CD Covers
Separate to New Media work, with my musical connections I'm sometimes asked to do CD Covers. Here are a couple of examples of the most recent jobs I've completed.
You can click on the individual thumbnails for a larger view, then go back and forth through the entire collection on this page.
Simon J Alpin - On the wire.
He's been helping other people sound good for years, both as a musician and as a producer. Now it's his turn to shine. The album was recorded over two days and all the songs are first or second take. Simon likes simplicity. On first listen the songs sound soft and almost easy but it does not take long before the harder edges and darker centre start to show. Jess Klein and Caitlin Cary singing backup add to the beauty.
Simon J. Alpin is one of Britain's most prolific session musicians. Best known as a guitarist, the Sunderland-raised Alpin, a multi-instrumentalist can also play the mandolin, banjo and pedal steel, and has worked with a long line of musical acts which include the Teenage Fanclub, Devendra Banhart, Badly Drawn Boy, Thalia Zedak, the Walkabouts' Chris Eckman, Deanna Varagona, Last Town Chorus, Brian Kennedy, Viarosa and Wendy James.
In 2000 he joined the Willard Grant Conspiracy shortly after they had released their fourth album, 'Everything's Fine', and played with them on their subsequent tour to promote it. He also worked as a co-producer and co-writer with their singer and front man Robert Fisher on their much acclaimed fifth album, 'Regard the End'.
2005 found him producing 'The Famous Mad Mile', the debut solo album of Danny George Wilson, the front man with Grand Drive, another group whom Alpin has toured and recorded extensively with.
Transglobal Underground - Beach Bellydance Babylon.
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Shimmy and twang, in whatever order you like! Beach Bellydance Babylon celebrates the days when men with velvet trousers and unpleasantly wide lapels picked up their guitars and twanged their way across a thousand dance floors in cabarets from Los Angeles to Damascus!
At the height of this Age of Twang, on one side of the world The Ventures and Dick Dale proved you could get the go-go into just about every song ever written with a Fender Telecaster and surf beat. Across the continent, the bellydance bars of Brooklyn and the East Side were resonating to the same guitar sound reinterpreting Turkish and Lebanese folk and pop songs.
As a nod to the past, the theme from the sixties show 'The Avengers' gets the full Oriental treatment, while the Egyptian classic 'Fakkarouni' is washed up and re-assembled surf style on the Californian coast.
From the present day, Nirvana, Depeche Mode and the Black Eyed Peas are all covered: the latter with a version of 'My Humps' being perhaps the worlds first psychedelic shaabi r n b mix. Onto an unknown time and space, the album takes on various Arabic rhythms and twists them into new shapes, notably the full rocking workout of 'Machine Gun Shimmy'.
The album was originally conceived as something to inspire belly dancers to work out some new dips and shimmys to: in fact it was previewed at the International Bellydance Congress. However, a piece of work quite this hipshakingly original deserves a wider hearing. So...hear away, get out a surfboard and some sequins and shimmy your way to the Beach Bellydance Babylon!