King Cardinal
Reviver
Album art as science experiment:
Swabbed instruments serve as seeds for 12 petri cultures that mutate and bloom to organic life.
Often we aim to capture the what of an album: what it sounds like, what its lyrics represent, what themes it has. But for this particular album we captured the how.
Because the ‘how’ of this album was unique. Where past King Cardinal albums followed a linear path (writing a demo, arranging its parts, capturing it, etc.), Reviver was more like small seeds of ideas, passed around among collaborators; each growing, branching, and mutating into unpredictable complexity and beauty.
This core idea gripped us. We started thinking of visual metaphors that grow organically. Seeds that sprout, mutate, branch. We wanted to find a process that we could start ourselves with some sort of seed, that would then unfold organically.
So we created twelve different petri dish cultures — one for each song — swabbing the instruments, clothes, and even bodies that contributed to each song. We let the 12 cultures grow for weeks, each culture emerging as a unqique organic signagure of its parent song.
In the end the art became—simultaneously—an exercise in rigorous, scientific control and the complete abandonment of creative control. We set the initial parameters and started the experiment going, but quickly found us ourselves simply waiting and observing as the cultures grew and mutated into unpredicable and completely surprising life.
| Made Shop® | Art Direction Concept & Creation Photography Layout & Design |