Album Art

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”.

One of my favorite things to do is help people realize a vision and make something happen. Illy Sav has been in the cypher for a long time and this project like many others (hint, hint, cough, cough) is long overdue. After a quick shoot featuring some Scope Apparel swag, I developed the cover art drawing on the visuals cues of the gaming world, referenced in the project, and particularly the iRock song and video. With the single covers, we wanted the words and images to tell a kind of narrative on their own with the simplicity of layout and selective pictures of Sav. The website is simply a vehicle to deliver the music, and also get you to a twitter or Facebook. If you’re into that kind of thing. In this area Illy gets all the credit for demanding functionality, simplicity and selectivity. So, go check out his other content on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. This was a great project to finally get done and I salute Illiam for his persistence as an artist in Boston. It is not the most welcoming of environments, but it seems to produce some very talented specimins. I am glad most of them are on our team.

Bonkers is Catch’s ruthless rendition of Tyler the Creator’s Yonkers for the frustrated Boston Hip-Hop enthusiast in all of us. For Bonkers, modeled the cover after Bastard visually, making strategic additions to a Sam Adams bio photo.

No. Its not our diagnosis, but rather the latest work (if we can keep up with him) of Catch Wreck. ADHD, Catch’s 3rd full project is rawer, in many senses of the word, than the more overtly conscious Violence Transfomed EP and The Young & The Restless Mixtape. While his early work was more aware of message and language, ADHD is an honest glimpse into one of the mad minds of this wrecked generation. For ADHD we connected Catch with our amazing illustrator and Scope Urban Apparel fam Luis Perez. We also shot and designed the single covers and built the website, bandcamp etc.

Cover Last week, Catch Wreck released the first track off of the forthcoming ADHD mixtape: “Concerto” over the classic roots track. Its been floating around on the web and getting some good feedback so I figured it was about time we posted about the art. Actually, in all honesty school has been consuming my life, and this is the first free moment I’ve had to write about it. But never mind the details. Wreck has been ready to release this track for a while now but due to the aforementioned school consuming my life thing, it took us a while to find a time to sit down and shoot and design the cover. Once we found time, the rest was pretty easy. Catch had a clear mood and concept he was going for, having sent a lot of reference photography in the style he wanted. Then it was just a matter of gathering some readily available props and getting the shot. We did some very minor post process stuff to the photo to make the colors have the right relationships and very simple typography. Overall, I, and more importantly Wreck are very pleased with the results and I think they the track justice. So far, the new material he’s been working on for this mix tape is of a new caliber and I can’t wait for what’s next. Video While we were shooting the cover we also did a quick and dirty video, using the same scene, props and players. We shied away from traditional music videos, instead of a lot of flashy performance shots, we just showed catch self medicating, something the song deals explicitly with. This video and track were the first single off of the ADHD project and thus we wanted this to build anticipation and curiosity about the project, which was a rapid departure from Catch’s earlier work. Concerto by Catch Wreck