What Is This Heart? album cover, photograph by Zackery MichaelOval-X, the idiosyncratic and enigmatic creative duo behind How to Dress Well'sWhat Is This Heart? album design package (out today on Domino and Weird World), are the mass media age distilled into a singular artistic modus operandi. In one breath they'll invoke pop culture detritus, and in the next they'll draw on Surrealism as a way of thinking about art and design process. It's all very fascinating, highly entertaining, and a bit mysterious, like they're Dune-inspired, pupil-widening website.
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In an email manifesto of sorts, Oval-X first described themselves as “the Alanis Morissette to your Avril Lavigne,” before proclaiming, “We are asynchronous pillagers to your top ten list of highest grossing celebrities OR your top ten list of reasons why you hate yourself.”But, make no mistake, these binary prankster parables (one of many they sent us) are fully infused with the spirit of Dada and Surrealism. They're playful, amusing, and perfectly attuned to the internet's rhythms, obscuring Oval-X's wide range of artistic and cultural influences in the process. This seems to be by design, as though the duo want to keep people guessing about the well from which they draw artistic inspiration.Like their Dada and Surrealist godfathers, Oval-X know a little something about human history and pre-history, as well as art's place within these epochs. And the duo put this kaleidoscopic knowledge to good use in the laborious trial-and-error design process for What Is This Heart?, which found them playing with and redefining album art. Much like The Flaming Lips' 24-hour song loaded onto a hard drive and embedded in a human skull, Oval-X want their creations to become artifacts that light the way toward a future of ambitious and thought-provoking album art. This ideology holds true for their work on How To Dress Well's third LP.
An early prototype of the What Is This Heart? album artAccording to the designers, What Is This Heart? has broader sonic strokes, compared to HTDW's last album, Total Loss—which Oval-X also created the album art for. So, the album art needed to reflect this. Initially, Oval-X wanted to do what Phil Collins did with Face Value: put HTDW's (aka Tom Krell's) face on the cover “looking directly into your soul.”
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“We all agreed something ambiguous that could be interpreted a lot of different ways was the goal,” they said. “We thought it would be beneficial to try to come up with some graphic covers aside from just HTDW's face, so that led us down the road to a lot, but mostly four major concepts: Anamorphic Reflection; Plastic Casings/Vacuum Form of Natural Objects; Symbols; and, Fossil/Relics/Impressions/Bas-Relief.”An early conceptual prototype (pictured above) replicated this effect within 3D space. As they put it, it allowed for more surrealism. “We really liked that idea and also liked the view from a birds eye and thought this could lend itself well to the records A/B side labels and so forth. We did more research and there had been similar things done, so we kept exploring.”The interplay between plastics and nature was also a concept Oval-X pursued. They wondered what sort of meanings could be created if they vacuum-formed natural objects.“These experiments were an effort to somewhat commodify nature and humanness,” Oval-X noted. “The final treatment would have been to smash these objects so the package looked as if it had been used and abused.”The artists explained that this was technically difficult to achieve because the 3D program had to calculate a lot of complex geometry to smash the objects.
Plastics prototypeFor the symbolic aspect of the design, Oval-X said they put semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) to work. They turned “What is the Heart?” track title into a symbol or a logo for HTDW, citing Prince as a huge inspiration for the symbol's ornate and contemporary versions.
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Around the time they developed the HTDW symbol, Oval-X became obsessed with buried objects, fossils, ruin theory, and other areas of related study.“There was this image, 'Together for Eternity,' that we started to pass around and it excited all of us, and it seemed to touch on the right set of ambiguity and meaning we were searching for,” they said, with time, human, love, earth, and other concepts all wrapped up in one image. “So, we developed an impression of skeletons embracing, and combined it with the symbol and came up with this cover. It felt really Throbbing Gristle, which is awesome, but maybe not How to Dress Well's tone.”
