The Choice Music Awards is an annual celebration of the best Irish albums. We delve a little deeper to discover the story behind the album artwork chosen by some of the contenders and its relationship to the music in question.
Bantum is the moniker of Ruairi Lynch’s musical output. Shane O’Driscoll created the album artwork and explains the origins of the cover.
“The album artwork stemmed from the artwork for the albums first single, Take it, which features Loah. In the video for that song a dancer is interacting with public spaces at night to great effect. Both Motherland Films and the dancer (Laura Sarah Dowdall) did an awesome job, so we championed the dancer image to create a link.
When the album emerged Ruairi wanted to use other options from the single artwork, so it was just a case of digging up old art files and arranging new spliced compositions of the dancer. We also removed her face to make it about her pose rather than the person.
The intention was to bring a movement on a movement. The original image captures the movement of the dancer in mid air, but I wanted to bring more to it, which is where the spliced images came from. I felt using the original image was too safe and it needed a distortion, very much like what Ruairi does with sounds. I’m familiar with his work process and often get to see his process, how he distorts chords and samples, so that lends itself to the image in a sense. The title was to be unobtrusive, so we went with white.”
