V/A - Contaminated 5.0
At Stylus this week, I have a feature (URL updated) on artists who do metal album artwork. Each day will publish an interview and artwork for a different artist – Orion Landau, Larry Carroll, Stephen Kasner, Dan Seagrave, and John Dyer Baizley. This blog will host supplementary materials and interview outtakes for these artists.
Arguably, no label has an in-house graphic designer on par with Relapse’s Orion Landau. He mentioned that John Heartfield was his primary influence, which prompted me to look him up. Turns out that Heartfield was a German named Helmut Herzfeld who made powerful anti-Hitler collages. Landau lifted the face from Heartfield’s Italy in Chains for the cover of the Contaminated 5.0 compilation, as well as artwork for Relapse’s Contamination Festival.
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The CD itself doesn’t need review, as each Contaminated is basically a Relapse greatest hits at the time. From the comp, I’ve posted “The Tide” by Neurosis (one of Landau’s favorite bands) to, uh, tide you over while you read the feature. The interview outtakes below are from a discussion of when Landau first started working for Relapse.
What year are we talking about?
Around 2001.
I actually lived in San Francisco for some time around then.
Oh, cool! Where’d you live?
I was living in the Lower Haight, right next to the projects.
Yeah (laughs). I lived down there for a little while, too.
The prices went up probably because of the tech boom.
Yeah, that dot com explosion happened. What happened was, San Francisco became the Internet news hub of the world. We had a shop for $1500 that we were sharing with a couple other people off of Market. We lost our lease, and our [rent] went from $1500 to $22,000. I was, like, “I’m done, I need a break” (laughs). I’m not a business person; I like doing art. It was really appealing to go somewhere where people who were good at business would do business, and I could just focus on the creative end of things.
Is there some resource where I can see everything you’ve done?
Oh, god, I’m so unorganized (laughs). You know what? I have no idea how you would do that, sorry.
Are there any creations of yours you particularly enjoy?
I have such a hard time looking at my work. Sometimes I’ll come back to something a year later and go, “Oh, wow, that was all right.” But I always feel like moving on to the next thing. Recently, I was pretty happy with the Cephalic Carnage and Coldworker layouts, because I felt like I was pushing myself as hard as I could go for unusual packaging.
It must be hard to avoid your work, since it’s in stores and on people’s shirts.
Oh, yeah (laughs). It is a nice reward. But I don’t do any of this for that. Why I do this is I really enjoy working with bands and other creative people. I’m just excited to get to work every day.
Paul Romano offers prints of some of his album artwork for sale. Do you do anything similar?
No. I’ve been approached by a couple people. I have considered it, and I may do that in the future. I love Paul’s stuff, he’s a really great artist.
