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the artwork came easy. jon and his team approved the very first draft caspar put together. the idea was to reduce the big black delta imagery to the simplest forms, and let those forms succumb to gravity's pull; as we all do in the end. in this way we hoped the artwork would appear to be as reflective on the past, aging and the nature of all things, as these new songs are.

you can listen to the record's first single here, and you can preorder the vinyl edition here.

a telex is a now antique device for sending text messages over phone networks. it was invented in germany (where caspar and paul live) in the 1920s and finally gave way to the fax machine in the 1980s. given the science-fiction nature of the album's title, paul and caspar agreed that the invention of a new alphabet would be the first place to start when making the record's artwork. paul's love of emojis and caspar's complete distaste for them seemed like an amusing place for this alphabet's generation to begin.

caspar asked paul to reimagine and transcribe every single word on the album's cover and liner notes into apple color emoji format. caspar then took these emoji-based phrases and reimagined them into a visual style he felt more aesthetically comfortable with. he went through several stages of redrawing and simplifying them on paper with a pencil until they felt like a workable pictographic alphabet. he then imported them into a computer and proceeded to vectorize the different characters so that they could function at any size and in any context, be that in sentences or as single characters.

paul then generated a working typeface / font file from caspar's vectorized glyphs and used this for the various online and music video outputs he was preparing to promote the record. in the meantime caspar used the alphabet to prepare the final record cover artwork you see here.

the front cover uses a photograph caspar took from his balcony during the pandemic lockdown in berlin. the back cover is a telex message paul wrote detailing the album's tracklist and liner notes—using the new alphabet—from himself (in his MIDI city) to his record label, data airlines.

the record was released on february 24th, 2023 by data airlines. you can see paul's usage of the MIDI city alphabet in the video for the album's first single, distant friend, i love you!

it was up to us to find a way to talk about the concept of "chiaro scuro" with emilie's photos and any other elements we saw fit. the result is a piece that talks not just about light and shadow, but also the nature, shape and form of sound. 

the packaging is an attempt to turn the digital graphics 65 created on their computer screens during the year into an original lasting physical experience one could see and touch. in and of itself a reminder perhaps of one of the strangest years of our shared lives thus far.

in the fall of 2019 matt, jonathan bates (singer and songwriter of big black delta) and caspar went to death valley together to take some time off. later when jon had finished his latest album he expressed an interest in using the images from that trip for the album's accompanying artwork. thus every image you see through the album's packaging and the digital singles that went with it, were images taken from this trip. in particular the cover image was taken by caspar, whilst every other image was taken by matt.

this was the story matt pusti (AKA makeup and vanity set) had written and was thus scoring the soundtrack for when he created this album. what you see here is the logo design and record sleeve artwork we created to reflect this narrative.

the record is available through dais records on vinyl, cd and all streaming services. if you have the means, we cannot recommend a physical copy of the record enough. it offers a rich accompaniment to what is already a really beautiful listening experience.

working in collaboration with the photographer, jeff brown, we sourced various objects, built a series of sets in our studio and got to work arranging and lighting things. caspar then created abstract interpretations of the same photographs and used those as counterpoint pieces throughout the layouts. the resulting package we feel speaks to the music in both direct and indirect ways.

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.

the record features the talents of many friends including big black delta, the protomen, witchoria and joey ciccoline. the short film accompanying the record's release and is featured in part in the album's video trailer above.

the cover up is likely just the first in a series of exceptionally well recorded collections of cover songs from the band. needless to say it was our job to create artwork for the record that deliberately wove it into the protomen's overall narrative arc. this included nothing less than asking friends to voice characters in the various "movie scenes" dotted throughout the recording.

the idea here was to make a movie soundtrack to a film that was made and exists within the protomen's ongoing story. in doing so we asked john delucca that he might once again bless us with his exceptional drawning and painting talents. caspar and commander then sewed everything together to make a vinyl record release we're very proud of.

we hope you enjoy the work.

john was sent a few paragraphs detailing the narrative behind each album. he then started to create a poster that we could divide into three halves, to represent the three parts of the story.

we were asked to create the logo, cover and overall packaging for the record. the logo we made is pretty self-explanatory, but the packaging was a subtler affair. utilizing the bokeh affect often seen in films when the camera is focussing on objects in the foreground, we realized we could represent each part of the trilogy with a different coloured circle. in this way the cover image could say a lot with very little, and each record within the packaging could be differentiated by its own red, blue or brown graphic.

joey was then sent the logo and proceeded to shoot the necessary footage to create the teaser trailer for the trilogy, this clip was the first promotional piece released to the general public. once released the limited edition box set sold out in 2 days, but you can still purchase the album digitally here.

the "creatures" or "ships" in the artwork were created by trying to break some of the standard functions in adobe illustrator.

for his latest LP he asked that we tackle the artwork. ordinarily, given the pre-established hallmarks of the black metal scene, this is something we might not have jumped at immediately. however given surachai's taste for esoteric artwork (formerly employing the likes of bridget driessen and sarah sitkin to handle the task), we knew he would be open to an entirely fresh interpretation of his music.

you can read more about the making of the artwork here.

the band approached us in the summer, asking that we might put together a poster and a record cover of some description for the release. it was similarly an incredible opportunity that was by no means lost on us. the poster was in many ways a direct reference to the film, as discussed here. the final record sleeve you see to the left was something quite different, and you can read more about that here.

paul wolinski is one quarter of the experimental musical machine that is 65daysofstatic. polinski is his more purely electronic side-project.  the discussions for how to handle the artwork for the album started years before the record was even a twinkle in his eye. we'd talked at length for years about films, musics, books, games and designs that appeal to us for whatever reason. whether it be the books of jeff noon or the cassette loading games of sinclair ZX spectrum, there was an innate understanding of what this solo project would demand in terms of artwork the moment the demos started to come together.

the final artwork started with us coming up with a story that would capture paul's feelings about various things and how he wanted to translated those into a science fiction tale of some kind. the next step was padding that story out with various touchstone visual elements and then translating those into a series of panels that we could use for the album and any singles. the first image we put together turned out to be the album cover as it is now, and this went onto influence paul's approach to making the music. he then sent us more demos that inspired the creation of more panels, and so the back and forth went until we had enough to illustrate the story / world we had created.

a huge thanks to photographers alex alekseenko and matt sundin, without whom this project would have never come about.

the record sleeve we made for the album—with the help of matt sundin—is, as front-man joe shrewsbury put it, "a beautiful expressoin of human love." please read the full story on the making of the artwork here. all photography by matt sundin, except the heavy sky EP.

once again we asked john delucca to bring his magic to the project. first he painted the fantastic streets of fire inspired cover, and then went on to create various other pieces for the album's illustrated "libretto" booklet. caspar then wove everything together for the 2009 compact disc release of the album, and the promo "movie poster" that went with it.

in 2018 it was time to release a deluxe, vinyl version of the album. for this the band wanted to make a book with a pop-up diorama of john's "how the world fell under darkness" illustration as the centrepiece. this time around caspar eschewed the rest of the CD artwork and replaced it with stills from the recently shot and released light up the night music video.