Robert Beatty on retro Photoshop, creative friction and designing album covers that feel almost primeval

It’s Nice That: I’ve read that your childhood was filled with Liquid Television, Mad Magazine and Fantastic Planet, which means I’m talking to a fellow “indoor child”. How did this lay the foundation for your future work and interests?

Robert Beatty: It sounds counterintuitive to say, but I feel that it was way easier to unexpectedly come across weird things lurking on cable TV, the radio or in a store before the internet made everything so accessible. With everything being so easily accessible now, it can be overwhelming to sort through it all and figure out what you actually connect with. There was so much stuff that I saw just once – experimental animated shorts, music videos, public access shows from other countries – with absolutely no context that I wasn’t able to see again or find any information about until years or decades later. I think seeing something and not being able to immediately replay it or look up every bit of information about it and having that gestation period where you sit with it and are able to think about how it makes you feel – that distance was really important to how I developed as an artist. Trying to figure out how to make something myself based on my memories of something I saw or heard is basically still how I work to this day.

An example is a memory of seeing part of the Nicolas Roeg movie Walkabout on the cable channel Bravo (back when it was an arts channel and not just reality television) when I was a teenager and being so confused and excited and waiting around until it came on again early in the morning so that I could record it. The use of music, editing and the story abstracted in the way it is was unlike anything I had ever seen and it totally rearranged my brain. Just seeing that movie and not knowing that something like that could even exist was a huge deal to me.

I’m definitely not trying to romanticise that world with limited access to information, but I think we could all do with a bit more patience to digest things rather than having some immediate reaction, evaluation or classification of the art we take in. I remember buying so many CDs by bands I had heard about and then getting home and immediately being disappointed when I listened to them, but given time I eventually would come around and appreciate them. Difficult art isn’t meant to be digested immediately, and I think the way things are now, it’s easy to have the impulse to simplify or dumb things down so that it’s immediately digestible and I am constantly fighting that.

INT: During your teen years, you were a big fan of Warp Records, and now you’ve designed loads of album covers for them. How does it feel to be designing for a label that you admired since you were a youngster?

RB: There are so many things I’ve been able to do as an artist that, if you had told me when I was younger that I was doing now, I would not have believed you. I’ve crossed paths with so many things that have informed what I do or have been an influence on me. I used to spend a ton of time looking at Squarepusher and Aphex Twin CD sleeves when I was a teenager and their art has definitely made its way into what I do. I started working with Warp through Dan Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), who was someone I met playing noise music shows and the whole thing felt very organic and natural. Warp is one of my favourite labels to work with and I think I’ve done some of my best work for them. There’s something about the way they work that I feel opens things up a bit more, so I’m able to do work that feels more expansive and a bit less limited than a lot of more standard indie labels or whatever. I’m grateful they’ve come to me for projects aside from OPN and I’m always excited when they have something for me to work on.

INT: I have to be selfish and ask this question purely for myself: how did you come up with the R Plus Seven album cover? It’s kind of a master study on telling a story, and communicating a mood, with the least amount of shapes possible.

RB: That one is interesting because it was me recreating a still from an animation by Swiss animator Georges Schwizgebel called Le ravissement de Frank N. Stein from 1982. I had been working with Dan Lopatin on the artwork for that record for months and nothing was really coming together, and he had that still in the references for the art and kept coming back to it. He ended up having Warp reach out to the animator about licensing it, but there wasn’t a still that matched the patina of the image or was suitable for the cover so I ended up recreating it totally from scratch based on this low-res jpeg of a VHS screenshot. So what you see was totally made by me, but it’s based on that. It’s been interesting to see the way people have interpreted that over the years. Lots of people credit the cover to Schwizgebel and not as my recreation of his work. With the way Dan often works with found sound and samples, I find the whole thing really interesting and an example of the difference in which people perceive sampling and authorship in visual culture versus that same thing in music and audio. There’s a thread I posted when the album turned ten that goes into it a bit more if anyone is interested.

