To date, all of the album artwork I’ve made has been for dance music – house, tech, boogie, jack, tech house, micro haus, etc, etc, ad infinitum. It would be unfair to lump all of those genres into one heap, but generally speaking it’s been music made specifically to dance to. That hardly makes it one dimensional, or not as rich as music made for, say, listening to in an armchair or in a concert hall.
But I was not expecting to be charged with creating artwork for a dance music EP so replete with narrative and sentiment as when commissioned by the good people of the Culprit label to make the artist jozif’s newest release. The Lady B EP’s songs are hard to describe, even within the framework of today’s widely varied electronic musicscape. But more than anything, they remind me of early 90’s dance music, when bands who had previously made rich, thoughtful, heartfelt music finally felt ok with forgoing the stigma of making songs without traditional, analog instruments and began to experiment with drum machines and synthesizers, but might have also included a few analog sounds for good measure. Skip my clunky description and click here to have a listen for yourself.
jozif was good enough to provide me with some direction in making the artwork. The songs were an ode to his girl – Lady B – who he had completely fallen for. He wanted imagery that conveyed the idea of growing from something incredibly small and delicate into a strong and long lasting ‘object’. Specifically, an acorn and an oak tree.
My initial ideas were a bit too obtuse – I was intent on using female figures, one inside the other, but it just didn’t work. After many iterations, we went with something a lot more straightforward. Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to make full use of the beauty provided by nature present it with fewer alterations. I tend to shy away from symbolism, which is why I think I went more for the human form, but for songs with such rich narrative value, it made sense to give the viewer/listener the images with which they should rightly be working.