ART BLANCHE: Relaxer

One day while scrolling through his Twitter feed, alt-J’s Thom Green stumbled upon something that caught his eye. At first glance, he wasn’t sure what it was, exactly. It was an image, sure, but a fairly abstract one at that.

Thom was intrigued. This was exactly the sort of thing he was on Twitter for.

“I really like Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram for the sheer factor of how much access you have to imagery, really,” Thom explained. “I really like just scrolling through [them]. …I often find images that I want to be involved with or do something with, [but] I don’t know quite what. Usually I end up using them for like my Twitter picture – I change my Twitter picture every day because I like using images for things.”

This particular image came to Thom’s attention courtesy of a man named Oliver Leach, and his Twitter account, @BAKKOOONN, that Thom followed because “he regularly posts images – quite interesting images – that he’s made or that he’s found.”

It came at a perfect time, added Thom, because alt-J were in the need of an album cover for their upcoming record, Relaxer (out June 2nd), and Thom was sold that this was it.

alt-J - Relaxer (Courtesy of alt-J)

“I contacted [Oliver] saying that I thought that it was a piece of work that he had made… I was getting prepared to be like, ‘Can we please buy this image off you?’” Thom said.

Oliver responded, explaining that it wasn’t his image, but rather a still image from a game called LSD Dream Emulator.

“I’ve never heard of the game, never played it,” Thom said. “So I looked into it and our management got into contact with the designer of the game and asked if we could use it. He was totally happy for us to use it. He’s a Japanese visual artist… I think his name is Hiroko Nishikawa. He was really excited because he really likes the band and he was really flattered that we wanted to use the image.”

Born from the dreams of Hiroko Nishikawa, LSD Dream Emulator was a PlayStation game released in Japan in 1998 that has since developed a cult following. During gameplay, the player simply walks around, experiencing visuals inspired by a dream diary Hiroko kept over the span of 10 years. Despite the game’s limited initial reach and abstract concept, it features some very relatable aspects for a gamer like Thom. Most notably: the unmistakable visual style of ‘90s video games.

“I’m a massive fan of computer games and I recognize computer game imagery – you know, it’s quite distinct imagery,” Thom said. “I used to play PlayStation 1 but I’ve never played this game. [The art] drew me in, I think the red and the black work really well together. It’s really an attractive image. I think a lot of people might think: ‘What the f*ck is that?’”

That last part comes from personal experience. In fact, it wasn’t until Thom showed his bandmates the image that he was even aware of everything that was going on in it.



“The red figure on the floor, I didn’t notice that to be a body to begin with, I just kinda thought it was an abstract shape, really – maybe a puddle or something like that. And it was Gus (Unger-Hamilton) that pointed out that it was a body,” Thom said. “When editing the image for the cover, we removed [the body] to see what it would look like because originally we weren’t too into the idea of it being a dead body – it would just have too much symbolism that didn’t relate to anything [in the record]. So we took it out and then realized that it actually works much better with it in it, it kinda ties the image together, really.”

By far, Relaxer has the darkest cover of alt-J’s three records, and intentionally so. During the process of thinking about the album’s artwork, Thom was leaning towards something darker than before. Ironically enough, Thom explained, Relaxer “[is] not a dark album. A lot of people say it’s quite bright, it sounds like a fun album – which it was to make.”

The darkness of Relaxer’s art wasn’t the only notable stylistic change from the first two record covers – this album also marks the first time that alt-J have put any text on the cover of their records. In doing so, they didn’t just stop at listing the album’s title, but chose to add the entire tracklist to the front cover as well, a much less commonplace decision.

alt-J - “In Cold Blood” (Courtesy of alt-J)

“It came around when we were putting the imagery together for the album with our kinda art director. He kinda has everything up on his monitor… [and] I think Gus might’ve said ‘Let’s see what it looks like with the logo with Relaxer up there.’ I think because, you’re right, it’s not seen that often, I think older albums, like older records used to do that or singles… I quite like how uniform it is, kinda structured. I think because the font works so well it was just like ‘Why not?’ It was definitely a deliberate decision and we were aware that we hadn’t done that before. The first two albums, we thought there wasn’t really a place for the title or the name on the cover and we didn’t want to just put it on there for the sake of it. They’re so abstract – the two other images – that I think they work as an image alone.”

Going forward, the band is excited by the opportunities that this stylistic change presents. For Thom, things like merch and their live setup immediately jumped to mind.

“Using different colors for merch and the live show and things like that I think is good – it would be a bit crap to not think about that. For the live show it’s really, one of the first things I thought was this computer game and the game itself was based around kinda random images, I think it will work really well live if we can figure it out.”

alt-J - “3WW” (Courtesy of alt-J)

Already, alt-J have embraced LSD Dream Emulator in a myriad of different ways for Relaxer’s rollout. Artwork for the singles “3WW” and “In Cold Blood” as well as a teaser video for the album and interactive web game have all featured images pulled from LSD. Because the band hasn’t yet had a chance to play the game, finding the images has required an inventive approach.

“We found a database of images from the game that somebody’s compiled and we kinda sifted through them and [suggested images].” On top of that, Thom explained, “There’s a guy at our label who had to play it to get an idea of what to use for the trailer videos or things like that and we played it for a week apparently. It’s pretty cool, I like the premise of it – it’s really hard to find the same image twice because it’s all randomly generated.”

That said, despite a lot of thought about it, Thom isn’t quite ready to dip his toe in LSD’s waters just yet.

“We actually watched a lot of the footage that’s on YouTube and it makes me quite anxious – it’s quite intense,” he said, laughing.

“I think that the game… within the game the higher you are, the more abstract the world becomes and yeah, it’s like, it’s quite weird,” he said, adding, “You can get an emulator – you can get an emulator for anything nowadays – I’ll download it on my laptop and have a look. Maybe one day. Or get a PS1 – that’d be cool.”

-Dylan Singleton

alt-J play Merriweather Post Pavilion on July 27 - tickets available here.

Preorder Relaxer here.