edel music

edel music
independent media company

art direction, illustration and graphic design for the album of deep purple – splat!

for splat!, deep purple’s latest album, we imagined a suspended universe where past, present and future converge. an invented mythology, made up of fragments of a lost civilisation and inhabited by human figures, robots, monuments and mysterious energies.
to build this visual world, we explored a wide range of references: vintage science-fiction book covers, cinema, metaphysical painting and classic rock imagery. these influences and visual references were used to construct a coherent and autonomous symbolic and narrative universe.

artificial intelligence was one of the tools used to create the illustrations. we generated hundreds of possibilities, which were then selected, combined and transformed through collage and digital illustration. as designers, we consider ai alongside all other creative tools: it becomes valuable when guided by visual culture, intuition, passion and method.
this approach recalls bruno munari’s idea of applying the principle of “judo” to new technologies: rather than resisting the nature of the machine, using its logic and even its unexpected results as creative material. we believe the same attitude can be applied to artificial intelligence today.

we conceived splat! as a single visual narrative rather than a collection of illustrations. the cover is its threshold: the point of entry into a world that does not literally translate the music, but exists alongside it.