Modular - Sonic Explorations
The Modular Project is a musical collaboration between guitarist and producer, Dan Phelps, acclaimed bassist Viktor Krauss, and drummer Matt Chamberlain that captures a series of completely improvised live sessions. Released as a deluxe edition, the package consisted of a double LP album in a triple gatefold sleeve, and a 28 page 12”x12” booklet of field notes, photography, and illustrations for audiophiles and collectors.
Each of the six tracks on the album are inspired by different elements of the natural world. Our concept for the artwork was to present the album as the audio recordings and field notes of a pseudo-scientific aural experiment, as if conducted by some sort of mad scientist who was somehow recording and manipulating the sounds of the earth itself. We set up the Modular machine in locations representative of each of those elements and photographed it connected to and interacting with those environments “Creeper Vine” was set in a rain forest, “Hollow Earth” in the petrified forest of a highland desert, “Everest” in the crags of the Cascade mountains, and so on. The images were art directed to bring the conceptual environments to life and activate the imagination of the listener to inspire them to ask, “Did they really do this?” and, “What would that sound like?”
The finished piece gives the album a mysterious gravity that walks the line between fantastical and monumental and its stoic presentation never lets on as to which it actually is.
