My good friend and resident red coat, Dom Kreep, has been working with me for a little while now on the art concept and execution for the next Kreeps album. When I say for a while, I think it’s safe to say that this record has been in the works (both aurally and visually) for almost two years now. This album’s art (and sound) has influences from all sorts. Ranging from an abandoned hotel in Detroit, to The Shining and Session 9 (note the reel-to-reel), and many things in between. But all things spooky.
As far as the production of this album’s art goes, one of the mantras we had wile working on this is “you can’t fake the real thing”. You want your photo to look old? Sure you could take high resolution digital photographs, then modify them and ‘dumb them down’ to appear old. And frankly, that’s something I do all the time. But they still don’t look right. They look good, but they don’t look legitimately old. So, instead, I opted to use one of my original Polaroid SX-70 cameras (if you have 10 minutes, watch this). Now, this poses an interesting problem, there’s no film for these cameras any more. Not really, anyway. Polaroid stopped manufacturing film for these cameras years ago, then later, stopped making film for the successors, the Sun 600. The issue is, the Sun 600 takes, as you might guess, ISO 600 film. And the SX-70 Land Camera takes ISO 100. Luckily! There’s a company that’s carrying the Polaroid torch called Impossible (formerly Polapremium). They manufacture film for these cameras, albeit, at a price.
I had a couple boxes of the stuff, and went on to purchase three more for the shooting I was doing for this Kreeps record. A couple hundred dollars worth of film later, Dead Sounds was photographed. And really, you can’t argue with the results. Yeah, it’s low-fi and full of imperfections. But imperfection is character. And let’s not pretend that the Kreeps’ music isn’t also low-fi and imperfect. Hell, that’s why I love it so much. Include weeks and weeks of prop procuring, and awesome friends that let me borrow their own props and such, and we have a wonderful mix of creepy things for a wonderfully kreepy album.
What you see here is a mere sampling of what’s coming down the path. So keep your radios tuned to the static and look for the subtle voices in the white noise… you’ll find more about this very soon.
Nix
