Psyence
DJ Shadow and James Lavelle
With the Beastie Boys and Thom Yorke among other collaborators.
James Lavelle. A power of musical design to be reckoned with. A massive collaborator, working with DJ Shadow, Beastie Boys, Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft, and many other talents over the years. This was Lavelle’s major debut into the pop/electronic/downtempo/breakbeat musical worlds. Samples are hypnotic and are a trademark of his musical style.
A massive collaboration on this record, Psyence Fiction was discovered by me a bit late, as it was released late in 1998 and I think I only found it around 2000 or so.
This album is such a mixture of so many styles, that it would be difficult to describe it as a style of music, but more of as a collage of soundscapes and tunes, peppered with strange samples.
There was a hidden rewind track on the CD that was more than a minute long and had tons of samples all mashed together.
Rabbit in Your Headlights with Thom Yorke from Radiohead was a standout track for me, and just finding a live performance of it here for you (the original video for this track is a bizarrely spooky effort by famed director Jonathan Glazer):
There is lots to explore with Unkle’s music. More info about Unkle can be found here:
There’s a 20 year anniversary release of this album:
https://thevinylfactory.com/features/20-years-of-unkles-psyence-fiction/
Cover Art
Cover art by Ben Drury (with his brother(?) Tim Drury and Andy Holmes), using a font he designed just for this record, as far as I can tell. Drury worked on several musical design projects over the years with some big hitters, including Massive Attack, Mo Wax, Stüssy, Converse, Nike, Microsoft, and more.
Illustration/paint was by Futura 2000 for the art on this record, and there are a few different variations of the artwork for the internals of the sleeve and different formats. The spacemen seen on the cover were featured in music video footage, and were consequently made into vinyl figures on KidRobot (NYC Toy store). Futura’s websites are wonky, but in case Instagram still exists while reading this you can view his account there:
The font used for the back of this design was Metropolitan, designed by Gareth Hague of Alias. Their sites are up but require Flash, so I’ll let you go down that path, if you dare.
https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/23748/metropolitan
The graph paper aesthetic also struck a cord with my cut and paste graphical history.