"Together for Eternity" symbol and related album cover prototypeOval-X continued down the path of impressions left by objects. Ultimately, they asked themselves: “What would a really futuristic cave wall painting be like?” They guessed that it would probably be quite mechanical and machine-rendered.“Something technical and kind of alien,” as the duo described it. They followed this design principle through to the back cover track-listing. Ultimately, this was also turned down because it was "too out there" and confusing. It felt cold and they needed to "warm it up.”Back to the Phil Collins Face Value idea. After Krell enlisted photographer friend Zackery Michael to shoot the cover (see lead image), Oval-X decided that there should be no typography on the cover because the lighting was dramatic, and felt like a painting. Even worse, every typography they deployed seemed to cheapen the image.
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“For the rest of the packaging we used ideas from our explorations, such as the skeletons in the wall, to give everything a consistency and identity,” said Oval-X. “The deluxe version of the album comes with a special transparent PVC sleeve that houses a bunch of album exclusives—the first being the deluxe gatefold sleeve.”
Deluxe gatefold sleeve“We wanted the deluxe gatefold sleeve to feel like an object, like a slate, like less of a commercial product and more of an ancient artifact—graphic-less,” they emphasized. “We liked the metaphor of the wall. We as humans have tons of invisible and physical walls all around us.”“We put walls up and guard ourselves with them or sometimes they even guard us—sometimes in ways that are hurtful to us,” they added. “Regardless, we found a way to turn hitting a creative wall into art and it felt substantial.”The deluxe package also comes with a 28-page lyrical booklet and companion piece, with lyrics on one side and a motif to represent the ideas on the other. The single artwork for the albums tracks is also represented by these images.“When we first did the booklet, we wanted to express the lyrics in a concrete poetry style,” Oval-X explained. “We were quite bored with centered text and had been looking at a lot of Japanese works that utilized a grid more abstractly. It felt refreshing to put lyrics in this form.”
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deluxe album booklet
Final album booklet
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The other part of the deluxe package comes with an exclusive 10-inch release, which contains a bonus HTDW track, and a remix of “oFF Love.” The 10-inch backside features the elegantly etched figure of a man, “etched in shame,” as they put it.For the 3D work, Oval-X used Maxon's Cinema 4D software. The duo then paired Cinema 4D with V-Ray to render for more realistic lighting.“3D is clearly the future, as our world outside crumbles and disintegrates the world inside gets more expansive,” the duo waxed poetic. “I predict we are about to enter a new surrealism with 3D, especially with things like the Oculus Rift, where you're engaging with 3D environments in a fully immersive sense.”
10" inch etched vinyl included in deluxe packageWhile Oval-X are excited about the surrealist possibilities of 3D environments, don't get them started on the commercial design world. They won't have any of it.“Everything right now feels very boxed in and homogenous, and everything is template-driven and out of the box,” they said. “In the design world, there's this modernist snobbery that exists and permeates our culture. Not to point fingers but websites like Manystuff.org perpetuate an elitism in the design community that is suffocating. It's either this really strict modernist academic thing or this really fake over sentimentalized 'scrumptious' aesthetic, and it's suffocating.”Oval-X looks to studios like Metahaven.net, who are challenging design institutions with their radical approach. “They are more politically loaded. I hate politics, but at the bottom of everything, what isn't political?”
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“Oval-X is our attempt to push away,” they added. “If it's all one big feedback loop, how do we disrupt it for that brief second until it engulfs what we love and spits it back at us?” Judging by the looks of the What Is This Heart? design package, the "brief second" soldiers on.
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Final album bookletThe other part of the deluxe package comes with an exclusive 10-inch release, which contains a bonus HTDW track, and a remix of “oFF Love.” The 10-inch backside features the elegantly etched figure of a man, “etched in shame,” as they put it.For the 3D work, Oval-X used Maxon's Cinema 4D software. The duo then paired Cinema 4D with V-Ray to render for more realistic lighting.“3D is clearly the future, as our world outside crumbles and disintegrates the world inside gets more expansive,” the duo waxed poetic. “I predict we are about to enter a new surrealism with 3D, especially with things like the Oculus Rift, where you're engaging with 3D environments in a fully immersive sense.”
