We knew we wanted this whole suite to be a fully-realized conceptual package, and so we commissioned Chris Boni at the very beginning to create the entire visual element, from album art to videos. The pleasant and arousing masquerade that hides a very sinister darkness underneath. For sure, our darkest themes yet, all sugar-coated by a nice, pop-music sheen. We were playing with notions of subversiveness by presenting lighter sounding, more pleasing, tropical grooves underneath strong, biting comments on youth culture, consumerism, late-night parties, surveillance, misogyny and apocalyptic death drives. The larger conceptual idea behind Pageantry Suite was already carved out musically, lyrically and thematically. In our case, the visual work that made up the cover was almost entirely the intuitive response of Chris Boni to the music on the album. I thought that a paper version of Brancusi’s Bird in Space (left) sculpture would inhabit this abstract playhouse. Obviously referencing Matisse in elements of design and in media, I built a diorama of three-dimensional paper structures and worked on top of them with pencil and paint, trying to add the illusion of space on top of real space like a trompe l’oiel. Orlando let me take charge with this concept, and even though it seems at odds for a label that is interested in the possibilities of technology, I thought that creating a “futuristic” all computer-generated image would be too literal and that, above all, experimentation with different processes was more important for the cover. On the other EFN covers, I had worked 80% on the computer, digitally collaging paint strokes with some 3D modeling, but this time I wanted to physically build the environment without relying too much on digital work.
The image I had in mind was a structure, with hints of 1960s Italian architecture, that was both rigid and permeable, sort of like an Escher print something surreal and just a little confusing visually, to reflect the soothing but odd atmospheric sound of the album. For Relax and Rolex, I wanted to design another interior environment, a continuing theme of the previous Escape from Nature covers.
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