(v)
(v_i)
(version_industries)

music
vinyl cover
back cover
rob
paul
joe
simon
booklet inside back
five waves
popular beats
trackerplatz
vinyl label A
vinyl label B
vinyl cover and record
cd cover
digital cover
_what
record sleeve for the sheffield-based band, 65daysofstatic.
_how
replicr, 2019 is the sixth studio album by 65daysofstatic. it marks a rather radical shift in approach for the band as—fresh off of making the algorithmically arranged no man's sky soundtrack—they had started to question the way they made and performed music. recognizing the post-mark-fisher-capitalist-realist-pop-cultural-fugue-state the world of music seemed to be in, the band wanted to somehow make a record that articulated the seeming futility of trying to make anything that was in any way new.

as drummer rob jones put it in an interview: "this was supposed to be the future, but that future got cancelled. history is moving but it’s got nowhere to go. it’s piling up all around us. that’s what this record is about; this atemporality is an illusion, it’s the cultural logic of late capitalism, consuming everything faster and faster, each artefact a more diluted replica of the last. even the idea that ‘pop will eat itself’ is eating itself."

replicr, 2019 is an album made using customized algorithmic software and live coding techniques, and in almost every way marked a departure for the band not just in terms of how they made music, but also how they would perform it on on stage. it's a dark, unsettling and challenging record. it certainly has a soul, but it would be hard to say it was an optimistic one.

conversations about the artwork were long and hard and hit many dead ends. caspar would meet paul in berlin and they'd talk in circles—not without being aware of the innate irony of that—as they waited for an idea to fall into their laps. afterall, how do you make a record cover that says "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy, and that in some sense our best way out of this is to surrender to it", whilst also making a record cover that does in fact not look like anything else?

in the end the idea did just fall into our laps. back in new york and quite out of the blue caspar's studio mate showed him a copy of a relatively unknown, experimental, american, arthouse film. made in 1968 the film had won an award in the same student film festival as george lucas’s THX 1138. this meant george lucas would have seen this film before making american graffiti or star wars. before even watching the film it had dawned on caspar that it might shed light on a solution to the replicr, 2019 artwork that he was still struggling with. 

after watching the film caspar pulled a series of stills from it. each still was chosen for its abstract beauty, it's inherent movement and its oblique narrative implications. he then packaged this selection of stills with two reference images that suggested how these static film captures could be used to make a viable and interesting record cover. the first reference image was a 1967 sol lewitt piece called eakins stamps, and the second was a 1963 czech poster for michelangelo antonioni's blow-up by milan grygar.

the band responded well to the package. there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel, and thus began the process of making the vinyl, cd and digital artwork. rather like autechre's oversteps record, we all agreed that each of replicr, 2019's different musical formats should have different artwork. this of course echoed rob's point that everything we were making was a diluted copy of the previous thing; our pop that ate itself had to regurgitate itself to satisfy the format wars.

caspar then made a large series of hand-made collages using the 1968 film's stills. the idea was that each collage would be made on a fixed, pencil drawn grid, using the same limited selection of stills each time. in the process caspar tinted half of everything he was producing with an unusual red colour. it was a colour that he and the band agreed carried an ineffable, ominous quality that echoed a similar quality found in the music.

then came the typography for the album name, tracklist and liner notes. caspar printed all the relevant text out onto paper and then layered several pieces of sellotape over some of the words, sentences or paragraphs. some of the tape he ripped off—thus removing pieces of the words—and the rest he left as is. scanning the results of these experiments back into the computer produced the typographic effect you see here in the artwork.

last of all came the question of whether to put a picture of the band into the album artwork. they'd never done this before so it was an interesting proposition. the band weren't all living in the same country at this point and so they'd already come up with the idea of doing a band photoshoot using passport photo machines in different countries. it was itself a great idea for a band photoshoot, but it also served the replicr, 2019 project's ethos admirably well. caspar therefore took these photobooth images and folded them into the collages he was making. remarkably, the band didn't hate the results.
_link
65daysofstatic.bandcamp.com/album/replicr-2019
_tags
cover
1
2
3
4
_what
record sleeve for the sheffield-based band, 65daysofstatic.
_how
our friends and long-standing collaborators 65daysofstatic were hired to write the score to the forthcoming game, no man's sky. 65 in turn asked us to put together the artwork for the soundtrack itself. after listening to the music for months we had a long chat with the band and came up with a loose aesthetic trajectory. two or three different approaches were fully explored before we settled upon what you see here.

