Heute erscheint Illuminator, das zweite Album der Shoegazer GIFT um TJ FREDA. Hier bringt er – exklusiv für Popmonitor – im besten Sinne Licht ins Dunkel des faszinierenden Cover-Artworks:

As a very visually minded band certain images come up while writing the music. Illuminator is all about light, speed, water and the passing of time. Speed, fleeting moments, and people coming in and out of your life. A main inspiration for the cover was the emphasis on movement, dance and body movement. The idea for the cover came when Dannah Gottlieb and I were sharing ideas. We both separately brought up the idea of slit-scan photography. A process that has been around for ages. A great example of early slit-scan is the light tunnel scene in Kubricks “2001: A Space Odyssey”. I loved the idea of taking reality and warping it. Taking a somewhat normal occurrence and augmenting it. I wanted the cover to be two people, intertwined in life, warped and glowing. They are wrapped up in each other either becoming closer or separating.

ALEXANDER BAUMANN und ROBERT RUTH vom mit der Realisierung beauftragten Designstudio 502 Bad Gateway fügen hinzu:

Dannah brought us a bunch of references, but the one we were all drawn to was Storm Thorgerson’s cover for the Kansas album In the Spirit of Things, which features people being circled by ghostly slit-scanned figures. We wanted to capture the surreal quality of those silhouettes, while making the figures on the cover twist up around each other in a dynamic embrace. We took slow motion videos of TJ and Jessica and remapped their motion over time onto different parts of the cover, which ended up working like a slit-scan effect with a hand-painted gradient determining the position of their limbs. You get this impression of motion that’s not realistic at all, it’s just conveying this uncanny moment of interaction, colliding discrete moments of their bodies in time.

GIFT
Illuminator
(Captured Tracks / Cargo)
VÖ: 23.08.2024

www.gift-music.com | www.502.haus