You’ve been in the industry for a very long time, as a musician, designer, and an artist as well. What’s your view on how things have evolved when you talk about album artwork?
I'm grateful to be part of a generation that has experienced this entire curve of culture that happened in the past three/four decades. Album Art is still very relevant, of course, but it's just not viewed as what it used to be. I personally feel, on a general scale, the artistic expression and the response it got between the 60s to 90s was the golden era for album artwork; thus, the 'legends' of Album artwork are from that era. It had a longer lifespan of audience attention on larger physical formats that fans collected and cherished for years, and it became an indelible part of their lives. In about two decades that I have been in it, I've seen scenes flourish and perish, bands and trends come and go, and album art morph into multiple versions of what it used to be. But we must remember that Album Art on a whole is still a very young art form with only about a 60 -70-year-old evolution, when compared to other art movements that go back hundreds of years. Maybe, the peak is yet to come.
What makes the artwork such an important part of the Album creation process?
Album Art is the only form of art that gives a face to countless pieces of human expression. Unlike other forms of visual art, which focus on one specific technique, feature, style, or skillset, it provides a much bigger playground. In fact, Album Art is such a vast genre that it's not easy to comprehend the sheer scale of variety it includes—a blend of various forms of art and multimedia, encompassing everything from painting to illustration to typography to graphic design and video art. All of it combines to create this amazing form of art that we know as 'Album Art.' It is much like what it represents because an album is a blend of various forms of musical art. We must as a society first begin to evaluate and appreciate what 'Album Art' is as a whole on its own, as I feel the artists who create album covers have never truly gotten their due yet on a broader platform, when compared to artists involved in other art forms.
Who have been your influences, some of the bands you think have the best artwork?
My personal influences come from a smattering of what I grew up to in the heydays of the 80s & 90s: classic rock, hard rock radio, heavy metal, thrash, death metal, extreme metal (tech death, grindcore, speed metal, thrash death), prog, grunge, shoegaze, alternative, industrial, hardcore, crossover, nu-metal, and modern metal. A countless list of bands from mainstream to underground ones going all the way back to the days of tape trading. The art of Michael Whelan (Meatloaf, Sepultura, Obituary), Dan Seagrave (Entombed, Morbid Angel, Rivers Of Nihil), H.R Giger (Celtic Frost, Triptykon, Carcass), Storm Thorgerson (Pink Floyd), Ed Repka (Megadeth), Derek Riggs (Iron Maiden), Simon Bisley, Zdislaw Beksinski, Norioshi Yohrai, Katsuhiro Otomo, and so many other incredible tattoo and comic artists who created some of my favorite cover art.
I've always gravitated towards iconic and intricate album covers, of a conceptual or thought-provoking nature that draws you into the album. Which is probably why most of my album art has struck a chord with instrumental, progressive, or highly technical bands/artists. If you have an eye for it, you can catch some incredible new album art coming out every other day, and right now at this point in history, I think the album art genre is at its most 'diverse' form ever with so many talented artists.
How do you approach an artwork, do you speak with the band, listen to the album to get into their heads? How does it all work?
It's a collaborative effort based on deep dive discussions and going over the written or recorded material, so that the band and I can identify or solidify the theme, form, and character of the album and then try to find the best way to articulate what we are trying to say with it. Album covers have a rich history and legacy, so I try my best to bring my knowledge of that to the table. Mostly, there's enough free reign to interpret the band's ideas into my style, and I'm grateful to be entrusted with that. But of course, with great freedom comes great responsibility, so I strive to raise the bar with each new release and create something both the band and their fans can be proud of. It's a slow and very demanding process, but greatly satisfying in the long run. In my experience, great album covers have one thing in common: they should stand the test of time, something we should be able to look back on fondly. I make an effort to pursue that at least as much as possible.
Tell us about the most challenging and memorable album art you’ve worked on?
