The Story
Rounding out Bret Helm’s back catalog of never before released material in late 2020 were two SMUG albums that virtually created their own album art in my head. First up was the studio album, Remains. As soon as Bret told me the title, I knew I wanted to create the cover using a picture of a cassette tape that had been eaten by a crappy, malfunctioning tape deck. This sort of thing used to happen all the time with that medium of media, and you were left with the remains of an unlistenable tape. To me, the concept felt like a perfect fit.
To carry off the concept, I hand wrote "SMUG Remains" on a tape label and haphazardly attached it to a brand new cassette tape, pulled several feet of tape out of it, arranged the mess nicely on a white background in my product studio and shot it with my Nikon DSLR with a macro lens attached. As I 'developed' the picture I blew it out to give myself a lot of white space, then increased saturation and contrast in a manner that would create a lot of chromatic aberration colorization in the picture (that’s all the green and purple seen at the edges of the tape in the final, below). Here's what the shot looked like as I brought it into Photoshop to work it up:
As I was working away on the artwork, in my head I changed the name of the album to Remnants. Perhaps a good title, but not for THIS album. Haha. This was one idea I worked up using that wrong title.
FINAL:
Note that I slyly removed anything that would identify the make of the tape. So clever, I swear!
Done. /\/\
