Today (err yesterday technically) Anjuli Stars released her latest project “Starvation Volume II,” the much anticpated follow up to her acclaimed 1st Vol. Anjuli, originally from the 305, has strong ties to Boston and I had the pleasure of meeting her through my Scope Urban Apparel fam when she came to Boston to perform. I was glad to help with the album art and a landing page for her website to showcase the project. The cover art features illustration by Mike Oveido, originally seen on the single for “Buss Shots.” I worked around this amazing piece of art and tried not to take away from it. Anjuli’s vision was very clean and inspired by Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” but with an updated palette of typefaces and colors to bring out the FLavor. The landing page was a way to brand anjulistars.com for the current release and showcase the album and the video for “Buss Shots.”  Please do yourself a favor and go Download Starvation Volume II by Anjuli Stars FOR FREE! Then follow @anjulistars and @southdade records on twitter and like South Dade records on facebook. Stay tuned for more big things from Anujuli, South Dade and other Scope Artists.

As the world waits for O.T.O‘s “The Furnace” he wanted to release a project to compliment and buid up to it. This new project, called “Oven Door” already has a 2-part single and videos circulating which Political Pirates did the art for. The shoot was very simple. Kitchen, oven, low lights, doobie, Scope apparel, Polo – camera. We kept the post photo stuff to some minimal color changes and levels/curves. While the project was pretty simple we love the results – nice atmospheric and simple. Go check O. out at pswethebest.com. Shout out Big Byrd da Boss who filmed and directed the two promo videos. Download on fire Pt. 1 http://hulkshare.com/gtvuk4uwny3q Download On Fire Pt. 2 http://hulkshare.com/360e3qlj5zr5

When Pause dropped his second tape ‘Time to Go’ he enlisted us again to pull together the cover art and website. The cover photography was done by Nick Stringer at the Prudential Tower in front of the city. For the site we created a simple 1-pager that highlighted his music and videos. pausekid.com  

Friday, CCRMG artists Catch Wreck and Retrospek released the video for Spliff Lifta, the apocalyptic single off of Catch Wreck’s latest album Collective Consciousness. The video was filmed, directed and edited by Rene Dongo and the song was produced by Rah Intelligence. As we busily prepare the website and other materials for the release on 12/21/11, we thought it would be a good opportunity to share the cover art and talk about the process behind it and how it relates to the concept of the album. This cover was done by Jake and grew from a late night session sitting around and listening to the rough mixes – talking about images and ideas associated with the project. The title “collective consciousness” has both external and internal references. CCR, which stands for cool collective reps is the musical family Catch has been working with here in Boston, and the mentality that unites the group, similar ideas and aspirations is one of the touch points for the project, which has a lot of material about Boston and the Boston hip-hop “scene.” In the larger context – Collective Consciousness refers to the way ideas can connect people across other boundaries, physical or otherwise and how collective action of like minds has tremendous power to change existing paradigms. With the cover we tried to pull together images that represented this on different levels: so networks within ones self, networks of people and relationships, networks of technology and networks on the cosmic scale. Knowledge as light, as energy, as life and something that connects us. There was a lot of adjusting to the images and colors to try to get the right balance – eventually landing us in this rich blue green to yellow – like a living equatorial ocean. For the type we wanted to keep it simple and direct. Mostly though we just pushed the images until we liked how it looked – listening to and talking about the music throughout. We also did the quick single cover for “The Plan”.