Dead Leaf Echo: Truth 12” / The Mercy of Women LP
For this rerelease of an earlier single, I used the original photography but added some gritty texture—for the portrait, too. The truth is rarely neat and tidy, is it? I contrasted this with a very clean, largely blank back cover, a trick I’ve been wanting to revisit since designing the GusGus ‘Polydistortion’ single at 4AD.
For the unrelated LP The Mercy of Women, I married found vintage tintype photography with a strict grid of lines—then let the typography shift as the muse took me. The old portraits—and perhaps the hair of the cover model—reminded me of the short-lived Victorian hobby of arranging seaweed. No, I’m not making that up. The results are beautiful, uncanny and somewhat alien. I was able to find an example in the public domain for use here.
