Figure From Ground: Album Art
My friends Claude & Ola are part of a four person experimental electronic band, a music genre so niche that on of the premiere music labels is some folks in Greece with a Wordpress site and links to Bandcamp. The fact that they are a multi-person band in this rarified genre essentially makes them a musical unicorn. So when they found out that the label wanted to release their eponymous debut album, Figure From Ground, Claude came to me to produce the cover art.
After a month of false-starts, no-starts, and actively ignoring the project, I finally dug in. They wanted the art to feature photographs of them by Noreen Sadue to emphasize the point that this wasn't another solo artist entry to the genre, but they also needed it to feel like their music. It had to be mysterious, complex, ephemeral, and anything but traditional. So I asked for Ola to provide me with examples of her abstract paintings, and since all of her art shares a common origin of the chaos of her soul, I knew it would capture at least a quarter of their music. Then I built a rather flatfooted design, something elegant and fitting for an indie band debuting in Scandinavia. Then I put in time destroying that design until it looked like what their music sounded like.
I'm pleased to report that the band shared my vision of their sound and the album will soon be released featuring this cover art: