My buddy Michael was graduating from USC with his masters in EE. He’s been going to school part time while working at Boeing in Los Angeles for a while now, and this was a huge deal- getting done. It’s funny – Mike and I were actually undergrads together in the same program as well, and were both RA’s at neighboring dorms in West Lafayette as well.

Anyway, I wanted to make him something rather than buy something off the shelf. I’ve been trying to mix a nonstop set for a long time, and ‘make a CD’ from scratch. I think that’s one of my biggest ambitions – to design CD covers for bands and artists.

People these days are quick to say CD’s are outdated (due to MP3′s and digital formats), but I think half the beauty comes from the artwork accompanying an album- it is the real essence of validation/ differentiation. Any idiot can rip you a CD and say here’s Pearl Jam’s Vitology, but only when you hold the album sleeve, rich with carefully selected weight of paper, color, fonts and most of all, photography, do you enjoy the total experience.

John O’Reilly, PhD, a writer for the Guardian and other publications on new media, music, etc sums it best in the introduction to “Display Copy Only, a book of Intro Work”:

“If you’ve never bought a record just because you like the sleeve, you haven’t truly tapped into the pop experience. One of the items on the great rock band checklist is having and understanding that what holds an album together, or gives a single impact, is what is communicated on the sleeve. Because of this, it would be easy to believe that sleeve design is an act of the translation – of a musical idea into the visual concept delivered on the sleeve. It isn’t. Great sleeve design is the final edit, the last mix, the visual track laid onto the music. Although, chronologically, the sleeve is designed after the music, smart musicians know that in a curious reversal of logic, the sleeve comes first. It is the equivalent of the preface or introduction of a book, written afterwards but read first. It’s a navigation tool for processing musical data”.

Now I know that was one hell of a lengthy quote- longer than the post itself was before I stuck it in, but I guess very few people feel the attachment I do to printed artwork and its association with music. Or just printed artwork to begin with.

So to make this CD, I didn’t want to start making music from the start – I just wanted to create a flawless mix of sorts. I remember noticing how the track numbers ticked over silently the first time I was listening to a nonstop mix on CD- and I was mesmerized. The show went on, but the music was flawless- no breaks! Hello, mixing! I had to be able to do this, some day!

I picked out a lot of tracks for Mike’s mix- very weird ones that are mixed as well as I ever have to date, but I made sure they were all in key as well- preserved the aural element too. I used Ableton Live 6 to mix, and Mixed-In-Key 3.1 to tune all the tracks/ make sure the mix wasn’t jumping key by a mile when going from track to track. Here’s the tracklisting, along with comments on any edits I made myself:

1. The University Of Southern California Trojan Marching Band: USC Fanfare + Tribute to Troy – Had to throw this one of course! Ends on a warped note of a transition…
2. Prefuse 73: The End of Biters-International (high-speed akshun) – Stepped up the tempo of a badass track and it sounded pretty wicked, I think…
3. Groove Armada: Lovebox (featuring Alan Watts and Farzaad Piraacha The Dick) –
   So I came up with this fictional Farzaad Piraacha character, from the upper crust of Karachi, to tell us what his likes and dislikes are, and I recorded it onto the track. I also threw in the voice of Alan Watts later on.
4. Cari Lekebusch: Shaded – Compuphonic & Kolombo Remix
5. iiO: At the End (Scumfrog Remix)
6. Boys Noize: Oh! (A-Trak Remix) - A-Trak is Kanye West’s DJ and brother of the French Literature PhD student who forms one half of Chromeo, David Macklovitch
7. Andrew Bennett Rico Soarez: Light of Hope (Jody Wisternoff Remix)
8. The Prodigy – Girls
9. Justice: Waters of Nazareth: Blackwater Fiasco (originally fucked by Erol Alkan) – yes, the annoying lawyer at the end is me, reading out a testimony accusing implicating Blackwater, the private security firm that went pretty haywire in Iraq last year…
10. Michael Jackson: Billy Jean (introduced by the Blackistani Stallion) – and who’s the Blackistani stallion? That’s right…
    

Here’s a picture with a link to the continuous audio file (it’s a 22MB .m4a audio file, and will play in itunes or winamp – don’t worry).

The interesting thing is that if you click the link to the corresponding iTunes podcast, you can download it, and it’s broken down by tracks that you can skip back and forth with you iPod. For some reason the podcast refuses to show up in searches, which is why I’m saying screw it – I don’t have the time to beg Apple to fix a problem that’s really not a problem!

OK, so that covered the fun I had getting the music together. The artwork was half the fun. The image above is the flyer I made for Mike’s invite to his BBQ. It wasn’t in line with the music completely, but I wanted to create a derivative of it nonetheless- the CD represents celebration and reunion (3 other Purdue people flew out to LA just for the USC graduation weekend) – so here’s the cover image:

Here are some of the back cover image:

The picture on the bottom right is us at Breakfast Club in 2003! The barcode is a REAL barcode generated from the numbers 47906 90007, which are the zip codes of West Lafayette and South Central Los Angeles respectively. The image on the top right is of Sapuristan, the newest member of the UN (the map is of Pakistan combined with California):

I decided that I didn’t just want to give him a blank, shiny CD with ‘Maxell’ or ‘Recordable Media 74min’ written on it. I went out to OfficeMax and bought a spool of white-label CDs that are blank on top.

Perfect.

I went to Kinko’s every day after work that week – I’d get to California Ave. at like 11pm, and then work on the presentation even further. I wanted to have an outlined decal placed on the CD itself. The staff at Kinko’s was great help. I wanted the word /DONE// in the same font as it is on the flyer and the CD cover, on the CD itself. So I had a decal printed, and applying it can be tricky:

Now, enjoying the CD…that’s a whole other story. Los Angeles- all over again…hah. But there have you have it- quite the exercise in art and music…

-Sapuri

PS- if you need a sleeve designed- holler! These are only single sheets, but I made a whole 16-page pamphlet for my Print media class back in school. I need work!

PPS – ‘Exercise 4′ is the name of my favorite track by Bent.