• RELEASED: 14 Oct 2002
• FORMAT: 2xLP / CD
• LABEL: NINJA TUNE
• CAT No.: ZEN70 / ZENCD70
• DESIGN: Openmind
• SPOTTERS DELIGHT: Different covers for Euro and US releases
• EXTRA ZEN: ninjatune page / BUY

My whole ‘thing’ with Amon is for a mechanic/organic mix of imagery as I find his music highly technical but naturally flowing and melodic. With all his artwork I’ve been exploring these themes and in this series of sleeves I scanned parts of un-built Gundam robot models. I reassembled them in Photoshop to make forms and creatures that have a quality that I would associate with his previous sleeves. Each part, once assembled into a form, was then shaded via airbrush and various layers of colour tones, lighting and textures applied until I had something I wanted.

I’ve been a fan of Gundam for years and always loved the forms and angles of the models, this time I wanted to build my own object and Amon’s work was the perfect platform for that. This is by no means the end of my work involving these shapes but for the next Amon record I moved onto something else. He’s one of the few artists who leave me to do what I want, he trusts me to make something on my own but he knows what he likes and what he doesn’t so I make a lot of material that gets discarded. For the LP I did around 15 different variations of the cover image, some made the LP and inner sleeves and some went on to the US version and the first single (Verbal). Oh yeah, and the vinyl sleeve was actually printed totally in metallic inks where I got the printer to replace the CMYK process with the nearest equivalent metallic ink. It’s a very subtle effect and makes the image paler than usual but I wanted to try it anyway.