Words by David C. Obenour
Blasted apart. Blown out. Totally fucked up. The beats on God’s World are submerged deep under ideas, noise and dissonance, yet still find their way back up for air and to keep heads nodding. Comprised of The Body’s Lee Buford and Nothing’s Zac Jones, Manslaughter 777 are back with an album as fuzzy as the boundaries of genres it slices, samples and sticks back together.
Keeping the work in house, the cover art was designed by Zac and the sleeves were hand screened by Lee. For an album as saturated with personal influences and unique ideas, this connection helps continue the self-presentation for what’s about to rip through your speakers. Solidifying the visual and physical connection of band to recording. It also saves them money.
Off Shelf: Overall, how do you define the relationship between an album and its cover art? Is it a preview? A companion? When it’s at its best, how does the art add to the experience?
Zac Jones: My thoughts on this have changed dramatically through the years, and undoubtedly will continue to. At this moment I believe that it is of utmost importance to provide a context for the tunes themselves to sit within. It is imperative to being able to get across what you intend to get across. At its best, an album cover can provide a subtext to deepen one’s relationship to what it is you are making. I don’t feel that this album cover is doing any of this but good things can tend to be mercurial before they are permanent. Maybe it is something that will grow alongside the record?
Lee Buford: I think we’re both visual artists too so it’s extremely important. I think the main goal of a record’s art is to make you want to know more about the record, so it has to be very engaging. A really hard task in today’s world! I think also being original and making it mesh with the music is also very important. The more I think about it, I guess it is really hard. [laughs]
OS: Can you think of some of your favorite album covers and how they’ve effected your experience of the music?
ZJ: I think that my relationship to the musical part of the record dictates what I can take away from the visual aspects of a record. ie. Burial’s Untrue may be my favorite record of my life thus far. The fact that I don’t necessarily like the record cover almost adds a dimension to the entire project that allows me some room to continue to ponder and uncover new things when I think of the project as a whole. A record cover I genuinely love for maybe the opposite reason is Harvey Milk’s Special Wishes.
LB: I’m drawn to covers that can be made “simply” but convey a lot. Ones that are obviously made by human hands. Any Crass, Wire, the covers of 4AD, and Tony Wright’s reggae covers.
OS: Knowing that you’re both visual artists, can you talk about how you approached creating the cover on God’s World? Did you collaborate in the process? Offer feedback or go through different versions?
ZJ: it is very difficult for me to force any kind of creative thing and Lee and I are so busy individually with our work and other projects that this all came so very late in the fold. I stayed up for almost three days straight making it because we were behind. I would send versions to Lee and yes, he would chime in on it.
LB: That was mainly Zac doing the cover. I designed the LP labels but using his cover ideas for it.
OS: What were you trying to convey about the new music through this art?
ZJ: The point of M777 for myself is that I am not attempting to convey anything with any part of this project. It is just playtime! Lee and I both have more serious music projects and that stuff can all live there. The record cover is just me bringing into focus a blurry image or shape that appears in my mind and picking away at it until it works as something I like to look at when I squint my eyes and blur my vision again.
OS: Did you consider the cover for World Vision Perfect Harmony when designing God’s World? How your catalog looks on a whole and how the pieces are similar and different?
ZJ: it crossed my mind but I am not a good enough artist to consider such broad things.
LB: I think we knew we were going to print these ourselves so that limits the art as far as detail and color. I think that was the main motivating factor. We wanted to design something that we could print without killing ourselves but also stuck to our vision.
OS: The approach to design here seems similar to collage work. Can you talk about the elements on the cover? Where you sourced them from and what you liked about how they added to the piece?
ZJ: I knew in my “blurry shape” mentioned before that I wanted church steeples but I didn’t want the cover to be overly religious-art focused. I have an old book with old church / cathedral architectural drawings – beautiful all of them but I couldn’t make it work as a whole. So I scanned and cropped in deep on specific elements and went from there. The scribbles are from a strange vintage art book that I found at a coffee shop in the Netherlands while on tour with The Body / disfig. Just scribbles from a person that designed eating utensils or something. I took photos of the scribbles, I liked them. I am constantly collecting little things like that. The photo on the back is one of mine from years ago, I’m not sure where I was when I took it. Somewhere in the Midwest, I believe.
OS: What did you appreciate about what Zach created for the cover? What do you see in it that relates to the music?
LB: I’m a big fan of Zac’s design for everything. He comes from the same world as me where you’re usually designing and also making the art so you have a different way of designing. It’s easy to design things with a million colors and insane packaging when you’re not the one printing it all. [laughs] When I first met Zac he also was into letterpress and I think that comes through his art a lot. Very deliberate typography choices and very good sense of the spatial layout of things.
OS: I was looking at your website and the primary focus seemed to be on photography. Can you talk about your background there? How do you think that influences your other visual work? Are you looking for similar things? Are you trying to capture different things?
ZJ: Yes, photography has taught me much about how to think visually. I blur my eyes when I begin to take a photo so that I can see the overall shape as a composition. It is the same thing I do when designing anything. Starts with a shape. The focus on the subject comes sometime after.
OS: You screen printed the vinyl covers too. What do you like about this process as an artform and how do you think it works well for the cover art for God’s World?
ZJ: Tactile, individual and inexpensive. [laughs]
LB: I started screen printing when I was a teenager and have done it pretty consistently since then. I’ve always been drawn tot the very personal nature of it but also the ease of making mass edition if things. I’ve always printed record covers and there’s something gratifying about printing hundreds of record covers.
OS: You also do t-shirts through Copycat Video. How do you see t-shirt art and album art as related and different? Do you have any thoughts for Manslaughter 777 shirts and what they would be like?
LB: I think with shirts they’re lower stakes in a way so you can hit on different ideas or wackier things that you wouldn’t use for something as permanent as album artwork. We’ve made shirts in the past that reference dance culture, so basically our homage to that lineage – in regards to where we see ourselves.
Zac Jones: Website | Instagram
Manslaughter 777: Website