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Completing the Yu Utsu cover required making a series of increasingly refined edits until the artist and label were happy. To begin, I listened to the album several times while scanning through my collection of source images, pulling out what seemed to work with the tone of various tracks. The overall sound felt cinematic and sweeping: though being contemporary and rooted in the producer, the tone seemed to spread out and up, transporting the listener away to somewhere and sometime else. Consequently, I tried to balance between several competing impulses. In all of my first round of choices, I went with a planetary background to speak to the sweeping “outside” the music seemed to refer to. This would frame a mix of more terrestrial elements: I was particularly drawn to the composition of a cross section of rock, skyscrapers, and the eyes of a Roman bust. Yu Utsu agreed to move forward on that composition, but I felt it still needed something else.

In previous art and design work, I frequently used the inside of envelopes as framing elements as they remind me of TV white noise and can add texture to pieces. I sent a second round of options for approval with these additional framing elements, and we all eventually settled on the version you see above. Altogether, the composition provided a worthwhile companion for the complex atmosphere the music creates, and I believe helped potential listeners initially click play.