some new things: a cd design and launch for PAULIEN a jazz singer

A new CD launch and done the artwork.

You can see it's a trifold with the back being one cool looking

 landscape blast.

This made sense to me cuz you gotta unfold it to look at the back anyways...

Pinks are for little naive girls, but Paulien is kinda tougher than those little pinks so I made her back cover a little more blue and maybe even a little more nasty than regular sweet 

pink.

From listening to her voice and punctuation, I'd guess she's not just your nice little pink girl the next continent. I mean, after all, what would you expect from a woman from the Low Country?

Mildly blue like the water, mildly blue being low?

Check out this sample of Be my Valentine

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Paulien and Gerard now hailing from Charlottesville are not country. They're not rock, ragtime or bluegrass either. They sure don't sound like other bands from Cville like Dave Matthews (colloquially "Dave", not DMB in cville) or Possum Delight. In fact, they're not even yanks.

But Paulien can dial some really nice haunting, chasing desperate, maybe suicidal and breezy jazz. Check out that link above, close your eyes and ponder what you "see" for artwork. Pete Turner comes to mind as a visual force for abstract aural sensory mapping in film, now pixels- and is one of the additives I like to mull when I walk the streets of Ponce de Leon being Old San Juan, for example.

I tried to pitch them a little bit of some cool photos but nothing really stuck except for a hinge I photographed in Avignon, France.

This:

Not thisa one:
Or thissa one:

I was honored they'd ask me to put together the artwork and design for their latest cd. I didn't shoot the portrait on the cover or create the "circle P" logo, but did supply a nice provencal hinge and put all the rest of the color blends and design together. Not having worked with the cd manufacturer and its printer before made for a bit of a stretch guess on colors. To be told the press is gonna shred my favorite bits was sorry but Gerard went for it and we all were quite pleased with the results. Bravo and phew!

This brings up a detour which I wanna address as a complete topic sometimes, but it is so irksome I'm just gonna say it here, too: Everybody's shooting digital these days- it has surpassed film at the top end in every respect (shut the fuck up), so why don't printers have their machines ICC profiled so we digital pros can soft proof the artwork without guessing????

God darnnit aunty May, come up to the day's standards will ya? Okay, feeling better now.

Here's a bit of the Paulien project in photos. We were lucky to establish in the beginning there was a need to make the album liner look like the music sounded, we agreed on the sound (which was a nice hurdle to not have to jump) and we wound up with kind of an abstract looking thing that aspires to beyond the confluence of album artwork and moody jazz vocals (or so I think). Basically, it's really fun trying to conjoin and blend an aural abstraction with a visual one!

You can get the tunes (cd, right) from Amazon or cd baby and here's the "official site" (which could use a little torque in the hip department if you really want the truth).

Work my two favorite senses... looking and listening (whilst virtually screaming out the tobacco from New Year's resolution is like scratching anthropomophized lightning bugs' heads together on star trek). Really, it's actually "trying to see and trying to hear", ya know?

Chow for niao