Portrayal of an Artist – Part 3 [Music Parody]
For the past two days I have been sharing the wacky album cover and music industry satire we created for the defunct website artlick.com (see Part 1 here and Part 2 here). This is the final instalment in that oddball collection. And if you thought some of the other albums were odd, you ain’t seen nothing yet. These go deep into really unusual abstract places, but are among my very favourites of the entire series.
Albums: Futurific; Neon: The Futurific Remixes
Singles: Once in my past twice in your future; Greener Grass; Eliminate your last thought
One afternoon in 2001 we headed out around the financial district to take some suitably esoteric photos of me wearing a beanie hat and some Elvis sunglasses. I remember really loving this photoshoot. The result was the Futurific album which we decided was to appear on a new record label called Electric Son. I imagine this as somewhere between heavy beats driven electronica and smooth jazz. We had been listening a lot to the band Red Snapper (Check out their album Making Bones) during the creation process for these, which I feel are an influence on them. As with all popular records, you’re nothing if you don’t have a dance-y remix version of your album. So we went to Times Square one night and captured some remarkable photos in front of the neon lit NYPD outpost there to assemble the makings of the sister album Neon: The Futurific Remixes to.
The singles all followed a similar theme to the Futurific album cover but are lent an added air of poignancy given the events of 9/11 a few weeks later. They now stand as a strange document of that time
The most eerie and unusual one of them all was this single, which we named before the terrorist attacks, but now seem strangely prescient given the subsequent events that unfolded. Another curious element here was the naming of Clune (David Gray’s longtime collaborator and drummer at the time) as a collaborator on the tracks. I was a huge David Gray fan, and we had been to see the band perform many times during this period. We had a huge affection for the charismatic drummer, so we added him in as an unlikely collaborator on these.
The Greener Grass single cover is probably the coolest of them all and might well have deserved an album of its own. The green hue to the photo was due to the slightly faulty colour balance on the digital camera, which ended up being a cool byproduct.
We shot so many great images of the Twin Towers, so we designed a funky foldout CD type inlay to accompany the standard album covers. These are really nicely designed I think and the glorious lines of the towers are so photogenic in these. Masterful work by Dave on the design.
Albums: The Rambler Trilogy – The Rambler; The Return of the Real; Committed to Mediocrity
Singles: Slang; The Myth of Everything; Intermission
This is where we went super oddball and arty, and the results are both beautiful and slightly unnerving. It began with a photoshoot in our old office, where we were packing up to move to downtown Manhattan. So there were loads of empty office spaces, brimming cardboard boxes and a wealth of orange packing labels. Naturally enough I decided to stick them to my head to create a makeshift hat of sorts, and off we went.
Given the rather unusual atmosphere and ambience of the photos, we took the album art even further out there as we manipulated the images. We also decided to put this out on yet another record label that we called And Recordings, which somehow felt suitably indie. Additionally, I quite liked the idea that the word “and” is a conjunction and it was somehow connecting radically different phases of the artist’s career
We imagined that the recording artist would forgo his usual name (Kalle Ryan- yes, I find it odd talking about myself in the third person too) and simply become a character called The Rambler and this would be a suite of three concept albums that told a trilogy story from his experimental point of view. Ultimately the idea was a series of records based around language.
Much like we did for the Futurific record, we decided that a gatefold centre (with a slightly unusual look and feel) was appropriate for the final album in The Rambler trilogy. So we included that in our design above. The singles all followed in the same mad spirit. There’s something almost Kubrickian or Lynchian about them. Empty spaces. Weird characters. Unusual atmospheres.
I love the deliberately computer generated blockiness and cut-n-paste vibe of many of them. Seems fitting for something so artificial and contrived. Intermission is particularly quirky to me and looks like some kind of otherworldly painting. For some reason it harkens imagery from the Wim Wenders film Until The End of the World, which I was really taken with at the time. I remember going to see Wim Wenders do a Q&A at a legendary 4 hour version of that very movie around this time (and it was the only print in existence of the movie) so some of that must have filtered into the influences on this one. Most of all I love that they all have a coherence and distinct style to them.
Album: Eventuality of Nothing
I think this one was imagined as an instrumental album along the lines of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. Dave was also a huge fan of Vangelis and I think some of that was fuel for inspiration too. The record label was again different for this one, Lösch Audio, which seemed to fit with the experiemental soundtrack vibe. If the artist we were satirising was to fully realise his wild ambitions then, of course, he would release an epic lush instrumental soundtrack.
Album: Zoocoustic
Long before it became a thing to cover an entire album, I cooked up this acoustic, unplugged tribute to the legendary Zooropa album by U2. A band and an album I adore to this day. The guitar is my Takamine that I still own to this day, and the Zooropa artwork and layout is poached from the original album. I always wondered what this album might actually sound like if it were recorded this way. Over to you Bono…
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