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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
