Blue Cover Art

The third installation of cover art I am illustrating for music producer Dark Fellow.

The release is a combo of two tracks "Blue I" and "Blue II" and you can hear it and download it at Ignite The Sound.

Dark Fellow's 5-part "Blue" composition is easily one of my favorites on the album. "Blue I" opens with slow, moody arpeggios in an organ tone, but at the beat drop it explodes into a huge track with a bass line that makes you want to jump buildings and swooping overtones to give you wings, all atop the cascading arpeggios that are the breath of the song.

Once again Dark Fellow defies the customs of electronic music. Blending inspiration from classical music with a refined techno sensibility, he delivers a sound that is unlike anything else his contemporaries are up to. In fact the closest you'll probably get is Larry Fast (aka Synergy), a pioneering musician of the late 1970s who composed colossal symphonic electronic works on the synthesizer. Dark Fellow is pushing a vision of electronic music that focuses on composition, dynamics and attention to detail. Fuck dubstep.

"Blue" belongs to a trio of tracks inspired by Yves Klein's pink monochromes. "Blue represents the immaterial zone, a state of non-being-within-being or of void-without-void, the unattainable higher consciousness, Nirvana." I choose Icarus as my subject.

Icarus and his father Daedalus were imprisoned by King Minos in the labyrinth. The two patiently bode their time collecting feathers that drifted into the maze and eventually Daedalus had enough to fashion two sets of wings, sealing the feathers together with wax. Daedalus warned his son to fly neither too high nor too low, but to follow his father's path through the sky. But as the two of them escaped and glided over the sea, Icarus grew bold. He beat his wings and flew higher, giddy with the warmth of the sun on his face. When Daedalus realized he could no longer hear his son behind him, he looked up and saw Icarus plummeting to the sea. Icarus had flown too close to the sun, and the wax that bound his wings was melted.

Icarus. Inspiration, innovation. Leap of confidence. Falling into nothing. Immateriality, inversion. Motion, flight, escape. International Klein Blue. The figure in flight is based off of Klein's famous "Leap into the Void" photo. Immateriality is the wax, at once holding together but gone in a heat flash, solid to fluid. The maze is the prison from which he escapes, but also it is a non-space, an infinite room, a void to which there is no purpose, no true direction. The Fall. Disintegration. Death terrors. Hubris.

Materials: Pencil, Marker, Adobe Photoshop
Artwork (c) Karen Rauppius, 2013