Visiting The Record Shop

So my buddy Jackson sends me an email today labelled "A Challenge". Well, I always likes me a challenge, especially a graphic challenge, as this turned out to be.

He sent me to a blog called The Yellow Stereo, in which this guy PJ came up with a very cool idea: basically, you take a randomly generated band name, a randomly generated album title, and a randomly generated picture, and then use your graphic editor of choice (and your fine artistic skills!) to mock up an album cover! What fun!

PJ suggests you get your band name by taking the title of whatever comes up when you visit the Wikipedia random article page. Now I'll tell ya right now, I cheated a little bit on this first step, as I would generate a new page if I got the name of a famous person or of an actual band (I was really pissed when I got "The Great Kat" and then found out she was an actual musician. Is that a cool name or what?) For your album title, go to the random quotes page and scroll down to the last quote; the last four words of the last quote are your album title. (I soon discovered that I needed to refresh the page each time to get new quotes as I made multiple albums.) Then go to Flickr's Interesting Photos page and grab the third photo; that'll be the image of your album cover. (I'll go ahead and admit now that I actually was grabbing the fourth photo, as when I went to Flickr, the third photo had a watermark that was pretty sucky.)

Now make your album covers! Here's what I came up with...it seems to want to produce industrial minimalist bands or German techno-type stuff, but I did end up with a good metal band as well. First off, we have Overconvergent Modular Form, and their hit album "Like It Better Dead"

(click to see bigger)

Gotta love the OMF and their sweet trance beats. Next we have Segmental Blood Pressure with "As Simple As That"

They look like maybe they're one of those electronic cello bands that play modern interpretations of hard pop songs. Or maybe just Christmas tunes. On to Diasello and the haunting "Sweet Serenity of Books"

I like the name Diasello. I was quite fortunate to end up with a nice simple picture for that one, and had fun making the creepy, ethereal logo for the group in the sky. I'm thinking these folks are like latter day Clannad. Quite a polar opposite to our last group, the note-shredding guitar-wailing explosions of CYCLOTYPHLOPS and "My War On Terror!"

Rock on! And yes, "My War On Terror!" WAS the last four words on that quote, and yes, the exclamation point was part of the original text. Sweet.

In real life, overconvergent modular form refers to some type of mathematical space, segmental blood pressure is the bp of individual limbs, Diasello is a village in Greece, and cyclowhatever is some sort of blind snake.

So anyway, I challenge all my graphically-inclined friends to try this out on your own blogs and comment here with a link to your offerings. It is a CHALLENGE, I'm telling you!