Well, to be honest, every album provides a different mountain to climb and an opportunity to express a new idea upon the world, and I get to learn or grow from that process. The fun is in taking on that adventure, sometimes against stacked challenges like tight timelines, budget considerations, and varied tastes of the individual personalities involved. One of the most challenging and impactful albums was Jinjer's 'Macro' (which celebrated its 4th Anniversary on October 25th, 2023) as it was a huge release with months of involvement and coordinating with a team spread out over 5 continents. I feel great albums must age well, show their worth in a couple of years and decades, and bloom into greatness. I think it’s hard for me to correctly gauge the full impact of any album I get to work with, but ‘Macro’ I was certain that it would only shine brighter with time. Looking back at it 4 years later, I'm amazed to see how much the album means to the lives it has impacted. There are such great memories of the creative process working on this in the open pre-pandemic world, a world with fewer wars or wars for attention. Sigh. In hindsight, what is most satisfying to reflect upon is that the producer, manager, the crew, and I as the artist; we all sort of worked out of simple small setups with simple tools, on a notably career-defining album. Small steps leading to larger changes, a dot becomes a planet, Micro to Macro. Jinjer’s journey bears testament to that fact from starting out as a small band in war-torn Ukraine and becoming such a huge worldwide phenomenon. I’ll always be grateful to have been given the chance to contribute to that great legacy in a small little way.
How has Covid changed things, how has it impacted the music industry? Have the funds dried up, are bands still as keen and invested in getting album artwork that represents the band’s music and ideology?
That's right, there has definitely been a huge shift like with everything else in the Covidian world. Things aren't what they used to be, but I daresay it's slowly starting to gather steam again. The ground reality is that many bands have quit (even some I've worked with in the past) because they were unable to sustain in this new world order. But many found other ways to stay afloat, for example focusing on releasing new merch and singles or product collabs when tours were shut down. The 'pandemic' also turned into a 'bandemic' of sorts, as a ton of new bands and sub-genres sprouted out of the lockdown, which is the silver lining! Many of the old guard are still going strong too with back-to-back new albums. In a way, the downtime gave people the perfect opportunity to extend their creativity. I'm grateful to be a part of that and still work with bands that still take their visual ideology seriously.
Touching on another aspect of this, given that audiences now consume and purchase music in a very different way – most people don’t go out and buy CDs like they used to and now can either access it for free on social media or via streaming platforms. Are bands still incentivized to invest in album art anymore?
Of course, imagery still remains the calling card for any performing artist, even though the landscape has changed from physical to digital streaming. The competition is extreme, every new album released sits in an endless stream of consumption, per-play click returns are negligible, combined with shorter attention spans of audiences, the stakes for great album art are higher than they have ever been. It has to be a different beast now, where Album imagery must translate into great thumbnail visuals, visualizer and lyric videos and also be able to function as visual content for consistent social media presence. It has to evolve with the times.
So when we spoke earlier you said something very interesting, you said that you foresaw AI coming in and changing things completely 2-3 years back. What led you to come to that conclusion?
So, a lot of the background work I do is concept art-oriented which is a key cornerstone of the gaming industry. As many are aware, gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry with cut-throat timelines, and the race to constantly come up with more immersive games is a relentless one. Studios are over-burdened most of the times and tech is pushed to the forefront. With 3D creation being a really time-intensive process, studios began adapting automation way before anyone else.
