Behind The Artworks: Async Await - Irretrospective Part.3 (2024)

The artwork for Irretrospective Part 3 is a photo taken by my friend and fellow musician Jacob Luckey, who has taken most of the photos I’ve used for promo. It was at a somewhat short-lived DIY punk house in Rahway, NJ in the summer of 2021. This was a memorable show as one attendee (apparently fresh from rehab) who was incredibly intoxicated started to mosh at the beginning of the first band’s set and began violently puking all over the floor, inches from a pedalboard. The area was evacuated, rinsed off, dried up with a large old piece of carpet, and then dragged outside all during the same set. Shortly after, since this was a BYOB show, I snagged one of his beers from the cooler in the driveway figuring I’d be doing him a favor, a Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA. I remember hiding the label with my hand as he walked by. Also, inside the house where people seemed to be loitering unrelated to the show, there were some freshly laid vinyl flooring tiles, and the still unset glue oozed out between them and was sticking my shoes to the floor. Clearly, they were committed to the DIY ethos.

 

The photo was taken when Jake noticed that my Vans slip-ons matched a splotch of pink paint on the driveway next to one band’s particularly unreliable Ford Econoline van (which transported an unreasonable amount of gear for a 2-piece). He told me to stand there and snapped the photo. When he later sent it to me, my first thought was to do a selective color edit in Photoshop to isolate the pink. I ended up enjoying the aesthetic and after creating the blue and pink color scheme decided to make that visual theme for the whole Irretrospective series. It was challenging for me to do the same for other photos for parts 1 and 2, since I’m an amateur with Photoshop, and the results were mixed. But fittingly, part 3 features my favorite of the 3 album covers with my favorite of the 3 EPs.