In 2008 when he was aged 18 musician Space Dimension Controller (a.k.a., Jack Hamill) made his first-ever album in his bedroom in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This year, Orange Melamine makes its debut on Ninja Tune. It's an album full of influences from Hamill's past, and the old, beat-up technology that surrounded him—from recording some of the drums on degraded 70s Pyral cassettes, to incorporating the sounds of hiss and reverb from VHS tapes passed down from his older brother and cousins.
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The ambient flows of Boards of Canada, William Baskinski, and Brian Eno are also cited as influences, along with the album taking cues and quotes from 80s and 90s movies and TV shows like The Guyver, Short Circuit, Ghostbusters, The Fifth Element, and Power Rangers. It's this sense of a specific time in Hamill's life, the sensations of exploration and experimentation, that artist Jacob Chabeaux references in his surreal, futuristic artwork both for the album and the music video for "The Bad People."Album cover for Orange Melamine. Courtesy of Jacob Chabeaux"I was aware when making all of the artwork that the music was coming from a time and place of significant memory," Chabeaux explains to The Creators Project. "A time of being young and discovering, creating and learning: it’s important, it’s colourful and it’s a kind of lost, sprawling journey of finding yourself. The video and imagery should be echoing that raft of adventure in some way; I wanted it to be an almost painterly flow of colors and motion, something that resembles the excitement felt in that age and that gives that burst of reminiscence of how it feels to discover."Chabeaux also designed the strange, enigmatic press shot for Hamill, which shows a kind of eerie hooded figure. The shot is a nod to a film from Hamill's childhood, Darby O’Gill and the Little People. It'sinfluenced by the ethereal, green-tinged banshee in the film, except in the press shot, they're Hamill's eyes.
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Space Dimension Controller press shot. Image courtesy of Jacob ChabeauxThis spectral, hooded figure appears at the beginning of the music video for "The Bad People," too, before it begins its journey through craggy otherworlds, multicolored, bleary cityscapes, and Futurist highways. To create the video, Chabeaux explains, he first started sketching with pen and paper then used 3D software to render the drawings. He didn't want the final images to look too clean and perfect, though, nor too cookiecutter when it came to rendering abstract CGI. "The kind of painterly feel comes from that time and process spent layering and adding texture onto texture until it feels right and you know that it's to a point as finished as it can be," he notes. "In that way, and all of these overlapping ways, time plays an important role with the release of the album and the creating of the artwork."
Still from video. Image courtesy of artistThe result is a futuristic vision colored with 80s neon—it's a fantastical mindscape, and this sense of inward journeying reflects Hamill's own internal voyaging when he made the album all those years ago."I've read people say this in interviews so many times, but when I was passionately buying music on CD as a kid, I’d be one of those to obsess over the packaging, front to back, liner notes," Chabeaux says. "I designed the vinyl with that in mind—I wanted people to get drawn in, have those moments where you could appreciate the accompanying artwork while you listened to the album. Hopefully people will like it and get to have that moment, even just one person and I’d be happy."
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