the above cover of the new big black delta album has existed in one form or another for a year or more. aside from the protomen act II logo, this is the longest we’ve had to sit on something and let it mature. it has therefore had to suffer being discarded a few times and consequently being heaved back onto the table for repair. this is largely because we were nervous and didn’t trust that the visual came close to the power of the music. thus we kept searching for a way to express that, and consequently found ourselves staring at this piece again and again, realizing it was the closest we’d ever come.
the idea behind this cover was essentially two-fold –
first up whilst the EP depicted elements passing through space toward something, the LP we felt should be emblematic of the place they were all headed – the core or nucleus sucking everything in. this way we had a story of sorts, both visually and conceptually. conceptually because, as with most EPs, the songs were tested out and then some found their final resting place on the LP.
secondly we wanted something that gave you the sense of being in a minute, inner-space, just as much as the more obvious, vast, outer-space setting the artwork appeared to depict at first glance. we wanted it to feel like the genesis of an idea, or the microscopic core of the beginnings of an erruption, as much as a planetoid or huge cataclysm in space. you see we were into the idea that jonathan bates’ first band, mellowdrone, had had an album cover with a man clutching his head as it exploded, and that subsequently this record was perhaps illustrating the inside of that same head. the nucleus of the eruption, be it psychological or physical, that lead to the head exploding. the assumption being that both images, for us, represented the state the band was in, the lyrics and the overall tone.
whilst big black delta is very much a more personal, solo musical endeavor for jon, mellowdrone saw him very much more in a band environment, in more of a democracy and also dealing with a sense of disenfranchisement. so the angry bear album cover was an external view of the result of a certain psychology, and the BBDLP1 cover?is a depiction therefore, also, of something more personal, from somewhere more unique to just jon.
beyond the hand-drawn elements themselves the cover was also treated with a level of distressing and texture. the reason for this is that the music itself was treated in a similar fashion. jon deliberately kept certain glitches and errors that happened in the processing or compression of each track in order to give it a more freeform and ‘fuck it’ attitude. so in turn we effectively threw the record on the floor at a UFO convention and let everyone stampede across it as they made their way from bob lazar’s talk on alien spaceship reverse engineering over to the preview screenings of the next series of ancient aliens.
so what next? well jon is of course working on new music and we’re already working on new artwork. as jim carroll says in the basketball diaries “come on, reggie, you know this game never ends.”
caspar has been invited to write a monthly blog for the independent film project.?the first article went live on monday and it’s on the subject of trust.?here is an excerpt –
in terms of the work i do for version industries, i have a healthy obsession with narrative and pathos, and feel that one should inherently lead to the other if you?re going to win the trust of your audience, whatever the medium. for this very reason i try wherever possible to tell a story with each project, be it a website, a record cover, a poster or a music video. i don?t mean a ?story? in the ?fashion magazine? sense, i mean a story with characters, scenes, events and climaxes. now of course it doesn?t have to be a sad story to be a good story, but without a sense of pathos somewhere along the line, you won?t glean any real loyalty for your work. take the funniest film you?ve ever seen and there?ll be a moment of sadness sitting right at the heart of it, and whether you like it or not it?s that moment that grounds everything else. why? because sadness feels more true than happiness. we might only recollect the happy memories and we certainly don?t have much memory of pain, but it?s a fact that it?s the sad moments that help us lower our defenses, bring us together and help us trust each other. trust being fundamental if you are an artist trying to earn the respect of your peers and garner support from your audience. it?s trust that leads them to follow your progress and consequently support for your next piece of work, be that financially or other.
once again we could not be more grateful to topspin. they have put us in touch with an eclectic range of radical artists with whom we’ve had the most exciting and rewarding relationships. the gregory brothers, better known as the auto-tune the news guys, are no exception. a month or so ago they walked into our studio and told us they needed a new website. they then hit the road and we sent them our ideas as they criss-crossed the country on the youtube tour. the trick was to combine their already burgeoning aesthetic with a number of new levels of functionality. their old site had been pretty much built entirely by them using dreamweaver and they were understandably into something that would be a little easier to update. needless to say, but the process was a breeze and often funny too.
