Chopin Residue Music Album Cover

The idea did not arrive as a concept first and a material later. It came from watching what a process discards. When you remove the piano from Chopin, the central voice of the music, you expect silence or absence. Instead you find that everything around that absence is still there: harmony, breath, the emotional weight that the piano used to carry on its own. That is the residue, and it turned out to be generative rather than empty. Once I understood that musically, the same logic governed the object. The cover could not be a clean illustration applied on top of the music. It had to come from what the music itself left behind.

I stopped thinking of the package as a container and started thinking of it as evidence. A protective sleeve tells you nothing about how the sound was made. Here the artwork carries the trace of a physical act, the cutting of vinyl, so the object and the recording share a single origin. For a listener that reframes the format. You are not holding a wrapper around a file. You are holding a record of a process, and that, I think, is one of the few arguments physical formats still have in a streaming world: they can be the thing, not the packaging of the thing.

The waste was not chosen to make a statement about sustainability, but the methodology does open that conversation honestly. The vinyl thread left over from cutting the records was used to make nine large-format paintings, two metres by two metres each. Photographs of those paintings became the visual language of the artwork. So the byproduct of one process became the raw material of another. I think the responsibility, when you make a production process visible, is not to aestheticise the waste into something false. The traces have to remain what they are. The honesty is the point, not the decoration.