying text wherever possible.

The jazz writer Stuart Nicholson, in an essay on his website built around a 23 May 1999 interview with Eicher, described the covers’ “eye catching cover photographs” and “immaculate sans serif typography”, and contrasted that modern image with offices above a shop unit in a grey Munich industrial estate. The point he drew was that the label is less about a place than about a way of working.

The covers became a subject in their own right. Wikipedia says they were collected in two books from the publisher Lars Müller: Sleeves of Desire, published in 1996, which the German entry says set out the history of the label’s cover art and listed every image used to that point, and Windfall Light: The Visual Language of ECM in 2010. Steve Lake, who joined the label’s staff in 1978 after writing for Melody Maker, contributed to both.

Museums followed. Wikipedia says the Munich museum Haus der Kunst opened an exhibition on the label in autumn 2012, ECM – A Cultural Archaeology, created by the curator Okwui Enwezor with Markus Müller in close relation with Eicher, and accompanied by concerts and a film series Eicher curated, including work by Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos and Godard. A wider exhibition, under the Gertrude Stein line “Think of your Ears as Eyes”, ran in Seoul from September to November 2013.

Eicher gave Stereophile the principle that links the music to the pictures: “You don’t impose sound ideas that have nothing to do with the content of the music.” The covers work the same way, with a photograph, a field of grey or colour, and a small line of type, chosen album by album rather than from a fixed template. No official logo specification or colour code is published in the sources we read.

For a design guide, ECM Records shows how a label can build a recognisable look from restraint: photographs, generous space and very little text, held together by one producer’s choices for more than fifty years. Compare Blue Note, a jazz label with a very different, type-led sleeve tradition, or XL Recordings, an independent label shaped by its founders’ ear. For this guide we use fjord grey, slate and mist with a light geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ECM Records’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.