A melancholic, mercury-like kaleidoscope of flowing lava comes to life with volcanic pulsation in Alex Banks’ latest music video. The British producer commissioned Tamás Birinyi to design an album cover and a music video for his latest track and EP, Tephra.
Tamás Birinyi has worked with several DJs and producers as a graphic designer and even started dabbling in music himself. In our article on his first material, #flumesounds, released under the alias ONAKOM, he told us how important the organic merging of sounds and images is in his typically dark, deep-toned, textured tunes. This is what he carries through to his latest project.
Tamás has always marveled at the videos and album covers of the artists represented by the record label MeshMesh, while the music of Alex Banks, who also did remixes for Bonobo and toured together with Moderat, has been influencing him for years. That’s why he was thrilled when he was given the opportunity to design an album cover and a music video for Banks’ latest track and EP, Tephra.
Like most of Tamás’s projects, this one also started with the process of gathering inspiration, doing research, and forming a conception, followed by a phase of planning and experimentation. First, they needed an album cover for the EP, so the design plans were created in a square picture format. He then rendered these into video form.
“My primary concern was to make sure that the video and its visual world was derived from the music. The mood of Tephra clearly shows the two months Alex spent in the Canary Islands, so there was no question that the style of the video should also be determined by the place where the song was written, the island of Lanzarote. Thanks to its volcanic origin, it’s a special, colorful, otherworldly place with many faces. The slow-flowing lava, as the main theme, reflects on the melancholic mood, which can also be felt in the music,” said the graphic designer.
In the video, the delicate, organic character of lava and the environment is broken by transforming them into geometric shapes. This is enhanced by the continuously changing colors and textures as well as by the lava transforming into chrome-colored liquid. The designer’s aim was to create an abstract world in which the natural endowments of Lanzarote create a unique environment by reflecting on reality, while slightly dissociating from it at the same time.
For the time being, the album is only available in digital form, but Tamás has also designed a vinyl album cover prototype for the project.
Alex Banks’ album Tephra is available HERE.
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