Mouse On Mars - Parastrophics artwork

Link: Mouse On Mars
Link: Monkeytown

"...We found out about the Shakers — they were similar to the Quakers in the 19^th century. They tried to reconsider religion and use America as new ground to do that... They had a very tolerant idea of the non-material world and the idea of Jesus. They had this practice where they drew all these weird maps of things that happened to them in a day, including the ghost world and mathematical formulas. And this whole map looked like a score or a diagram to create a machine. So we used this as the album sleeve — that’s a Shaker design."
(MTV Hive)

"...And then, we found those Shakers drawings, which basically we stole… or took as inspiration for the album. And the Shakers were a weird religious sect because men and women in the group were equal; they had the same rights, for within the 19th century, it was quite radical. They were great craftsmen, but also liberal in a way, very un-dogmatic. And they even had this idea of a metaphysical world that they would deal with in drawings, in craftwork, in poems. So we used this kind of worldview for the record."
(Exclaim.ca)

Photos: Steve Loya

Work by Non-Format

There's already a picture of Non-Format's Red Snapper artwork on the Hard Format post but, looking through their portfolio, there are so many perfectly realised music projects. The sort of stuff that would make it worth trekking to the shops for.

Fabrice Lig - Genesis of a Deep Sound

Compared to some of the more luxurious packaging I've posted, the artwork for techno producer Fabrice Lig's Genesis of a Deep Sound long-player might be seen as fairly standard. A collaborative effort by Edit (creative production) and Sawdust (art direction and design) with photography by Andrew Moore [who supplied visuals from his book Detroit Disassembled], it does feature a really nice inlay, 180 gr vinyl and two locked grooves.

What especially drew me to it is how it seems to follow on from Paul Rand's Mechanized Mules of Victory project [bottom two images]. I'm not sure if this is coincidental but Rand created a book that looked at what the American car industry was doing for the war effort while Moore's photographs highlight the dereliction of that same industry after the Second World War. On a more basic level, the use of yellow and black also links these two projects.

I'd like to think that one has had an influence on the other but then I'm quite happy for them to be linked by accident too.