The second artwork update is for 2019’s No Place.
That album is all about imaginary, dreamed, otherworldly, impossible “places.” The old cover art gave the impression of weirdly scaled lit windows on misshapen skyscrapers, with a bright glaring fog in the background obscuring the hinted outlines of other shapes.
I simply drew a few black rectangles over the top of the foreground buildings, and ran some “find edges” filters on the remaining space in all its vagueness, and did some flood fills in white to partially cover odd empty spaces. I found an aerial photo of Manhattan, pixelated it and grunged it up so it was almost an anime cyberpunk look, and masked that in. There was a bunch of other manipulation, color and tone adjustments etc. but that’s the gist of it. Again, the old text layers just got put right back as they were.
I like that it sort of gives the illusion of sandstone rock formations in a canyon (or at least a blocky procedural version from the game “Superflight”), and the illusion of nebulae in space, while being neither of those things. And I like that the buildings and sky don’t quite look like they should be in the same scene… like it’s not an ordinary sky but an intrusion from a different world.
I’ve fallen in love with Glitch Effect Maker. It’s not totally comprehensive, and it’s not actual databending which reveals something of the nature of file formats and compression. But it can displace color channels, add noise and scan lines and that sort of thing in fun ways. Of course, the rows of lit and unlit windows in the image (enhanced by pixelating it) themselves give an impression of scan lines.
My visual methods in some ways reflect the processing I do to audio. It’s not unusual for me to distort, bitcrush etc. a sound and then filter or smooth it back out, or vice versa, all in the interests of texture.
The URL for the updated image is https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3510409215_10.jpg
