Behind The Artworks: The Medea Project - Reflections (2023)

Reflections were not something that was originally intended as a complete release, we were working towards album 2 during the lockdown and had a series of interesting events that led us to create this EP to curate the various musical endeavors that we had undertaken along the way. We needed to package this up to make it a cohesive whole and so the EP was conceptualized to be a complete release.

Album Art:

For the cover artwork, we wanted something that tied it to the previous album, as originally the track The Ghosts of St Augustines was part of Sisyphus. We had an artist lined up, but unfortunately at the 11th hour they had to pull out, so now stuck, we had to find another artist who could come to our rescue. Enter Daniel Bollans of Consecration.

It was suggested we work with Daniel as a replacement, and honestly this was one of the most painless experiences we have ever had. We started with the vortex motif as a core design concept and then gave a very loose and rough brief to Daniel based on the concept of a vortex of ghosts or souls, we wanted this to be definitely human in form and to avoid many of the heavy metal stereotypes.

Daniel delivered this in spades, asking pertinent questions and keeping us in the loop. He sent through his initial design sketches and worked quickly with us to capture the essence of what we wanted whilst adding his own flair to it. In the end we have this striking piece of artwork with many tiny, hidden elements that draw the viewer into the vortex.

Tina Korhonen: We needed a new set of images that better represented us as a band post-Sisyphus that were slightly less abstract than the images used in the last album, and we contacted Tina K to do a shoot for us. We ended up shooting a series of images in a studio in London during lockdown, this in itself being a very surreal experience and quite possibly the feel of desertion from that drive down added its own little bit of atmosphere to the finished work. The images came out with a certain ominous quality that alludes to the darkness in this collection of tracks.

Phat Mandem: Claudio Ravanelli and Andre Harrison of Phat Mandem contacted us with a brief for a video that they wanted to shoot and felt we would work really well in it, we in turn felt that The Ghosts of St Augustine would be the ideal track. We’d wanted to work with them after seeing their brilliant video for Ygodeh, “One night stand”.

The shooting took place in a small studio space in London. Some lockdown restrictions were still in place so cast interaction had to be strictly controlled which meant that shooting was done on a some in, some out basis, but it worked, and the end result is oozing with atmosphere and menace. Ultimately again, that semi-enforced isolation added its own touch to the video, creating some very surreal moments in the interactions of various people.

Putting it all together:

The album layout and design we decided to do in-house this time due to production backlogs everywhere, so this would remove that delay from the chain. That in itself was an interesting process as print media is not something that either of us has really done in the past.