This artwork takes three forms:
As a vinyl, as a bespoke record player/gramophone and also as a full length album upload on YouTube.
This concept was not made for a specific musician in mind, it rather came about via general cross-pollination between my musician friends and myself, a visual artist.
The visual concept plays with ‘wax’ on many levels, and is supposed to capture the turn of the century hi-fi/lo-fi zeitgeist - the blending of the analogue and digital.
The humanoid accoutrements that make up the gramophone, the hand as the needle and the ear as a speaker, aestheticise the old tech. The means become an end.
The pointing hand needle is the arbiter of taste: the DJ’s finger on a touchpad or keyboard, stressing a singular sensibility, the will and whim of the consumer. Beneath the obvious subversion, the ear represents the importance of listening rather than speaking in a world of already deafening output.
The hard-copy album format is out, since most people find their music on YouTube, primarily a video sharing website. So I decided to animate the album cover I designed so the candle spins and melts to fit the duration of a given album so that it could exist in the same way most albums do now, but with a twist that no one else has tried before (see third image).
The image of the record player playing the album that it is designed for then being broadcast on the web, captures the self-reflexive quality of 90s/early 2000s revivalism.
The piece meanders across uncanny valley but ends up in dramatic metaphysical space, witnessing the digital distillation of space and time, the variable melting into the constant.