Though the tech was in development for at least a decade before, around 2018-2019 a lot of concept artists started adapting to AI for storyboarding or generating quick concepts, save rendering time for fully painted scenes. It was kind of rough 'image breeding' where an artist didn't have to spend hours photo-bashing on Photoshop or kit-bashing on 3D to generate believable environment concepts. Though the results were fairly rudimentary, like many other artists involved at that stage, I realized it was only a matter of time before it could be capable of delivering polished art. Factors regarding the pandemic in 2020 sped up the tech, people were stuck at home and online entertainment was bigger than ever before, with the push towards generating non-stop content by the entertainment industry. AI disrupted the mainstream, pushed into NFTs, made its way into advertising, photography, video & music production, and regular image editing apps, and the rest, as they say, is history. The last two years have been the most tumultuous for art because open source AI opened the gateway for non-artists to be able to generate content as art, and we live in an age of content, constant and relentless social media. I signed many 'AI Regulation for Artists' petitions to stop AI stealing artists work and celebrated the U.S Senate hearing, but as we all know Big Tech corporate money buys everything, even Government regulations. Where it goes from here is anybody's guess, but it's a reality we cannot ignore as almost every digital art or design tech is now aimed at an AI-driven future. The AI is getting smarter and evolving at a rapid pace even as we speak. Google's LAMBDA program developed sentience, AI data interfacing tech can predict human behavior better than anything else, our devices almost read our minds.
We already have YT channels for AI death metal. How prevalent is AI for artwork? Or do you think there are still a few years away where bands move onto AI rather than people?
We already have AI generating instrument plug-ins, album art, and music videos for bands (both on big record labels and independently), especially if you look back at 2022-2023 you can see many major releases already adapting. All this with only the earlier versions of the tech which is evolving faster every day. It's only a matter of time now. I see a future where the low to mid-level creators will sadly be wiped out as they won't be needed anymore, only the top shelf creativity with high-level skills and a style totally unique to themselves, have a shot at survival. An artist is now in direct competition with something that is hundreds of times faster and cheaper. In the near future, it won't matter how popular you are or how big your social media following is because content over-saturation has set in; the only thing that can set a human artist apart from an AI artist in the future is going to be a matter of exceptional human skill and creativity. When movies with sound came around in the early 1920s, it wiped out the entire silent film industry, all the mime actors had to either adapt or call it a day, so we too must find our unique individual space to survive the new reality.
But what about the human passion? I would imagine that that’s what really makes artwork shine through? An artist who really wants to do this, has spent years honing in on his skill, not just in putting color to paper but also in assimilating the band and the album’s core and distilling all of that into a single image (of course it can and often is nuanced). How do you replace that, how does AI bring out that layered perspective that (presumably) is the product of a human brain?
I have battled with this question for a long time myself. There are too many questions and not many answers at this point to address these points without raising some larger issues with our society and the human psyche. What AI is doing or at least trying to do is replicate the part of human intelligence where it can mimic at least the aesthetic part of the equation. When art is based on an ultimately commercial audience-oriented goal, it becomes about what's possible within a certain window. From what I have seen those with discerning tastes will always value the artistic passion and skill needed to deliver a layered perspective via the human ability to portray 'emotion'. Artistry will always exist in one form or another.
How do other album artists you are in touch with feel about this?
Everyone is adapting or diversifying into related fields in some way or another. Many digital artists and designers I know of have started moving towards tattoo art or traditional painting, gone back to day jobs in design or turned towards content creation. On the other hand, many more who are embracing the tech, are also hopeful now that Album Art cannot remain a small gate-kept community of a few well-known scene artists, many artists who believe they deserve a shot based on their creativity can actually get it. The playing field is being leveled now.
Where do we go from here and what’s your advice to artists who want to get into the field?
Skynet is already here with industrialized art. The moment of singularity where Artificial
Intelligence is able to create like a human has already kind of happened. Regardless of what the 'experts' will have you believe or argue about, the ethical concerns or how scary it is, we must accept that it's already happened. Even Neo had to enter the Matrix to "see" what it truly is. What trillion dollar tech companies do behind closed doors is always way ahead of what is released to the public, so who knows what's coming next.
What makes the human experience so special and unique is how things make us 'feel', people may bored of the sheer banality of purely digital creation, so maybe could be on the precipice of another era, one where physical & digital, human & machine will collide in new forms and reveal previously unforeseen ways of how art is created and consumed. What you make of it, totally depends on where you want your art to go and how adaptable you are to upcoming challenges. I think the main thing is to chase excellence and consistently keep working on bettering your art, because else nothing stays the same.