Hamish Napier - 'The River' - CD Album cover design

Firstly I must stress that this album is an excellent piece of work, exquisitely composed, played, mixed and mastered. The subject matter is interpreted and portrayed with great sensitivity, intelligence and soul. Support great Scottish art and go and buy it! Without financial support these projects will simply cease to exist. I implore you go and buy a physical copy from http://hamishnapier.bandcamp.com/album/the-riverI have been collaborating in a myriad of jinx with Hamish since my early 20's. I am proud to say that Hamish is one of my best friends, he is hilarious, top-shelf craic and quite possibly the most learned and well studied musicians I know. His knowledge of music across all genres is startling and having made a fair bit of music with the man myself, I have learnt a great deal about the minute details, intellectual parameters and history of music. Recently we made a piece of music together and my extremely simple chord progression was explained to me from 3 very different theoretical perspectives. Simply put Hamish is an authority on all things music. Not only does he posses meticulous and possessive knowledge on the theory and history of music he is also a very soulful, charismatic and entertaining performer, he never lets his extensive knowledge handicap his creativity or the creativity of others. This album represents a work of great emotional connection to a place, it's people and it's history. When Hamish told me his plan for his album I feared he was going to do something safe, something conservative; that perhaps he would not exploit his talents fully and make an album that he perceived the folk scene would accept more readily. These fears were completely unfounded. Somehow Hamish has managed to cram all of his influences, knowledge and musical expertise into one mammoth, heartfelt and intricate creation. The intense detail which Hamish is able to deal with is nothing short of miraculous and I am proud to be associated with him creatively, to call him a friend and to be able to listen to his music. Long may he flourish and make albums of such brevity, technical prowess and exquisite sonic detail!The artwork we have created here reflects Hamish's propensity for detail. I won't lie; this artwork was torturous at times. I have drawn every element here by hand, albeit digitally. The cairngorm mountains in the background themselves took over 8 hours and have 13,332 points in them alone. The scene become so complex that my 8 core 32gb ram hackintosh struggled to process it so I to split the scene into various different compositions, mixing each sequence of objects down to one and then adding to that. This intrinsically makes for dangerous album cover design, if you make a mistake along the way you have to go back correct and the mix down again. Every leaf of every tree has to be rendered and before I had even finished the geographic scene I had mixed the files down 5 times. At points the files had over 100,000 lines in them. Hamish had outlined (in his trademark OCD way) the inspiration behind every track and it was important to include all of these, stories, people, animals, building, trees and plants had to be included. The whole concept was to create a stylised overview of the area with all the influences for the music included but not represented clearly so you have to look for them. To immerse yourself in the place to be drawn in and surrounded by the landscape, it's history, it people and general character. Hamish to his credit gave me full control of how this was going to happen and he didn't see the piece until it's near completion. There is no point in me describing every element in the drawing, buy the album stick it on a descent hi-fi or wear some headphones and have a good look at the CD cover, you'll pick stuff out yourself and we hope it will be food for your imagination, your soul and maybe even transport you to a different place altogether. Hamish has written very detailed liner notes and it was a point of great frustrated entertainment getting this text to a place he was happy with. We did it together in the office and I believe he edited the word file in my dropbox 34 times whilst sitting next to me as I was meant to be dropping the text into the layout. We finished at 3 in the morning but it was great craic in a desperate, masochistic way. Hamish also managed to track down real vintage photographs of the area and these serve to enforce the sense of place even better. It was a real pleasure to thumb through the photo albums, to see the place in the past, fish the size of bass guitars, stacks of hay, the snow, the spate. Speyside is magical! And Hamish has captured this magic beautifully, sincerely and magnificently.There is only one thing I feel this project is missing... Vinyl! it is missing being presented on vinyl. I would love to see this artwork on that scale. Vinyl is better! In every way!BUY IT! BUY IT! BUY IT!and grant my wish of getting it on a 33rpm, lacquer disc :)http://hamishnapier.bandcamp.com/album/the-river