as the project went on we of course became more and more familiar with their work. aside from the classic auto-tune videos that we’ve all seen, it was very apparent that they were a talented 4 piece band in their own right. not only are they capable of making a hilarious youtube videos but they’ve got an album’s worth of solid, self-proclaimed?folk ‘n’ roll jams. hit up the music store on the new site to check some of them out. they just got back from playing bonnaroo festival and i’m sure will be announcing more tour dates soon. seriously, go. they’re fantastic people and their show is seriously unique.
a while back we were asked by loft publications in barcelona, spain, to have some of our work featured in a web design handbook that they were putting together. the book is now out and available from amazon here.
a huge thanks to paz diman and all at loft publications for the invitation. we’re very honoured.
a couple months back alessandro cortini pushed the button on the sequel to his experimental synth project sonoio. he’d finished a rough version of the album and was keen to get some ideas for the artwork rolling. the first record’s aesthetic had been based around the colour blue, and we’d known for a while that this record was likely to be coloured, and called, red. in fact there was already a version of the album cover from the original design sessions that had been cast in red and he’d been using for his demo mp3s. however once we’d heard the record and fallen under its spell (it is even better than the original), we knew a new cover was needed. something that felt more involved, continued the abstract character based narrative of the first cover and took it into a new realm of introspection, if you will.
we’d also already developed the blue cover in a number of directions for the remix album that came soon after it, and so realized there was space there to keep telling the story in a fashion we felt true to the new material. it took a while to stumble across something that still felt immediately connected to the first cover, whilst offering a fresh angle on things. the resulting piece is of course deliberately open to interpretation, but features our white and black characters again, now in different circumstances and states of repair. we also started to pad out the design with more intricate textures and new colours, as the new album felt like a development and growth musically in such a way that the artwork had to follow suit.
then there’s this music video for enough, as seen at the top of this post.
for a long time my close friend and collaborator, the director / photographer?matt sundin, and i have been talking about making videos, and eventually films, together. in fact it was this desire that made the 65daysofstaticwe were exploding anyway album cover turn out the way it did. so the moment alessandro proposed a video, i gave him a call and said ‘this is our chance’.
alessandro was considering making 2-3 of the new songs into videos and wanted our ideas for each. ultimately he felt that the ‘live performance’ pitch that we included was the one that felt truest to where he was with this project right now. so matt called his crew together and asked that i start to write down a list of ideas for shots for the video. so i took an evening, put the song on repeat and worked on shot ideas that i felt would embellish the music visually and give the production a quality that had some level of character. you know, above and beyond what you usually get with these things.
we then booked a studio in green point, brooklyn and alessandro flew out from LA. the next day we hit the ground running.
matt and his gaffer / assistant craig ward had pulled together some fantastic elements, including a wild array of lighting options and a carpenter to build a small but unusually surfaced stage for alessandro to perform on. we then painted everything else in the room black and setup our dolly / tracking rig. so far everything was going well, heck there were even 2 cats wandering around the studio which proved more than enough to keep alessandro entertained between takes.
the only sad moment was when the two vintage television sets that alessandro had used for his live performances in LA arrived via post all cracked and broken inside their box. we tried our best to make them work, but it wasn’t happening.
pushing on we proceeded to do take after take of alessandro performing the song from every angle we could, taking care to include shots with him not on the stage too for some fun and games later in the editing room. it was a pretty intense process but the footage was clearly looking solid from the outset. plus the more the song got played over the studio speakers the more everyone involved started to dance a bit too, and dancing never hurt anyone.
the shoot ended pretty late into the night and the studio owner offered to keep our stage setup for some cabaret / performance art style shoot he had going on later, involving strippers and wild animals. i could have mis-remembered that though. we then headed back to matt’s apartment for the wrap-party and alessandro headed back to LA the next day.
