I created some custom covers for a few of my Spotify playlists, as an alternative to the standard, automatically generated thumbnails. Seemed nice to share them here.
This one is dedicated to minimal music, now still mainly Brian Eno and his brother Roger Eno. “Minimes” also refers to the “Rue des Minimes” in the art quarter of Brussels. Don’t know why, but it’s nice.
Not far from the Rue des Minimes is the imposing Palais de Justice built by the controversial architect Joseph Poelaert. The first times I saw the building during my highschool years it didn’t make a lasting impression. Only later, after having discovered the great works of bande-dessinée creators François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, it struck a nerve. Now I have seen it so many times that it has become a personal archetype.
“Mnemosyne”, in Greek mythology the river of remembrance, is associated with music which drifts in and out of consciousness like long forgotten, but always present memories. Again, the Eno brothers with their album “Mixing Colors” comes to mind, but others too like “Dallas Acid” with “The Spiral Arm”. The collage contains fragments from photos I took for a writing project on the Cimetiére de Montmartre (formerly Cimetière du Nord). The tomb in the foreground carries the ‘gisant’ of Godefroy Cavaignac (1853-1905) who, as it happens, became infamous for not acknowledging the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus. During that period, he was minister of war, and when it was brought to his attention that the document on which the accusations against Dreyfus were base was a forgery, he stubbornly refused to act upon this knowledge and entered the camp of the anti-dreyfussards. Left in the background fragments of the Pont Caulaincourt, built over the cemetery in the 19th century to connect two important traffic arteries. The construction of the cast-iron bridge, or viaduct, made it necessary to relocate a number of tombs to make room for the pillars, which did not meet with general approval.
Nyx, the Greek personification of Night (Nox, Nux) is a strange confluence of powerful associations. Darkness, fear, death, unbridled creativity, nothingness, sleep, dreams, fulness of image, it is all there. The goddess is an immediate descendant of Chaos and sister of Erebos, the god of darkness. The image is a photo I took some years ago in the restoration yard of the Middelheim sculpture park (Antwerp, Belgium). The statue probably doesn’t represent Nyx at all, but this is how I imagine her.
Inquisitive 