The art for Intensities was a very invested experimental process that involved my first proper use of resin in any kind of large scale. The base sculpture that the photographs are taken of is put together from multitudes of casts of various crustacean claws, removed from their silicon moulds at various stages of cured or nearly cured so that they warped, cracked and dropped over each other. These were coloured with a range of tints and dyes, generally across a red/yellow/orange scheme, with flecks of black and green here and there. Each layer of the sculpture was a run of casts from the moulds and a layer of resin from the overflow of colours from filling the next layer of casts.

This gave me a probably very poor by technical standards, but visually rich slab of translucent chitin held together with similarly translucent currents and flows in the resin.
The intention for this was to get at some kind of plane of consistency and tie it to claws and strata referenced in the Geology Of Morals Chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, which is also where the concept of Intensities that the album takes it’s name from comes from.

Once this was all layered and set after a month of layering resin and casts every night, I back lit it with various colours of LED light and the final photo is what forms the main image, with a few of the additional close ups and different light colours used for the inlay.

This was all worked up into a CD layout for a release on Transcending Obscurity, and then was in turn used for a Vinyl version, and a whole bunch of merch. I went with a specific ‘as performed’ layout on the lyrics for this, in keeping with the previous work on the Rhizome album.

You can grab a copy at the Transcending Obscurity bandcamp here, and the rest of the Plague Rider discography is here.

Plague Rider logo by TG Rantanten.