a week or two later the intense process of editing began. matt went through the footage and started pulling together the best stuff from the vast array of material we had. soon after that he was putting together a great rough cut of things and sent this to me so that i could cut together the teaser clip that went live a couple weeks ago. he then did another cut and passed it over to me again. we agreed that what there was already felt good and exciting, but tended to get a little tiring after a while, as it all had a very similar tone. so we consciously divided the song up into 4-5 parts and attempted to address each section with a different mindset, in terms of editing. i was then left to re-imagine the intro to the video and the electronic breakdown after the verses and choruses – the part with all the ‘oh oh ohs’. sending this back to matt lead us to more talks, further edits and the delivery of the first rough cut to alessandro.
alessandro was very excited by what we gave him and made a series of notes regarding various tonal changes he was after and what he felt, due to the nature of where his head was at with the song, needed adjusting in terms of shots used for certain lyrics. in this way several cuts were sent back and forth between new york and los angeles and then just last sunday we got a thumbs up from alessandro. matt then sat down and worked his magic on the footage, grading it to give it the warm, grainy, contrasty feel you see in the final cut. it was that final lick of varnish that properly started to give us the shivers. the thing was done, we were flat out of time and there was nothing we could do but send it off.
none of us could be happier with the response to the video. you just never know if you’re going insane in that editing suite. many days in the dark with breaks at strange hours for food or beer, and then back into the darkness. hearing the song a thousand times over to the point where it’s just noises and everything in your head is tied to its ebb and flow. it gets a bit bewildering. so much so that at one point we did an edit of the video laced with eerie footage of cats that we’d shot at matt’s girlfriend’s apartment nearby. inspired as we were by the cats that had been on set throughout the shoot, and often leapt onto the stage right into the shot. of course the ‘cat cut’ really didn’t work but we felt we had to try everything just to be sure, haha. ?so yeah, thanks and thanks again.
the sonoio project is going from strength to strength at this point and we’re very fortunate and grateful to be a part of it.
thanks to the ladies and gents at topspin, we were asked to do a talk at the IFP independent filmmaker labs last week because of our work on tronsoundtrack.com. on thursday morning i spoke to a room full of documentary film makers hoping to find their way in the online world now that their various projects were nearing completion and needed some kind of apt promotion.
the talk went extremely well, which is surprising given it was literally the first thing of this kind that we’ve ever done aside from giles’s PACA panel discussion back in ’08. we’d like to thank rose vincelli and jonathan reiss for considering us for the task and for making us feel so welcome throughout the process. it’s looking like we’ll be doing more of these talks in future now that we’ve gotten a feel for it. we’ll try and post on twitter or similar when such things are about to occur. you know, should you want to come say hi or whatever.
i’d also very much like to add that i had no idea who jonathan reiss was when i met him over email, in person or when he introduced my talk. i mean i thought his name seemed familiar, but i never would have guessed this was the same jonathan reiss who’s work i have been in awe of for years. you see this is the man who directed the famously ‘banned’ happiness in slavery video for nine inch nails. a video that literally changed the lives of my friends and i when we first saw it in the 90s. few music videos come close to it in terms of sheer power, brutality and brilliance. suffice to say i thanked him not just for myself but for all the people out there who i know would want me to do the same, given half a chance.
you can view the filmmaker labs press release?here.
if you’ve ever heard their cover of cheap trick’s song he’s a whore, you’ll know that both big black delta and war widow are bands to keep an eye on. both new, both from LA and both with singers called jon. now whilst we’ve been working with big black delta for some time now, war widow are pretty new to us. both bands share the same record label – coming home records – who have handled not just releases from a large amount of nine inch nails alumni, but of course also the magnificent mellowdrone. it was through coming home records that we got wind of some of the new tracks by war widow. the label’s boss erik andrews posted a couple of tracks on soundcloud one morning and i joined the others on twitter who follow the label’s feed, and gave them a listen over a hot cup of coffee.
tear it up (above) is the track that immediately grabbed me. the first thing that struck me was the dirgey feel of it. then when the dark + seedy lyrics filled my ears i started getting a range of very particular images dancing around in my brain. so i immediately looked to see if any artwork had been announced for this release. sure enough they had a record cover on their website. it was of a cat snarling. rich colours. very vibrant. it was tough, but it didn’t seem to mesh with the music i was hearing. so i quickly fired off an email to erik and asked if the artwork had been printed yet. he said it hadn’t. i then started ripping through various photographs i had lying around on hard drives and bookmarked on various sites, trying to find things that seemed to fit the music. i then put together a few designs using the bands logo and some of these images, and fired it off as quick as i could to erik. he amazingly passed them right onto the band and just moments later i got news that they were into trying a new cover and wanted to know what else we had up our sleeves.
