'Make Me Young, etc' is released alongside a couple of unique items - a new run of T-shirts designed by Thumpermonkey bassist Sam Warren, along with a limited run of 30 cassettes containing unreleased demos that didn't make it on to the new album, (each with hand printed lino-cut artwork, also designed by Sam).
"The main project I did when I studied art at Isle college was a project inspired by maps, aerial photography, and early analytical cubism - looking at ways of representing 3-dimensional reality on a 2-dimensional flat surface by having more than one viewpoint happening at the same time. This creates a degree of distortion; imagine you are a bird with glass eyes that are shattered, flying over an ordinance survey map."
"The idea of doing something with maps again was very appealing. The only preparatory drawings I did were the initial sketches - inspired by the Chaos Engine computer game on the Atari ST"
"A problem that I had, (something that made me realise I'd never be a graphic designer!), was that idea of going through a brief - engaging in a process where you work your way through several crap ideas to get to a good idea. With the T-shirt, I felt, 'Well that's rubbish, I've done all that in my head before I start bothering with the proper idea - you just do it'. That's how the T-shirt sketch happened, but I soon learned that this aversion to experimenting in order to work towards a finished product wouldn't really work for the cassette sleeve lino-cut."
"The process of creating sleeves for the limited run of 30 cassettes felt kind of backwards for me, because it was all in the preparation.
I knew it would have to be something I could print - something that had to be hand made, and needed to use some kind of paint or ink to keep me interested - so I just had to think about what kind or printing methods were accessible to me having not done anything like this before, and having no equipment.
"That only left one choice which was a lino-cut, where the mechanics of the process become part of the image that you can't necessarily control. When I come to print these properly it will be quick, but for now it's a case of experimenting and looking closely at what works and doesn't work."
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