Continuing with the theme of designing record covers for the YouTube generation, the artwork I created for this year’s New Blood compilation on Med School has been going down famously!
For this album, I created twenty bespoke videos based on my original cover art idea – using a subwoofer to vibrate a pool of blood-coloured oobleck – one for each track. You can see the whole playlist of them all here:
It’s surprising how different the results were based on the different tunes – some of the basslines created very uniformed ripples, whereas some made the mixture go absolutely nuts!
The idea for all of this nonsense came about in a typically Ricky Trickartt fashion. My original idea was going terribly, and I had recently taken delivery of a new round dining table. The shape of the dining table was important to the idea’s conception: our cork placemats were square, so I had cut them into circles to match the table, and the offcuts were sitting on my desk asking me to do something with them. The cork scraps were getting in my way for a few days before the penny dropped, when I remembered that cork floats.
I ran up a test version and sent it off to Med School HQ, where everybody liked it, but said my nice cork letters looked like they were either made of Ryvita or Weetabix. I was kind of bummed out that all my nice cork was being rejected, but I couldn’t dwell on it – I moved on to some white foam as an alternative solution.
Getting the shot wasn’t the most sociable process (Lilly described my subwoofer manhandling as ‘serious ghetto rattle’), and after nailing the cover shot, guilt got the better of me and I stopped – we had just moved in to this apartment and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with our new neighbours!
Instead, I loaded up my Vespa with all of the equipment and hit the road – The Purple Gates’ studio was a much more sound-proof location for rattling subwoofers and buckets of non-newtonian fluid.
Soundproofing aside, I still felt bad about the noise, but the Hospital staffers assured me that it was nothing compared to when Danny Byrd comes in to do his mixdowns (!), so I felt a bit better about cracking on. It proved a bit of a spectacle to everyone though, with various people dropping in to see what I was up to.
After a day of low-frequency rattling, the artwork and all the videos were done, and following a one-a-day schedule over the past three weeks, they’re all up now, and the album is available to buy now on all formats.