The "Art" of Transmission (Part 3)

In the previous two parts of this post, we looked at the artwork for the first five releases from the Transmission project, leaving just the singles Here Comes the Summertime, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Intermission.

Here Comes the Summertime

My personal least favourite of all of them is Here Comes the Summertime - the ideas are fairly clear. The circle of caterpillars somehow seemed appropriate, the lyrics are handwritten, there's some kelp, and the weird seashore shape going diagonally across the image. The earliest attempts were blue:

The weather symbol in the middle - loosely styled on the BBC's symbols - doesn't entirely work unfortunately - we probably should have chosen either a cloud or a sun. But instead we were concentrating on making everything go a murky green colour:

The final result is definitely better than that green one, but ultimately compared to all the other singles it just seems a little bit of a mess:

You can listen to Here Comes the Summertime here.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

As you saw last week, many of the elements that worked their way into the fourth single actually came from the Remission remix EP. Even this had a couple of false starts though - here's the working version:

Which obviously still needed a bit of fine tuning (although if you're looking for trivia, that isn't actually a sad face - it's a character from one of the Inuit fonts I found on my computer).

This mimics the album sleeve very closely: the floppy disc has been replaced with a View-Master reel; the interference pattern has been replaced with a picture of our Korg Prophecy in the background (playing the patch "Lovely Noise") and the waveform has been replaced with the semaphore version of the song's lyrics. Finally, the icon in the centre is a droplet (although it hasn't been confirmed whether this is in fact blood, sweat, or a tear).

You can listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears here.

Intermission

For the final sleeve on the Transmission project, we had a lot of elements to combine. We did have a couple of leftover sleeve ideas, one of which we had vaguely been considering for Golden Wheel, if it had ever been a single:

I had also at one point considered wasting some money and getting an actual 7" single pressed for Distant Moon, for which this might have been the artwork:

Note the image of Simon playing his synths, which sadly still didn't make it onto the final release. I particularly liked the moon icon on this one, which sadly never saw the light of day on an actual release. For the final version, we toned down the colour slightly, and combined our favourite bits of both the sleeves:

I think the waveform on the right hand side may still actually be from the vocals for Distant Moon, but it didn't seem to matter hugely with this release. The spider icon, web, and vinyl are there from the Golden Wheel sleeve, and most of the elements are there from Distant Moon too.

You can listen to Intermission here.

So that concludes our little journey through the artwork of the Transmission era. Hopefully you've enjoyed the trip!

The "Art" of Transmission (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this post, we examined the genesis of the visual style of our most recent album Transmission, and looked at how the first two releases ended up looking the way they did.

I'll Give You Electro

After the multi-layered complexity of the album, we decided to keep the single sleeves relatively simple, but we still worked a few oddities into this second single:

This is the only sleeve from the album which doesn't contain any photos. The initial background is a sort of vague, badly stylised circuit board pattern (inspired by the badly stylised interference pattern on the album). Overlaid on that is some binary code, which like the waveform on the album says "I'll give you electro," except for fun I took out the first column, as they were all zeroes, and replaced it with the words "ELECTROHYPERNOVA". And the centrepiece this time is an electric danger sign which we drew especially.

Ultimately the lack of photo makes it just look a bit like a wallpaper, but it's reasonably effective.

You can listen to I'll Give You Electro here.

Remission

For the remix EP, we decided to take a more complex approach, like the album sleeve. It was actually combined from two different sleeves, as we couldn't quite work out which direction to take it. This is the original sleeve for what might have been the Eyeballing single:

This version didn't last particularly long, due to the slightly disturbing bloodshot look, and because we already had the vague idea that Blood, Sweat and Tears might be a later single. At the same time we were also working on alternative ideas:

Interestingly, the eject icon was never actually used, but ultimately, ideas from both sleeves were combined, and the colouring was altered slightly, to create the final sleeve:

Which is distinctly less disturbing than some of the early versions.

You can listen to Remission here.

