Project: Dr. Future Identity, Record Sleeves and ’Title Cards’
Client: Lee Feldman, Urban Myth Recording Collective
Project: Dr. Future Identity, Record Sleeves and ’Title Cards’
Client: Lee Feldman, Urban Myth Recording Collective
The Dr. Future sleeve was the initial springboard for the development of an entire set of identity images.
The record is (in the artist’s words) a “imaginary musical” of images and characters without a clear narrative arc, but with lyrics that encompass free verse, tin pan alley rhyme and bluesy repetitions that became incantory with repeated listenings.
At first I was tasked with the album cover and I picked up on sort of a blurry science fiction future history undercurrent that reminded me of the original Westworld film, Planet of the Apes and genre sci-fi dystopian imagery. The wink to Edward Benguiat’s iconic Super Fly logotype was Lee’s inspiration… bringing back Shatter, sorry that's my fault.
There are also multiple references in the lyrics to psychiatry, particularly in the song Countertransference. Despite Lee's generally chilly soundscapes, some of the songs have a real warmth and vulnerability to them.
I had to try to find a place for those themes in the artwork too.
Lee then asked me for sleeve artwork for the singles, urm, emphasis tracks Dr. Future to the Rescue, Anxiety and Countertransference.
Lee was so enthused with the results that he requested ’title cards' for each and every song on the record, to be used on a planned bespoke web streaming player.
The found imagery—mostly from non-comm stock but also a few elements of paid—refer to and hopefully reinforce the themes and/or specific lyrics in each song, however abstractly, although there is a through-line of motifs and visual treatments that emerge from the album's spacey noir vibe that hopefully pulls everything together as a series.
The Overture is an instrumental, but hey, it’s literally an overture to side two of the record, so hopefully I get away with literal stage curtains considering it's an imaginary musical. (Let’s hear it for displacement maps.)
If you’re fortunate enough to have followed Lee’s quixotic pop music career so far, you will appreciate how utterly un-Lee Feldman it is to use his wordmark as a brand, stamped across everything. (It's there on all of them, on a couple you might need to look more closely). Somehow Lee agreed to let me do it.
Listen to Dr. Future at your favourite streaming service: https://ffm.to/drfuture
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