Empathy for The Devil

Gigs, Posters & Rock’n’Roll: a message to the music industry.

It’s always been great to work with real authen­tic rock­ers, no mat­ter what they do — ston­er, hard­core, garage rock, blues trash, doom met­al, whatever.

Mes­sage from the Cler­gy: Thou shalt be con­tent­ed work­ing for the Holy Spir­it of Rock’n’Roll.

Those hairy (some­times) tat­tooed (or not) dudes are big-heart­ed, ami­able, and recep­tive gen­tle­men of tal­ent. On the designer’s side, it’s all about fath­om­ing the music to gain the super­pow­er to con­cep­tu­al­ize it visu­al­ly. Lis­ten, get into it, talk to the musi­cians, lis­ten, start sketch­ing while lis­ten­ing, have a beer with the bass play­er and the singer, lis­ten deeply again, scan some stuff, etc…

Regard­ing the joint, if I may say, we’re all cre­ative peo­ple deal­ing with one anoth­er: cre­ativ­i­ty is the first key. Yet I am the sup­pli­er, they are the client: empa­thy is the sec­ond key. The point is to be able to raise mutu­al trust and friend­ly respect.
To this end, I trip­ping­ly come back to the band, once I have lis­tened to the usu­al demo, with feel­ings, moods, ideas and con­cepts. In fact they hear that I can not only feel but also under­stand their music.
Indeed, I make it mine. I have to. They need know that I am inspired by the album because they want me to add the prop­er visu­al lay­er to it. They need fig­ure out that I am about to raise and devel­op a visu­al con­cept that is in total sym­bio­sis with the music and the album concept.

The rest is usu­al­ly pure pleasure.

Bon­jour chez vous,
Max­im­i­lien, Founder @ Flyermann