I'll Give You Electro II

The reissue of I'll Give You Electro came about very quickly and largely accidentally. Since we were tweaking everything a bit (a different version of the single, with different b-sides) we decided to change the artwork too.

This early attempt proved how easy it is to make these sleeves into a bit of a mess:

In the end we added a photo of some banana plugs from my Chimera Synthesis BC-16 mini-modular synthesiser, altered the colouring, pushing the circuit board image right back into the distant background, and added a different centrepiece. I think I prefer this version to the original:

By the way, the title I'll Give You Electro II only came about when we were uploading the single and realised that we couldn't have two releases with the same title, otherwise it might have appeared on the artwork too.

You can listen to I'll Give You Electro II here.

In part 3, we'll take a look at the later sleeves from the Transmission project.

The "Art" of Transmission (Part 1)

Of all our albums to date, I think Transmission probably had the longest gestation period, and the artwork developed very slowly over a number of years. This week we're already celebrating the third anniversary of its release, which seems a good opportunity to take a look back at how the "look" of the album evolved.

Initial concepts

After a few false starts, the very first idea we had was that we would incorporate images of retro technology into the artwork, so I spent some time over Christmas 2007 taking photos of old tapes, floppy discs, and vinyl, like this one which you might recognise from the Remission sleeve:

Not having taken the time to find any sheets for the background or light the images properly inevitably meant we had to diminish the quality of the images somewhat before we could use them for anything, but soon we were coming up with concepts such as this:

With 7"-sized sleeves for the singles, and LP-sized ones for the album. The battered 7" sleeve is from a series of singles containing nursery rhymes which I had as a child, and the 12" sized one is from a promotional single (I think it's Alizée's Moi Lolita, although I might be wrong).

I chose the silhouette of myself from the original Here Comes the Summertime video, although we played with a few other ideas too. At some point the waveform concept made its way in, as well (note the album title Distance - I don't remember if this was ever seriously considered, but it would have been quite a good name).

By late 2010, we had a relatively clear idea of what the visual style might be, but we still weren't quite sure how to fit all the ideas together, so a brief sidestep took us to what I called the "squares concept", trying to build a sleeve using evenly spaced images laid out across the page:

From this you can see we gained the centrepiece, replacing the actual cut-out vinyl section, where somehow the cassette spindle seemed to fit the bill rather nicely. This would become one of the key parts of the album imagery.

Better Days

Once the album was almost complete, we decided that Better Days was would be the first release, and we wanted to keep it relatively simple, so we just went with the arm waving image on the 12" sleeve, without too much processing, so that you should still just about be able to tell that it's taken from a real photo.

My only regret is the choice of colour - I'm not sure why we never changed if from that foul shade of vomit green which you can see on some of the early conceptual versions above. But never mind...

You can listen to the Better Days single here.

Transmission

There were some quite effective early versions of the album sleeve floating around in early 2011, such as this one:

Which actually works quite nicely in its minimalism (and no, that wasn't ever going to be the album title). I was keen to use the image of Simon, because I really like it, but that was vetoed. Somewhere along the line, it lost the 12" photo backdrop, and gained the floppy disc pieces instead:

Finally, within a couple of weeks we had added the waveform (that's me saying "transmission," in case you were wondering) and the simulated interference pattern, and we had a completed album sleeve, although we weren't too sure about the colour:

We had already had a "green" album (2002's Zero), and so we wanted to try something different. Another early attempt used a colour called "grandma's refridgerator," mainly just because we liked the name:

But finally we ended up with the bold blue colour, and since we had never even had a blue single before, let alone an album, this definitely seemed the way to go:

With the album sleeve complete, we had what we thought was a strong visual style for the album, something worthy of following up the Dusk sleeves of which we were also very proud. We just needed to ensure we could keep up the theme for the rest of the album releases.

You can listen to Transmission here.

In part 2 of this post, next week, we'll share some of the concepts and final designs for the early Transmission singles.