Triangle artists respond to new musical project

Back when people bought real CDs, half the thrill was looking through the paper album sleeves, staring at the background art and going blind memorizing the lyrics in size-two font. While those days are long gone, album art can still be just as potent as the music itself. Each song on the Pet-Tich-Eye record is accompanied by original album art from a visual artist in the Triangle area. All ten artists exhibit a distinctive vision that is apparent in the varied styles of the pieces, from the color-saturated photograph of “White Sunrise” and the carefully crafted sketch of “No Hesitate” to more minimalist images such as the whitewashed cover for “East Coast/West Coast Time.”

It’s difficult to fully interpret the artwork as it relates to the music and other aspects of the project with so many pieces still unavailable for firsthand listening and viewing. As Nicole Welch, Curator of Education at CAM Raleigh and the creator of the “East Coast/West Coast Time” cover, wrote in an e-mail, “Everyone interprets art and music through their own personal lens.”

That being said, online images of the artwork along with short samples of their corresponding songs still invite listeners to make connections between the visual and the aural. The track “Holland,” with contributions from members of Hammer No More the Fingers, Bon Iver and Bowerbirds, features Steve Oliva’s dichromatic mixed media print with a windmill in the bottom right, a nod to the song’s title. Kelsey Melville, the artist for “Don’t Start Believing,” wrote in an e-mail how her interpretation of the song and subsequent cover art reflect “the moment in which one loses naivete, whether it be from a relationship or from growing older in general.”

David Eichenberg’s explanation of his sketch for “No Hesitate” reveals how the many layers of the songs translate into their respective album art. “The dark lyrics that Ginger [Wagg, of Indean Ocean] created gave me a feeling of some sort of forbidden meeting or [as if] you were being lured somewhere,” said Eichenberg. “The instrumental parts of the song also gave me this wintry feeling from the first moment I heard it, so I wanted to make sure that was represented in there somehow. I also wanted to be very vague about the imagery so the viewer could come up with their own story.”

Each song was composed by a trio of musicians who then picked a local visual artist to create the cover art for their song, building upon existing bonds between local artists while also allowing for new collaborations in the Triangle community. Welch is friends with Ivan Howard of the Rosebuds and is married to Jon Yu, two of the musicians in the group for whom she created album art. For her, the artwork draws from personal memories and visuals as she listens to the song.

In addition to the musical inspiration that went into these pieces, there is also simply the keen visual intuition of the artists. For “Katantix” Lincoln Hancock created a precise yet whimsical grid of cat faces sourced from a coffee table book called Champion Cats of the World that he found at a thrift store.

“I wasn’t certain how anyone else was handling the art for any other song on the album, but this felt like a good solution. Fortunately, the band was all about it,” wrote Hancock in an email.