Chiloo is a newly arrived artist on the French urban pop scene with his first album, Genèse (Genesis in english). This project was the perfect chance to develop from start to end a never-seen-before visual identity. It was about thinking and designing all the medias through which his aesthetic would appear (CD/Vinyl, video clip, graphic and typographical design).
After a several months discussion between members of the artistic team, alongside the album writing during summer 2021, our decision went towards a deliberately ambivalent aesthetic.
It would combine, against a backdrop of latent darkness, a resolute thirst for hope and light with a strong presence of aquatic elements, in reference to amniotic fluid and membrane. To these very first avenues, we added some iconographic references to biblical Genesis and Garden of Eden.
I started from these aesthetic choices to design an album cover in which Chiloo would appear unconscious, underwater, drifting in a bottomless area.
Alongside, I made graphic researches to go with the project’s images and communication. I was looking for a modern aesthetic, following the current graphic design trends, while assuring a timeless look.
I went quickly towards the “Custom serif” typography, under its italic form (and yes, it’s accurate!). It was about bringing some delicacy up, both sober and elegant, matching quite good with the musical universe of the project.
If this choice worked pretty well for titles, however it was not the best for the whole body of the text, especially for the lyrics included in the album’s CD and Vinyl editions.
To highlight the typographic change, I chose to keep the typography we used so far, a custom sans serif typo. This blending of different typographic styles within an only project really represents the graphic trend from the beginning 2022.
STEP 1 : HOW TO COMEBACK ?
For the first video, we were not thinking about about a real music video yet. Chiloo had to come back on the musical scene and social media very simply, to tease gently the release of a very new project to his fan base, who is following him from his first EP. The lyrics video seemed to us to be the most fitting option
I imagined a sequence-shot with a quite technical execution. Chiloo’s image would be at first indirect. Seen as a reflect on the water surface, then through a wavy plexiglas slab, his face would be finally revealed clearly at the end of the shot. With this simple lyric video, we introduced, without being too obvious, the water theme, as the first piece of this large jigsaw that the whole Genèse project is.
STEP 2 : THE TRACKLIST
In the beginning of 2022, the project got faster. The next step was to shot the cover and some press photos, make a tracklist video and finally a music video for the track Genèse, which would give its name to the album.
For the tracklist, the idea was to model each track's title as rocks floating on water, drifting from one edge to the other. However, this idea was quickly dropped, as the video would have been too long, since we had defined its duration around thirty seconds. Finally, we chose to reveal track’s titles on an aquatic backdrop, which Chiloo would break the calm by falling from the upper part of the frame, unconscious, in reference to the album’s cover.
STEP 3 : GENÈSE'S MUSIC VIDEO
For the music video, I developed the original proposal of Chiloo drifting underwater. I wrote a synopsis marked by a stormy and dark atmosphere, putting on Chiloo facing his inner demons and fears before finally finding something as peace, or at least, calm.
Concerning the music video scenery, my production designer made me a very nice proposal. I wanted to make water and gold the two main materials of this video, bringing a lot of golden objects in the scenery. My production designer made this idea happen by constructing kind of an altar made of twenty golden arms, carrying a metal bowl in which an enigmatic shadow would drown Chiloo. This scenery choice allowed to make this scene almost ritual, observing my intentions to play with sacrament symbols.
Then she declined thes golden arms in differents stagings along the music video.
Pierre Michelet, one of the composer working with Chiloo, and I made a sound design to accompany each visual effect of the music video, giving an emphasize on this thunderstorm atmosphere, tense and wet.
THE CHOICE
Now we got all the medias, we had the biggest part of the communication around the project. The cover created a great debate within the artistic team. Several options had been discuss, radically different from one to another. We ended back to the first proposition, with a close-up on his face, unconscious underwater, after having explored an option where Chiloo was seen in silhouette from the bottom of water. This one became the back of the album’s physical editions.
STEP 4 : THE FOCUS TRACK
We are at the end of February. Both the album and the video clip from Genèse come out on June, 10. One music video, that we could release in the coming weeks, is still missing. We need a first single to support.
The track Bah Ouais was chosen for this role. We had to find an idea for a music video pretty quickly. It would have to fit the A.D already launched, of course, but in the same time to respect fill other requirements, as being more solar, more accessible than Genèse.
After a few proposals, from the show video to a very (too much?) ambitious music video, we ended making something simple but efficient, illustrating almost literally the lyrics.
Bah ouais is a music video putting on Chiloo and a woman he is in love with. They do not seem to live in the same dimension. Sometimes he is in his own little world and does not see her, sometimes she is in her own. They finally manage to match together again in a shared dimension. An utopian world they imagined by themselves, as the Wonderland imagined by Alice.
Here we are ! All the ingredients were there ! A whole universe has been created, the one from the Genesis of Chiloo.
This project was a great human and professional experience, prolonging a lasting collaboration with the Wouldi label and its awesome team, which I am working with for years now.
After these months of discussions, constant doubts about the A.D, this long-term struggle to keep coherence between each element, it’s a beautiful project coming to an end which, I hope so, Chiloo’s public will enjoy, and will allow other people to discover and like his work.
