This was one of the largest projects for me in recent years. Kennelklubben is the reactivated synthpop duo consisting of renowned radio host Christer Lundberg and Dark tranquillity keyboardist Martin Brändström. They formed the band as teenagers, but life circumstances forced its existence into limbo for nearly three decades.
The debut album was finally released last year, and my work encompassed the whole lot: LP and CD artwork and layouts with each song having its own illustration, a photo shoot and animated videos for the whole album (used during live concerts).
While dealing with universal topics, the lyrics are very localized to the town of Gothenburg, referencing street names and clubs from the past. At the same time, the appeal would be greatly narrowed down if one would try to accentuate this particular city too much in the artwork. Instead, and alternative visual universe was created - one that includes some easily recognizable Gothenburg landmarks such as the Sjömanshustrun statue on the front cover, but at the same time could be anywhere and anytime.
Needless to say, the visual language strongly references the golden days of synth - saturated colours, lots of gradients and geometric figures. At the same time, it was important not to make things too retro looking since the music does sound contemporary.
Photo credit: Abendstern
While I don't think that the animations for each song has quite the polish and detail level to stand out as *perfect* music videos, I made a potpurri of some of the highlights for the first single, "Höghusmiljonär", which is shown below. As with a lot of other music animations I've made, they're first and foremost meant to be enjoyed as part of the immersive experience of a live show rather than being viewed on a screen.
Various stills...
Some early ideas revolved around basing the album cover on a very old promo photo and add some glitch/processing aesthetics in order to create a bridge between the old and new, but this direction was abandoned when the more illustration based ideas appeared.
In addition, I edited a live video for the song "414". Given that most of the material consisted of shaky smartphone footage, I'm very pleased with the result. The idea was to mix up the live clips with some elements from the animations without making it look too fancy or "clever".
