Behind The Artwork: Mortuary - Nothingless Than Nothingless (2017)

1. Why did you choose such a visual?

We were looking for a cover that would represent the general idea of the album, namely the fight against the disease that gnaws us. Not the illness that happens suddenly but the one that has been present in us for a long time. The illness that we have felt approaching, settling and against which we will fight.

The general idea of the songs "U-man Slept, K-os Crawled"; "K" and "Kingdom". This letter K is present in each of these titles because it is the abbreviation that is noted on medical records when the patient has cancer. This disease that lives and throbs in us. The one who shares our daily existence, invests every part of our body, a second carnal envelope in short, destructive. The one that mixes us with nothingness.

2. What does it represent for you?

It simply represents the fight lost in advance against a power that cannot be mastered because it grew every day, as our body feeds it constantly. Hence this drawing in cold colors, where this woman is slowly absorbed by the contours and extremities of these limbs. We see through opening in the flesh such natural scarifications, palpitate the purple disease that consumes the body.

If the drawing lived in time and had the power to evolve to the rhythm of history, one can easily imagine that at the end of the work; we would have a huge blue square animated with swollen movements still waving under the last jolts of the victim. It would no longer human form as suggested by the background of the drawing. The disease, unlike sudden or brutal death, often occurs at the end of a long process of destructive creation. She takes her time to create a perfect work, fatal and lethal.

3. Who is at the origin of this visual? Why did you choose to work with him?

This work is a joint work of two artists, one French, Bernard Dumaine, and the other Finnish, Marko Ikävalko, as part of their work on the theme "The exquisite corpse collaboration" where one of the artists paints a part of the work on a canvas, then hides most of his work, revealing only a thin, painted strip.

Then he sends it to a second artist, who must finish the work only from this visible band; which gives extraordinary results. I chose this artist because I already appreciated his overall work. There emerges a great mystical and experimental force mingled with madness like certain works of Dali.

Then, I fell in love with this drawing and I knew immediately that it was the one that would stick best to the music of "Nothingless than Nothingness".

The work was initially in shades ocher, orange then Bernard offered me to colorize it in colder tones with this icy blue. We could not dream better cover for this album.