The award for the longest combination of artist name and album title certainly goes to Electric Landscapes of Rebellion for their album Electric Landscapes with Pigs & Piano on Petcord. They could as well have gone by their more commonly used moniker campo de interferencias (interference field) or their real life names Edith Alonso and Antony Maubert. Maybe combined with a success story of the honours and prices they won for their work, but then again, this would prevent the audience from actual listening, because the authority of their names made them readily accept it without entering their minds. Interference and rebellion has to be seen in a different context, as a daily struggle for one’s art.

Therefore, I focused on the visualisation of those implications. A bright red is often associated with uproar and disruption, it is a very active colour in my opinion that reflects the abrasive, restless aspect of the pieces found on their Electric Landscapes with Pigs & Piano album. The Golden Ratio and Tribonacci constant were of particular importance as there was a lot of empty space to organise. Another necessity was the focus on the cover’s typography: I opted to split the artist name and album title on the two planes of the front in order to avoid stuffing the front with too much information.

The latest work for Petcord involved an electroacoustic piece extraordinaire by Portuguese composer Ziur, André Ruiz (spell it backwards to get the moniker) in real life, called Stantia. Terseness is the key element not just in the selection of titles, but also in the use of motifs, which provides the acousmatic music a crystalline and rather cold appearance. Often based on natural sound sources, it’s the isolation from the context and reassemblage of those bits and pieces that causes the strangeness in sound, much like the principle I use as a base for cover artwork, so finding a translation for the music was a rather easy task for me.

The cover itself is dominated by geometric structures put into shape by the Golden Ratio and Tribonacci Constant (especially on the back), but this time in combination with circle and elipse segments as a contrast. I focused on creating a different way of text integration than on previous covers and fortunately this is one of the more lucky experiments with form and function. The beauty of ratios, numbers and maths in general as a representation of structuring a plane. Friends of botany may have already recognised that the vine on the left half of the front is Solanum Dulcamara.

Digital Mass describe themselves as an anonymous collective of artists that opted for the sparsely populated areas of Southeast Europe as their home base. They have released on Mystified’s Teetrunk netlabel before and thus it came with little surprise that Thomas Park himself stepped in as a mediator between Petcord and them for their album Desolatus Remix. Well, to a certain degree I understand the benefits of being anonymous: Whatever you do, people can only judge you by your work, rather than your performance as a celebrety, idol or otherwise privileged person. This may sound strange at first glance, but on second thought, it makes sense as some people’s judgement may be biased by marketing spin and submission to false authorities and sometimes, you just want to know what people really think of your work.

The cover itself is based on one of my fractal works which I extended to a certain degree. A first draft quickly matured and lied around for some time, but I personally found it too simple, so I took the risk of giving the draft an overhaul where additional complexities have found their way into my work again. The golden and similar recursive ratios were applied more loosely, because I wanted to make more use of my instinct. Perhaps it has to do with yin and yan that the more control you excert over a design, the more you feel the desire to break with all these rules and pretend you’ve never heard of them before. Take the fonts, I felt their placement was right the way it is. Interestingly, some borders sneaked in and took a vital role towards the end, as they delivered the final pattern for the back.

The old year is closing its gates but not without the last Petcord release for December by Fosel called Octahedron. An octahedron, in case you don’t know, is a solid that consists of 8 equilateral triangles that form two opposite pyramids on a square as a common base in the middle. But rest assured, the album itself isn’t particularly dedicated to geometry. Clocking at 78 minutes and 37 seconds, it’s the longest Petcord album ever released and contains music that is neither related to geometry nor botany in general.

The depicted plant is Angraecum eburneum, an orchid that can be found on the island of Madagascar. It formed the basic idea for the cover which Kurt had in mind. The rest evolved rather quickly without any bigger problems. Some geometric refinements were applied whenever a higher form of organisation was necessary. It may be interesting where the prominent use of white has its origin and what it could mean…

Another fourth album on Petcord: René Muñoz Córdova crossed this barrier with the release of his latest album Entity, a work that continues the transition to to dissonant drones and darker ambience first noticed in C, the predecessor. Utopies that do not fulfil, new age unification and empty promises by self proclaimed healers, shamans or prophets seems to be an underlying topic, at least what I can gather from the German voice samples embedded into some of the pieces, returning like a common thread. Just take the sarcasm of En Las Profundidades De La Utopía (In the depths of Utopia), where 30 seconds of nearly complete silence illustrate the nothingness of the enlighted. A black hole behind the facade of hugs and kisses and the certainty that entity equates to a dissolving individual, one that does not ask for explanations or no longer has a right to disagree.

