Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Curiosa Positronica




Remember the robot drawing I posted a couple of weeks ago here? It was for an album cover, and now the album has been released. It's called CURIOSA POSITRONICA, and it's by an ambient ensemble called "MindSpiral." Three guys play all sorts of electronic and occasionally acoustic instruments to create music which ranges widely from prog-rock instrumentals to outright chaotic noise. They are also capable of beautiful musical passages, such as the meltingly melancholy last piece on the album, "La Derniere Lemurien."

If you want to hear "Curiosa" you can download it for free at the "Earth Mantra" website. Earth Mantra is a "net-label," an online music publisher which offers downloads of music rather than sending you a plastic CD. It is maintained by one of the members of MindSpiral who played on this album, and it is a treasure trove of ambient and other experimental musical goodness. And it's all offered at no cost, there for you to explore and enjoy. When you download the "Curiosa" album you also get files for all of the graphics on the liner notes, CD cover tray, and even a round design to print on the CD, all of which you would print yourself to get a fully decorated physical album.

The members of this ensemble are Michael Metlay, who organized it all, Darrell "Palancar" Burgan, who not only manages two netlabels but is the creator and tireless maintainer of Stillstream.com, and David K. Herpich, who creates elegant jazz-ambient under the name of "Emerald Adrift."

This cover graphic is created in Photoshop using a combination of scanned ink drawings, Victorian clip art graphics, and Photoshop digital painting and special effects. The interior graphics were adapted from other work I did for the album.

1 comment:

Tristan Alexander said...

Nice! It does have that computer graphics look in spite of you hand drawn base. But it is striking and works I think. I will have to check out their music.