original cover design
- Sleeve 043/100: Cell-0 (2020)
- Studio Album by Apocalyptica
- Label: Silver Lining Music
- Genre: Cello Metal, Symphonic Metal, Progressive Metal
- Original Cover: artwork by Rami Mursula
This post is part of the 100 Sleeves: One hundred Album Covers Re-Designed project, a personal challenge I created for myself at the end of 2020. The goal is to create 100 album covers, a new one every week, inspired by the music I’m enjoying at the moment.
I’m really bad at keeping up with the bands I like, and Apocalyptica is no exception. I was listening to their 8th album Shadowmaker when I looked up their Spotify profile and found they released an album in 2020.
Like many of their fans, I was enamored by Apocalyptica’s instrumental pieces from the beginning of their career. So Cell-0 (pronounced cell zero), which is fully instrumental, feels like a sweet treat. I was immediately hooked by it.
The concept for this album is an “unknown particle”, the Cell-0, that makes a group of cells more than tissue and transforms them into living creatures. Apocalyptica believes music works in this way too. Music is made of notes and rhythms but without the Cell-0, it has no soul, it is not alive. They conceived and produced this album by themselves, without a label, and this enabled them to be more creative and inject the album with emotion.
The album also explores themes of politics, environmentalism, and the human’s ability to build and destroy.
Album Cover Redesign by franzmori. This is fan art, no copyright infringement intended.
The music left me thinking about beauty, chaos, life, and death. Because of the album theme on particles and atoms, I looked for pictures of cells as a source of inspiration. I found a cross-section of a marram grass leaf under the microscope. I thought of seeing a pattern of skulls in it and was captivated by the bubble-like structure. I also took inspiration from Maria Linares Freire‘s painting Collisions. Quamtum. to represent a collision of protons in the sky, and Rebecca Blair‘s patterns for the soil.
Some of the images that inspired my illustration for Cell-0
There was much in the music that made me feel like doodling: drawing lines almost at random and going with the flow. The sketch result was then full of details that took me quite some time to polish for the final version. I also had a hard time finishing this piece, emotionally speaking, because of the themes it touches and the current political and humanitarian situation. I chose the album and conceived the idea before the Ukrania and Russia war unfolded, but upon it happening I started to doubt if it was right to keep up with it. I decided to finish it at the end, expecting it can be perceived in a positive light.
doodles exploration and rough sketch
Would you like your own Album Cover design?
I’m available for commissions!
Listen to the art! I’ll be adding a new album each week to this Spotify playlist HERE.
To know more about my personal project and see the rest of the cover designs in this series, go HERE.