New
- Old
Not too long ago I decided to update the cover of my current work in progress, Songs about the Ends of a Universe. The reason for this was, quite frankly, the old one looked pretty shitty, even for Krachfabrik’s low standards. Basically that old one was made in the same vein as older Krachfabrik covers: “Just doing it, not caring whether it looks good or not”. At least I’ve somewhat tried to make the new one a little visually appealing. Anyway, the imagery has changed a little, but the symbolism is still the same. Although if you wanted to you could say the new cover depicts the process of achieving the album’s theme/concept/whatever at a later stage.
That theme, by the way, is to expand one’s horizon, to find new things and see old things in a new light. I think I only told about two or three people before. How did I even get to that theme? Easy. I thought: “Why not try something new?” The end. So far none of my albums had real themes. The Albums were theme named, of course. There was always a reference to music, sound and/or noise and how it sounded pretty much like shit. But other than that there was nothing much. Besides that, I think I’m beyond the point where I have to point out how bad my music is. I still do, but hey. It’s not like it’s objectively bad anymore, I’ve improved a lot since those early days and while I don’t write great music yet at least my stuff appeals to a certain audience, which consists solely of three people and my mom. Just kidding, my mom thinks it sucks.
I’ll now go on to explain the meaning behind those covers and compare them a little, so if you want to be all clever and find stuff out for yourself you should not read beyond this paragraph. If you’re unable to you just might run into some random guy on the internet who tells you about that totally deep shit going on in the covers of that crack fabric, man. But no, I’m far from famous enough to have random people rambling about possible meanings behind a pile of shade and color I made to visually underline my musical works.
If you know the theme and have seen the covers you should really be able to figure it out yourself. But maybe I’m just saying that because I made these things. So, what we see on the covers is basically a human (or any) self extending it’s petals (consciousness) towards the borders (the ends) of its individual universe (mind). By that expanding it further towards the borders of the album cover, which sadly is only 900 by 900 pixels big. What kinda two dimensional, shallow being allows itself to get imprisoned by the dimensions of an album cover? I feel the need to point out that you should not take that last bit seriously. I know some people would.
There are twelve of those “petals”, one for each of the twelve songs I traditionally put on each album. Not like I’m going meta and add a thirteenth song which I’ll claim isn’t even on the album, right? Err. So. One petal for each song. The flower motif is a little more obvious on the old cover, but I figured the petals shouldn’t all have the same shape. And the random patterns, while serving a point, just looked really really bad. So I went with random shapes and the color spectrum in the new one. Which serves the same point, although in a different way. The grey petals on the old cover don’t really have much of a meaning. They just were the one’s without words on them.
I tried to make both of those look different. The first one had the album’s title written on the colored petals, basically written in a half circle and the logo blended with the rest of the cover and almost turned invisible. With the new, rather random shape of the petals I couldn’t write the title on them anymore, not the way I wanted. So what I did was to cram the words in the lower left corner turned around by a random multiple of 90°. The logo just kinda sits there, doesn’t care which way it looks. You might just flip the whole cover upside down and still think it’s right.
The most obvious and also greatest change I made is right there in the center. In the old one we just see a galaxy. The new one has a caleidoscope of Poussini’s painting Et in Arcadia ego. The intended meaning of that phrase is not known, and it can be interpreted in many ways. Personally, I like Grant Morrison’s idea in The Invisibles, where several characters think it means “In paradise I am” also suggesting that paradise is in one’s mind. I chose to put it in the middle because I think that if you truly want to expand your mind you’ll have to move a little away from that safe haven, the paradise in your mind. Why else would you ask a brave, progressive and open-minded thinker whether he’s out of his mind? NAAAAAH. It’s a little darkened, that is supposed to show, that while the paradise might always be in us, we may not be able to see or accept that “fact”. It certainly is one way to see things, and I thought it gave the cover a nice finishing touch.
Mileage may vary to ridiculous degrees, of course. As always. But I like the my little cover. And now I wrote ten thousand paragraphs no one will ever care about, but at least I passed some time.
