Broken Toy

 

 

 

 

A lot of effort went into the artwork for TLDDSO and it yielded amazing results. I’m not sure how the rest of you feel , but I don’t reckon that the standard of graphics on most psytrance cds is very high. Its definitely nowhere near as conceptualised and well executed as an album released by your average established band for example. I was hoping to change that with this cd and come up with something that really impressed me on a personal level. If it could impress me, then the rest of the world should be fine too.

 

Before I begin rambling, I’d just like to say that although I don’t mind that people copy, download and trade music for free, I am disappointed that most of the people that own this album will never own the real artwork, which I consider to be 50% of the product itself.

 

About 6 years ago, I was perusing a pile of old records in a second hand store in Stilbaai, a seaside holiday town on the east coast of South Africa. I came across a series of compilations from the `60s called “Sounds Electronic”. The songs contained on the LPs were apparently “electronic dance remixes” of hit songs of the day. Although I have never listened to the records, the covers left a lasting impression.

 

 

Scantily clad ladies on fluffy shag carpeting fiddled with old school 8-track players and valve amplifiers in what was a delicious feast of retro soft porn. Tasteful yet smutty and authentic.  I suppose they were done in the same era as the infamous Springbok Records nude girls thing, but these were of course involving an element of electronics too.

For some reason, when considering what to do on MY album cover, I decided I wanted something involving the same things. Girls and gear.

 

         

 

Of course there was only one person for the job that I knew would handle the project with the same passion as me, and that was my good school friend Brendon Barnard. He’s the lead singer for 21st Century Tragedy, a metal band from Cape Town, and has done artwork for Damage and Artifakt amongst many others. He works for one of the biggest advertising agencies in South Africa and his time is scarce!

He hadn’t been able to work on my previous album because he was tied up with proper paying work and I’d been very disappointed with the results. I wasn’t prepared for the same thing to happen again, so we got started 6 months in advance on this. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of hard work got scrapped as ideas were streamlined along the way, but I think the results of this speak for themselves.

 

 

 

Due to a nonexistent budget, the cover was originally intended to be something purely graphic or illustrated. A few drafts were done and the colour scheme of pink, black and grey was established. Also, the idea of using a gramophone was decided on – something that would become more of a central theme both in the music and the artwork to follow. As it was, I did a track involving gramophone/ jaunty cowboy bar coin-operated piano sounds that never made it onto the album in the end due to its weirdness. This will be available as a free download on this site soon.

 

As time passed, I fretted over the fact that it would be much more provocative if real girls were used instead of drawn ones. But what of the budget? Where would we find girls willing to be photographed semi-nude performing depraved acts? Well, there was only one person I could think of – My girlfriend.

Malu ( the blonde one BTW) has loads of friends in modelling and fashion, and after I suggested the idea to her, put plans in motion that culminated in us organising make-up artist, stylist, models and photographer all to work for free. Yeah! What had started out as a small idea had grown into a full team of highly skilled people all dedicating their talents to my project. Its all thanks to their hard work and kindness that this became something that I could not be more proud of if I tried.

Everything was shot on 35mm film and looked beautiful despite how fuggin` expensive all the processing and scanning was.

 

                 

 

The more we worked, the more the idea expanded. By the time the track “Down on the farm” was written something became clear to me. The vibe and mood  from the previous album had been set in the inside of a claustrophobic dark house, and that this new album was to be the outside of that house – down on a farm. The wide-open desolation of the plains – flat land stretching for miles out where the heat haze rises and lizards bake in the sun. Gates creak and the wind brings distant howls of jackals on the cloudless air. A great place to hang out.

 

Creating this environment in my mind had been important, and bringing it to life with the correct flora and fauna had been easy as there was more than enough inspiration from the beautiful surrounding fynbos. Loads of forays into the mountains were made, taking pics of proteas and other wacky plants to use in the art.

In the end, the exterior of the house was only used on the back of the cd and it wasn’t possible to add all these elements into such a small place for fear of clutter, but its still very much alive in my mind. Living in the world I was creating for this album made it fun enough for me to actually finish writing it in the first place.

 

           

Brendon did a hell of a lot of postproduction on the photographs and streamlined the “speaker bats”, which are based on the monitor speakers I use in my studio – the EMES black TV Hr  (possibly the most symmetrical and coolest looking monitors out there). The speaker bats are pretty awesome and make an excellent logo too. Wickedly delightful little bass monsters are they, flying through your windows at dusk to blast you unexpectedly.

 

 

A promo image was set up at this stage to go out in an Alchemy records newsletter to promote the album. This was raising issues with the label, who thought that the front cover that we wanted was a bit too smutty. For the promo, a gramophone and textured background shot was set up as a toned down substitute, but I was refusing to let all the hard work and organising that had gone into this be canned simply because some people thought it was too edgy. Using sexy girls to sell a product? How unheard of!

Luckily, an awesome compromise was reached by the inclusion of a slipcover to hide the offensive images beneath – something I wholly approve of. We wouldn’t want a young child to be surfing the internet and run across these images randomly in an online psytrance record store now would we? Poor buggers would be traumatised…

 

The next step would be to wade through all the pics and decide on a decent pose. There were plenty of options, but we decided on the one with the most heavy grinding action because the other ones didnt seem powerful enough. The others, although beautiful, didnt seem like the girls were actually doing anything- they were just standing there looking hot and stuff. Plus on the one we chose , the composition of the whole frame is solid and really cool.

 

            

 

Once it was all done, the last bit of stress was seeing how the printing would come out once the whole album was pressed. Arabesque distribution had done the pressing of my first album and it had been an absolute disaster. Never mind that I was totally unhappy with the design in the first place, Arabesque had somehow used a thumbnail sized image of the front cover, blown it up to a full pixelated haze, and then leached and drained the colour out of it somehow before going ahead and printing ALL the copies and shipping them off to retailers. An absolute fuck up, and not a single cd of that first album was pressed looking the way it should. When I first laid eyes on it and realised that this was what my first album looked like, I experienced this strange dull shock accompanied by dead silent sadness that settled down deep within me. Thanks guys. Great job.

 

Saikosounds were organising the printing and distribution on the second album. They stressed about every little detail and getting the format and colour exactly right the way it was supposed to be. A bit of an adaption from our side was needed, but at least we didn’t have any doubt that they had our products’ best interest at heart and it turned out great! Thanks guys! Great job!

 

 

So is anybody missing the symbolism of me sitting in a chair, tying up with an audio cable and draining my dark evil blood into a gramophone so that my lovely assistants can crank it up and unleash it upon the world in speaker-bat form?

 

Just checking…