i then emailed two people. first my friend?matt sundin, who took the photographs for the 65daysofstatic album cover,?we were exploding anyway. i briefed him quickly on the sorta images i was after and asked him if he had anything lying around. i then reached out across oceans into distant lands i’d never set foot in and contacted a ukrainian photographer who’s flickr account i’d been obsessed with for some time now. i felt his photos were utterly perfect for this and had in fact used some of them in the initial comps i sent to the band. this guy’s name is alex alekseenko, and you can see more of his work here.
knowing both would need some time i then told the band i’d need a day or so to pull things together and if they could hold off the printing presses for a moment, it’d be worth their while. they were cool with this.
the next morning i was elated to find an email from alex in my inbox. turns out he was 100% down with us using one of his photos for a record cover, particularly for a rock band. he himself was a collector of many records and was very excited at the prospect of having some of his work used in such a fashion. similarly matt also got back to me with a few shots of his own that he felt stepped into the murky conceptual arena i was after with this.
the images then started to speak for themselves. certain images coupled very well with others and those that didn’t lead me to ask if they could delve deeper – send me anything. i wanted them to send me the stuff they might even be scared to send through, because of the content of them. needless to say but we were all excited and definitely beginning to get that feeling again. that feeling that made you remember why you do this damn thing for a living.
pretty soon it was done. round 2 was off to the band and we were checking our emails regularly for anything back from them.
the band got back to us after a few days. they’d made a decision. they wanted the image you see above for the cover, and the image you see below for the backcover. we then started about ‘finishing up’ the design, which of course involved making it feel like you’d find the record in the damp corner of someone’s basement in the middle of nowhere.
if you’re into hearing the record, needless to say we highly recommend it. it will be out on 12 inch vinyl and was produced by none other than jonathan bates of big black delta. you can grab another song from the record from the band’s site here, or from the label’s site here.
we hope you enjoy it and that the artwork in some way helps you get deeper into the music.
we’ve just had it confirmed that the site we did for daft punk’s TRON: legacy score, tronsoundtrack.com, was javascript site of the month in the january issue of .net magazine. click here to read the full PDF including a short interview with us about the making of the site. huge thanks again to remy sharp, mr doob, topspin and disney for the hook-up!
it’s been about 4 years since we changed the way we present ourselves to people. it’s never been a huge deal to us, given we’ve never been hugely attracted to the idea of brands, fixed identities and the overall corporate approach to a company’s ‘personality’. in fact this time around we’ve dropped our previous ‘graphic’ logo, preferring instead to simply type our (v) out and produce a variation on it that echoes the kaomoji anime style emoticons, (v_i)
beyond this there are basically three key elements that governed this redesign. the first part was some kind of old library catagorization card that we found a scan of online.
for whatever reason the raw simplicity of it matched our desire to build a site that was stripped right down to the bare essentials. our portfolio was now strong enough to speak for itself, and some basic lettering on a paper surface like this made a lot of sense to us.
the second key part of the redesign came to us when designing our new business cards. our local printhouse cut us a deal for some super heavy stock letterpressed cards, so long as we limited ourselves to using one colour on one side. turning this to our advantage we created a design based on the black spot from treasure island. it tickled us to think that anyone we gave our card to might be considered guilty, or that their time for judgement has come.
the third part was this beautiful old japanese poster, again found online, that for one reason or another had haunted us. if anyone knows where we can get a copy of this poster, or even a higher resolution image of it, we’d be hugely grateful.
everything else you experience throughout the site are elements of our own creation or recreated from design blogs and experimental code projects around the internet. as stated before, the site is intended to take very much a back-seat to our work so it’s almost an exercise in harmonies rather than a lead melody of any sort.
we hope you find it non-intrusive when looking at our work, but also complimentary to the work.
