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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.

caspar made the wild light artwork digitally in 2012/13 using adobe's illustrator (shapes) and photoshop (textures and type). going back into the files and hauling something poster-worthy from the wreckage was rewarding. not least because there were some intricate pieces in there that were never used in the record's original packaging and promotional materials. the strange life-form you see here being one of them.

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!

we made the LP cover artwork for the new record first, and then made this single cover second. the latter photographed in the rainy streets of berlin not so many days ago.

you can watch the fantastic music video paul made for distant friend, i love you! here.

this time around the band needed a new logo as well as a revised visual aesthetic. john drew the cityscape you see here, and caspar drew the logo typeface and the rest of the layout. the aesthetic references are we're sure very obvious to some, but above all we hope you find it all a fitting visual accompaniment to the song.

you can listen to "the fight " here.

we reached out to drew and he was into it. soon we were going back and forth with him exchanging ideas for the piece. fast forward to a few months later and we're all sitting here in awe of the video he'd made for us. matt pusti then said he was going to make an EP in support of it, with "time" as the title track. the great folks over at data airlines agreed to put the EP out on vinyl, and asked that we might make a record sleeve that used images from the video. we hope you dig the results.

all photography by bill reynolds. 

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 song's artwork was created using a photograph caspar took in berlin during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.

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 posters were made using a printer and a scanner. the manual elongation of the images, to us, spoke to the themes jon wanted us to explore.

we collaborated once again with john delucca on the poster design.

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 music and lyrics are what inspired the artwork you see here. 

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.

you can read more about the making of the film on our blog here.

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.

what you see here is the sleeve artwork we created to support the release. the record is available now for preorder 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.

if you're interested you can read more about the development of the artwork on our blog. otherwise by all means grab a copy of the single here, whilst stocks last.

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.

the photographic sleeve that used a photograph caspar took in austin, texas, was for the european and US release of the record. the abstracted, more digital looking sleeve caspar made for the japanese release.

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.

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.

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

you can read more about making the artwork + video here.

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

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.

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.