Mixtape Cd project - 'Dark night of the Soul'. Above is the cover, and below the back on which the track listings will be written. I've been looking at a lot of constructivist and old soviet posters lately and I really like that aesthetic - simple graphic shapes, block colours, stong composition. I've also just returned from a trip to Berlin where I saw a ton of really ace graffiti and street art - I particularly love the combination of messy layering and torn appearance of olf fly posters and strongly tonal stenciling. So I wanted to play about with elements of those two things, although because the Berlin trip came quite near the end of this project, there's not so much of the graffiti aesthetic in here.. but that'll come next!
The basic concept of this album was brooding and inner darkness - nights of worry, a general feeling of unsettlement. All cheery stuff! So I wanted to create imagry that was by turns a little disquietening and sad and slightly surreal too (and obviously compliments the music on the cd) The roots of the images are taken from things and images that come to mind when I hear the songs I chose; snow, bleakness, night terrors, cold, blue. Initially I was going to make a rather more abstract album about colour, or perhaps more specically the colour blue playing along the lines of the blues (music), feeling blue etc. I've also been reading Derek Jarmans 'Chroma' lately, in which each chapter forms a paen to a different colour. It was written as Jarman, a hugely visual and visually literate man, was loosing his sight as his HIV escalated. So it's suffused with poignacy and sadness, and it's a beautifully written mix of prose and poetry, a love song to colour, a lament to the loss of sight, and his musings on facing his impending death. He used the text of this chapter as the foundation of his final film, also called 'Blue', which consists only of a single shot of a deep blue screen [which has a celestial meditative quality reminding me of Rothko] over which various actors read the script. You can read this text here if you're interested - http://www.evanizer.com/articles/blue.html. It's pretty ace in my opinion.
Anyway! So those are the kind of things that have been floating 'round my head lately, and I knew I wanted to make something a little off beat and with a serious/sad edge. The idea of a concept album proved tricky - and neither yielded much in the way of visual inspiration nor fiited my music collection brilliantly (the mixtape was supposed to be the music we are passionate about). So after a couple of hardcore brainstorming sessions I settled on 'Dark night of the soul', which I was much happier with.
Alongside obviously awesome music, I wanted to include some spoken word on there too - so near the beginning of the album I popped in old Jarman (the very last section of 'blue') and at the end there's Dylan Thomas reading 'Do not go gentle into that good night'. Because it's wonderful and because poetry rules, even if Thomas does have a slightly odd affected RP accent.
The text here means 'Surrender' in cyrillic. I also made it into a little jigsaw! Because if you're ruminating away during your dark night of the soul, you might like to do a little ponderous puzzle right?I've been really enjoying having a muck about with this new more tonal drawing method I've been working lately. It takes a bloody age to do the originals, mind - I have to work on speeding that up. But rather than leaving the pencil/watercolour pencil drawings as is, I've found photocopying them and then working in ontop of them really adds to them - and also gives them a really cool scratchy, grubbiness which I'm keen to keep. So most of these images are multi-staged collages - pencil drawing first, photocopy, paint, collage, photoshop. Seems to be going ok and I am feeling the colour play at the moment (I do enjoy a bit of colour in my life), but I am slightly concerned about over photoshoping and have resolved to retain a bit more of the hand rendered quality from now. Getting there tho.
Design printed on the CD itself. Cyrillic here - 'escape' (well, as far as i know). I used cyrillic by the way - a) because it looks cool (being honest), b) to enhance a sense of confusion or the unknown (unless you speak russian) c) slight reference to those soviet posters I dig. Ooh and the repeated pattern in the background is a mass drawing of monsters and ghouls and the like, all grossly simplified from paintings by Bosch and Brugel (think night terrors, inner demons. Y'know, that kinda stuff.)
These last two aren't used on the cd by themselves but I like 'em anyhow. Might do something with this last one later on, add some stuff.. dunno. Red rules.
