(v)
(v_i)
(version_industries)

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.

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.