It’s that time of year again!
Culprit’s monthly rooftop party at the Standard, Downtown LA is back again. This year is going to have some heavy, heavy talent. If you’re in LA, I highly recommend checking it out.
(If you’re in Chicago, check me out on the #36 Broadway bus. I’ll be all the way in the back with the creepers!)
I had been leafing through vintage Playboy magazines from the late 70’s when Style Matters asked me to put together a dee jay showcase poster. I’ve done a few of these before, and it’s usually a bit of a stylistic free-for-all. But Spencer – the man behind Style Matters – is looking to build the brand identity, and taglines are going to be more evident in their advertising. That struck a chord with me while leafing through countless cigarette ads (remember those?) that had all kinds of ridiculously great lines that proposed to the reader some kind of perceived or implied ultimatum of Cool. What better way to grab the customer than to in some way indict them?
So where will you be April 6th?
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.
Way back in October of 2010 I wrote about the illustrations of Machi Abe included in her husband Kobo Abe’s novel “The Woman In The Dunes”. There is not a whole lot of information out there with regard to Ms. Abe’s oeuvre, and I included a halfhearted plea for additional info that someone with more knowledge might be kind enough to share. Well – a year and a half later, a complete stranger proved that the internet is not (as George Costanza more or less summarized) just for “porn and stock quotes”.
A kind woman whose Flickr handle is Ray Gun Betty sent me an email a couple weeks ago with her discovery of Machi Abe’s woodcut illustrations for Kobo Abe’s novel “Inter Ice Age 4”. She is scanning her grandfather’s science fiction book collection for posterity’s sake, and happened to stumble upon my Woman In The Dunes post. I’m still trying to decide if I’m more astounded by Machi’s illustrations or the randomness of having them presented to me a year and a half after my curiosity was piqued for them (forgive me – I grew up in a pre-internet age).
I was previously unfamiliar with the novel “Inter Ice Age 4”, but it is now on my must-read list. Here are the incredible images:
For the second installment of Culprit Sessions at Los Globos, I wanted to keep the same color palette and flattened style that I used for installment #1 – Tale of Us. I tried a few different variations:
I was pretty keen on them, but Andrei – the man who runs the Culprit label, and my most visually savvy client to date – wasn’t feeling them. Dyed Soundorom is his favorite DJ and producer, and quite possibly one of the cooler looking dudes in electronic music. Andrei really wanted to draw from the look of old jazz photos, so we rebooted and came up with a higher contrast, 30% more sexified look. Can I get some finger snaps?