the landscape paintings you see embedded into the various covers are by another of our long-term collaborators, john delucca.

the record is available here in various physical and digital formats.
_link
65daysofstatic.com
_tags
cover
detail
wide
_what
record sleeve for the new york-based band, activator.
_how
activator approached us to handle the sleeve artwork for their eponymous debut album. a dark, brutal, relationship-based thrash metal record, it played into our sensibilities nicely. sketching out basic layout on a scrap of paper, we photographed it and sent it to the incredible john delucca. 3 days later he sent back a final drawing and we began to colour it. the resulting image is a visual allegory commenting on whether it's really the relationship that's killing you, or whether it's actually something else.
_link
activatornyc.com
_tags
wild light front cover
wild light back cover
_what
record sleeve for the sheffield-based band, 65daysofstatic.
_how
wild light is 65daysofstatic's fifth studio LP. the band presented caspar with manifestos, poems, drawings, prints and transcripts of studio discussions about the concept of 'wild light'. he then set about producing a series of images that incorporated these ideas, whilst expressing how it felt when he listened to the record.

the resulting imagery owes a lot to takashi murakami, wassily kandinsky, katsuhiro otomo's akira and cam kennedy's artwork for the star wars dark empire comics. the creatures and / or ships in the artwork were created by trying to break the "blend" function in adobe illustrator.
_link
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Light_(album)
_tags
poster
VHS + poster
VHS
VHS 2
_what
VHS tape and poster for makeup and vanity set's film soundtrack, 88:88.
_how
this was a project that started out with MAVS sending us demos and whispering things about it possibly being a film soundtrack. we were then contacted by the film's director, joey ciccoline. joey showed us the film and sent some ideas he'd had for possible directions for the artwork. included in his package was a poster for the 1985 kid's science fiction film, the explorers. this poster single handedly informed the initial designs we created for the film soundtrack. these designs were then scrapped when joey then expressed interest more in a design that told you less about the narrative, and gave you simply a sense of mystery. 

fortunately MAVS then had the idea to do a parallel release in the form of a limited edition VHS cassette and poster. this would then come out later than the official film artwork, and give the original pieces we created a place to live. a tangent universe if you will.

you can see photos of the VHS tape here.
_link
8888film.com
_tags
album cover
_what
music video for polinski's debut single, stitches.
_how
paul wolinski is one quarter of the experimental musical machine that is 65daysofstatic. polinski is his more purely electronic side-project. labyrinths is is the debut album from polinski.

the music video for the album's first single, stitches, was an attempt to bring back the feeling of using the sinclair ZX spectrum computer, whilst detailing some of the album's narrative elements. paul and caspar wrote the video's story, which expanded upon the lyrics jonathan bates from big black delta was singing on the song. john delucca then beautifully redrew and further illustrated the graphics caspar had made for the vinyl record's packaging in pixel art format, and josiah newbolt then animated those graphics.
_link
polin.ski
_awards
color in design 2012 award winner
_tags
print
album cover
_what
music video + print design for LA-based band, sonoio
_how
we'd been aware for a while that sonoio (alessandro cortini) intended to follow up his unique and well received experimental synth debut, with a 'sequel' record of some kind. furthermore alessandro was toying with the idea of a music video this time and asked that we might pitch a few ideas to him for a couple of different songs on the record. we came up with 3-4 ideas he chose the most 'live performance' based concept that we had and soon things were under way. the video was for the song enough, which to us was one of the songs that immediately jumped out on the record when hearing it for the first time. once more we recruited the talents of matt sundin (who helped us shoot the 65daysofstatic and war widow album covers) and soon after alessandro was flying to new york to shoot the video with us in brooklyn.

you can read more about making the artwork + video here.
_link
sonoio.org
_tags
album slash page
offer page
poster page
source code
data capture page
_what
website for the tron legacy soundtrack by daft punk
_how
understanding that we were enormous fans of the original TRON film, and its forthcoming sequel, topspin and disney asked us to create a site to gather emails for the new film's soundtrack release. 

given the soundtrack was created by daft punk it was safe to assume anything we made would be very popular with fans of the band and the 80s film alike. as such, we took full advantage of some of the latest web technologies (with help from mr. doob) and produced a site that works on iphones, ipads as well as regular machines. the end result is a streamlined data collection / e-commerce site with a series of film-related easter-eggs for fans to discover.
_features
  • html5 / javascript UI
  • keyboard input based triggers
  • ascii art source code
  • topspin E4M integration
_link
versionindustries.com/archive/tron
_awards
site of the month .net magazine
_tags