• RELEASED: 1998 (F&F) / Jan 1999 (NT)
• FORMAT: 12″
• LABEL: FORM & FUNCTION / NINJA TUNE
• CAT No.: F&F06 / ZEN1277
• DESIGN: Openmind
• SPOTTERS DELIGHT: Form & Function 12″ version with full picture sleeve, Ninja Tune version had a housebag
• EXTRA ZEN: ninjatune page / BUY

Jason Swinscoe used to work in the Ninja Tune office handling exports and distribution and, when he DJed out, he would play lots of quality house with Masters At Work featuring heavily (or so I remember). So it was a great shock to everyone when he arrived with this monster as a potential release. He’d actually made a deal with Form & Function – a German label – for a single, thinking that Ninja wouldn’t be interested and this cover is for that version as Ninja released it in a house bag later on. A logo for this new group was needed and I custom-made lettering for it, not wanting to go the traditional jazz route and do a ‘Blue Note‘.

When Jason was on the phone in the office he used to doodle and his pad and surrounding desk were covered in these odd scribbles, like coral growing and multiplying across the page. When he asked me to do a sleeve I took one of his note books and started using parts of them as graphic material coupled with details of She One paintings who I was collaborating with on other things. J wasn’t really into these, wanting something cleaner and Tom Chant, his chief collaborator at the time, had written out some charts for the tracks. I took these and stretched them out into the distance as if they were train tracks, I probably took the idea from Steve Reich‘s ‘Different Trains’ cover as I was heavily into that at the time.