As for the illustration, I based it on several abstract works I created some time ago. The blue white contrast occurred to me as a good match to the music’s main characteristics that do not really provide any sort of comfort and introduce some kind of tension. The golden ratio was applied on several occasions, though not as strict as on other instances, mainly for organising typography. The back is less of a title listing but an illustration of a concept. How two units (or entities) composed of three are balanced out by a middle section. Arrows as another way of demonstrating how these parts are tied together and develop some kind of dynamic.

In the beginning, there was a draft for Ryan Gregory Tallman‘s first album for Petcord, Time Lapses Vol. 1 that consisted of concentric circles illustrating the elapsed time intervals. This quite fit to the music, complex drones that form patterns by modifications of their frequency ranges in my opinion. Curiously, when I first listened to the album, a similar impression appeared before my eyes, long before I took a look at the draft. Back in March I created a graphic with a similar theme, somehow supposed to be a cover sometime in the future and both Ryan and I agreed that this image would provide an insight to the music’s characteristics best.

The original graphic, due to the way it came into existence, had its focusing point in the middle, which isn’t the ideal choice for a cover, because for merging image and typography, the Golden Ratio provides the best way of organising space. This may be another parallel to the music:
It is rather trivial to clutter up an image with multiple layers and facets. But the more you take away, the more thoughts have to go into the organisation of space. Therefore I believe that reduction to the essence for the sake of clarity is the most difficult task an artist can be confronted with and maybe this is a task where plug-ins or automation no longer helps. Then you are on your own with your talent (or its absence).

Time and again I find myself in a double role, like for the Petcord Volume 1 – The Audio Fringe compilation, where I both contribute with a composition and created the cover design based on a photography by Yvette Bird (the third time a work of hers is prominently featured and the last part of the trilogy). The cover art itself was a quick one without too much experiments, since the photography itself is already quite dominating, there was no point in adding any distracting components.

As to my title “un sogno dentro un sogno” (Italian for “a dream within a dream”) on the compilation, the work has become rather eerie and dissonant. Not quite the sound the first incarnation of Synflict stood for, but that’s not too surprising now that Marco’s soothing influence is gone. It may have become something like drone, but eventually, as usual, I could not help adding complexity to the original idea, so that the result would be filed best under electroacoustic. I hope I find some time during the remaining weeks of the old year to follow up with a new album.

The history of the cover for LentoVeloce Propagare D’Abissi, the first album of Valerio Orlandini for the Petcord Netlabel, could be summarised as the art of improvising within a short amount of time. Two weeks earlier than anticipated, the album served as a replacement for a postponed album that needs more time for various reasons. An image the artist found on Wikipedia was thought to grace the cover, however looking closer at the licence, it turned out it was too restrictive to be used and thus, a replacement was needed. Maybe it’s the routine or I just was more focused than usual, but the alternative cover draft quickly evolved to something more mature and most things went by themselves without the need of putting too much thoughts into it.

Again, I used recursive ratios, this time a relative of the Golden Ratio with the main difference being that a length is not composed of two but three successors, which makes this variant an ideal choice for text boxes. Actually, if you look at the image composition, the Golden Ratio occurs there, too, though rather accidentally. The colours on the front cover create a subtile tension, or perhaps even a dissonance which is amplified by the motif itself (leaveless willows on a pond, a photography I took several years ago). Despite its simplicity, the cover is an interesting eye catcher, leaving both the artist and me rather satisfied about the result.

For the latest work of João Clemente on Petcord, Moan, I had the pleasure of creating the optical presentation. Again, this was a cooperation based on a given template, this time by the artist himself. The original draft was rather challeging because it was deliberately grainy, much like a black and white version of noise by digital cameras at high ISO settings. The composition had something intriguing so I opted to use it as a base for refinement and made something rather different out of it.

The basic idea evolved rather rapidly using the Gimp, with some refinements and changes added at the request of the artist, where I took the chance to include some additions, like the re-introduction of using fonts as a decorative element and my usual obsession with ratios and how they reoccur as a common thread of the composition. In the end, the cover became rather distinct and effectful, quite matching to the rather sombre music and its basic feeling of isolation.

Long time Petcord artist Fabio Keiner released his latest work Without Words Without Silence and Synflict contributed to its design part. Also, this was the second image to feature American artist Yvette Bird, who kindly granted permission to use one of her works as a base for the cover art. The poppy theme inspired me to go in greater depth through the process of modification up to the point where the original no longer is distinctly noticed.

Much, if not all, of the graphic elements and the typography is based on the Golden Ratio and once again, luminance and gradients play an essential role here as they did with Through A Glass Darkly’s cover. Since I did not like the idea of repeating the same text over and over again, I chose a different approach to put the song titles on the back and surprisingly, they exhibit geometric qualities, which in return could be used for further refinement. Personally, I think it’s one of the better works.