What’s In A Cover? Concrete Island with The Heartwood Institute

This is a mouth watering proposition – The Heartwood Institute and Hawksmoor taking on Ballard’s Concrete Island. For fans you know this is going to be epic before you hit play. For the uninitiated, here’s a handy article to know if The Heartwood Institute are for you!

Concrete Island features wonderful cover art from Eric Adrian Lee. We caught up with The Heartwood Institute to talk about the artwork and how important the art is!

The artwork for Concrete Island is phenomenal- tell us how it came about!

“I think serendipity is the word. I’ve always been blown away with the way Spun Out Of Control package their releases, the art and layout is always amazing. So once they were on board for the release they suggested Eric Adrian Lee. Both James ( Hawksmoor ) and myself were delighted to have Eric doing the art. He was sent a preview copy of the audio and came back with that amazing art. He absolutely nailed the vibe first time – that 70’s brutalist / sc-fi look that’s really central to the original novel.”

It’s the perfect evocation of old paperworks. This seems perfect for Heartwood Institute, would I be correct in assuming that in general literature, movies and TV are a bigger influence on your music than other music?

“Well I have to confess I’m a big collector of 70’s and 80’s paperbacks, I love the design work on them. I’ll often buy several copies of the same book if they have different cool artwork. But yes, for sure I’m taking a lot of influences and inspiration from outside of music. It’s no secret I’m fascinated by the whole idea of hauntology and trying to translate that into music.”

Many of your albums work to a theme- does it make it easier to find cover art as you have something to represent, or harder as it has to fit just right?

“A lot of what I do is really thematically inspired and I mostly have images in mind, so I tend to send the sleeve designer a whole bunch of images, not always for them to use, but to express where the music itself is coming from. In a sense Concrete Island was much easier to pass that on, all it required was saying it’s J G Ballard, it’s Concrete Island. A swift google image search will show some amazingly inspirational book covers.”

Imagery is very important to your music, so album art must be key?

“Definitely, when you’re doing instrumental music it’s not always easy to get across what it’s about or inspired by. So the imagery that goes with it really needs to get that across. With the Witchcraft Murders LP, it was really a huge bonus to be able to produce a zine to go along with the release. It really helped get the background across. Certainly something I’ll be thinking about doing for future releases, even just as a pdf.”

… and here’s the guide image provided by Spun Out Of Control to the artist, Eric Adrian Lee, to suggest a tannoy system in the centre of the island!