Autoreverse – Autotunes album art
Designer Hélène Marian continues her protean collaboration with the duo Autoreverse (live video on Youtube). After designing, among other things, their two previous releases, Esreverotua Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, which also featured fonts designed by her, here is a vinyl record whose cover is entirely composed of her latest release, NaN Archy. The design of Nan Archy directly echoes the half-electronic, half-instrumental layers of Nina Garcia and Arnaud Rivière’s band. In a typographic language we’d say half digital, half manual.
While Archy hints at reminiscences of heavier weights in these thinner styles, the album Autotunes, on the other hand, “exposes the takes played in the studio through ‘horizontal’ sequencing (A1), before repeating the same material ‘vertically’ in a meticulous work of hollowing out and elisions”.
The cover is a synthetic all-electric yellow sleeve, with the album name in the center like a shiny car logo with its chrome relief (what car tape player didn’t have the “autoreverse” function?). On the back cover, there are a series of nods to the band’s name: a spinning text effect in “autoreverse” mode and revisited references to music technology features, all in NaN Archy in almost all its forms.
Here’s what Éditions Gravats writes about the album:
Autoreverse brings together Arnaud Rivière (prepared turntable – we should say damaged or destroyed) and Nina Garcia (guitar & feedback). Autotunes is something like the duo’s core in fission. They throw themselves into improvisation with little patience for detours: the position is clean-cut hardcore – less over-the-top clatter and more about finding the cutting edge, with an insistence on fine-tuning the limits of the instruments, attacking the raw and the gritty with maximum precision: the result is an irradiating flow of rare metals and certified toxins.
Recorded with the support of Musique Contemporaine at the Dynamo of Banlieues Bleues.
