Keep Up!

The art of the record sleeve: Short interview with Openmind

Openmind recently designed the sleeve for forthcoming King Cannibal’s excellent 12” Murder Us/Virgo. The unusual imagery sparked my curiosity, so I asked Strictly Kev (AKA Openmind) whether he would be happy to answer a few questions about it.


What was the brief for King Cannibal sleeve?

I don't think there was one, Dylan sent me the tracks and we decided that whilst Aragami style was great that we shouldn't follow it or copy it because A) it was done by someone else who probably wouldn't appreciate us copying their style and B) the tracks were very different in style to Aragami. We both agreed that it should be fairly abstract but with dark overtones IE I don't know what that is but it's a little unnerving whilst also being quite beautiful to look at. Dylan was very easy to work with and just let me get on with it.

What was your involvement in the whole process? Did you do it all
yourself start to finish? (Art Direction, Design and Artworking)

Yep, chose the type, made the image, photographed and Photoshopped it, laid out the sleeve and made the logo.

Was there anything in particular that inspired you whilst working on this cover?

Not with respect to the image that came out of it no, I did do a set of completely different ideas that were rejected that were based around spectorgraph images of audio wave forms. They were nice and I'll save them for a rainy day as they will find a home sometime, they came about because I started using a new piece of software that came a multicoloured view of the audio spectrum of a file rather than just the waveform. I grabbed screenshots of different files and played with them in Photoshop so that piece of software kind of inspired that idea.

Can you tell me a bit about how you went about constructing the image for the cover of the sleeve if you can? What was the liquid used and did you shoot it all yourself?

OK, this is where I burst your bubble :) I wanted to do some oil and ink in water experiments to see what I could come up with that would look abstract and menacing so I looked for ink and paint in my supplies but found that all I has was some fabric paint. I thought it was black but it turned out that it was dark brown and when I dropped it in water it reacted by curling up into tiny worm-like tentacles. I half filled a discarded coffee jar with water and dropped a load of paint in, it curled up and I had very little time before the water started to dilute the paint and make everything muddy.

I propped my digital camera over the rim of the jar and tried to get as many shots as I could before the water became muddy. I had to use flash which rebounded off the water and is cropped out on the final image. In the end I only got one usable image but this was the one we used after I put it in Photoshop and tweaked the colour and exposure. Because it's such a close up detail of an image you have a nice lot of noise giving it a certain grain which I like also.

The back cover image was another, barely usable, shot from a second session I did where I tried to capture what I'd done the first time again. This was then heavily Photoshopped to make it seem like a landscape but we both agreed that the original image was the best one for the cover.

What other recent record sleeves have caught your eye?
Trunk records, almost without fail, turn out great sleeves that hark back to a certain age. La Boca have been doing some amazing stuff for DC for the last few years but I can't say a lot of sleeves have caught me recently. The current fashion for florescent 'anti-design' with all manner of wacky typefaces harking back to the 80's really doesn't float my boat. People like Trevor Jackson have the ability to take the simplest elements and do something quite minimal and beautiful with them and I've always been a fan of Andy Votel's hand drawn typefaces.

You’ve designed quite a few record sleeves over the years. Which are your personal favourites?

Amon Tobin's Out From Out Where, Funki Porcini's Fast Asleep, The Dragons' BFI, Amon Tobin remixes and collaborations, DJ Vadim Life From the Other Side and a Grey market Goods 12" I did for Thrill Jockey in the style of Vaughn Bodé for a friend.

How do you see the future of music packaging?

Unfortunately I think it will only really come into it's own with deluxe sets, of which there are more and more now in an attempt to tease money out of a consumer who gets most of their music for little or nothing. It's actually quite an exciting time for music design as people dream up more and more outlandish packages to accompany their music (see recent NIN and new U2 releases) People who are prepared to spend money want something special for it instead of a dull jewel case or a non-existant object (downloads) There is so much music and so many people vying to get noticed that the better the design and the package then the more likely people will pick up and listen to the music it contains.