The COVID lockdown brought many ups and downs, but one of the positive things it brought is music from artists stuck in their homes.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis created the album Carnage throughout lockdown, and this piece of music happens to be the first time the duo ever recorded a soundtrack as a pair.
Hingston Studio created and designed the album cover for the artists, resulting in a simple design with endless white space representing an infinite emptiness. The studio also designed the accompanying booklet, intentionally printed on delicate Bible paper to represent the delicacy of the words and titles printed throughout the pages. The design balances bold typography and expansive white spaces so beautifully that one almost doesn't even have to listen to the album to gather that the songs are both brutal and brilliant.
Carnage is an album by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, recorded over a period of weeks during lockdown. Although the pair have previously composed and recorded numerous soundtracks together, this is the first time they have released an entire of album of new music as a duo…
Nick Cave describes the album as, “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe.”The record is rooted in the idea of isolation and displacement, themes that were carried through to the artwork and campaign. The fragmented treatment of the title was employed as a means of softening the brutality of the word itself – compositions are continuously rearranged across formats to evoke the idea of something in flux. An expansive use of white space is a deliberate nod to the idea of emptiness, where words and lyrics appear suspended in a void.
This notion was then further extended into the accompanying book – which, printed onto bible paper, suggests a sense of fragility and allowed words, titles and lyrics to gently permeate throughout the pages.
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