INT: You’ve been in a butt-load of bands, from harsh noise music to indie rock – how does being a musician inform how you take on assignments from artists as idiosyncratic as The Weeknd, Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala?

RB: Honestly there’s not really a huge difference in the way I approach things based on the genre of the music, it’s more what the artist is trying to accomplish or get across than the way it sounds. It’s often the way the artist communicates their ideas or aren’t able to that really informs the way I approach making album artwork. It’s definitely rare that a musician has as much understanding and articulation when talking about visual art as they do music, which is I guess why people come to me to help figure out how to convey their music in a visual medium. I don’t know if having an understanding of both music and art really changes the way I make art for music, but I approach them the same way with a very improvisatory and open mind. And sometimes it’s the contrast between the music and the art that makes something interesting. Also it’s often hard to predict how a project will go based solely on the popularity of the artist. Sometimes the bigger bands are easier to work with and the smaller bands end up being more difficult.

INT: In extension to that, where do you begin when designing album covers? I suppose you must be moved by the music to conjure some images up, but then how do you know those images will represent the album for the masses?

RB: It’s often just figuring out what the music evokes and trying to convey that with the art. I definitely try to listen to the music while I work, but a lot of times there’s some outside reference or idea that leads the way and that ends up being more important. I work in relative isolation and don’t share the work with many people before it’s finally put out into the world so it’s hard to predict how it will land with people. There are things that I think are some of my best work that kind of go unnoticed and things I think aren’t as good that people latch onto.

INT: With a portfolio like yours, your style is embedded into pop culture, from the melting moiré patterns of Tame Impala’s Currents and OPN’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never to the digital airbrushing of The Weeknd’s Dawn FM and the Oh Sees’ Orc. What brings you back time and time again to geometry, fantasy and the phantasmagorical?

RB: I think there are things about a lot of what I’m trying to convey with what I do that are a bit elemental or primitive. I’m trying to make something that works on an almost primeval level. The style isn’t as important as it may seem and it’s more about what is there at it’s core and the ideas that got me there. And just the context of the things I’m referencing or the styles I’m working in that have a lot of history behind them. Something like the signifying elements of 20th century advertising are so ingrained in people at this point that they resonate on some basic level where it’s almost subliminal. It makes you feel some way on a surface level, but once you dig a little deeper you realise something is slightly wrong about it. I see a lot of work that may seem to be coming from a similar place as I am, but it just doesn’t have anything to give it more depth than what’s there on the surface. When I started doing the digital airbrush stuff, it was not really a thing, and I was taking something that was at its core a more commercial art form and putting it on the covers of underground noise music so it felt subversive or contradictory in a way. Now it’s fully swung all the way back around where so much advertising and commercial art looks like stuff I was putting on album covers 10 or 15 years ago, which looked like advertising art from the 60s and 70s. It a weird thing, but culture happens in cycles. I think that friction is what makes things interesting and I’m definitely always trying to get back to that. Obviously making artwork for other people or brands, there is an element of compromise and I don’t always succeed, but it’s always on my mind.

INT: In the spirit of tinkering with old tech, what’s one of the best things one could pull apart and mess around with for their creative practice?

RB: I think that’s something that people have to figure out for themselves. I know if I find something I like, I always try to figure out how it was made or a way to recreate it from the ground up. When I was a kid, I was always taking my toys apart to see what was inside. I think there’s something to be said for breaking things down to their most elemental form and then reconstructing them with the tools you have at your disposal, or applying those ideas to a completely different thing. Like just learning that a lot of the way that airbrush art looks is based on the fact that it is built up using masking was a huge breakthrough for me about how to approach making art on the computer.

I often think about something my friend Christopher Forgues said, where he described the way he approached storytelling in his comics as building a circuit. We both have a background in messing electronics for making music and I definitely have less of an understanding of it than he does, but I think it’s an ingenious way to approach things. You have all the pieces and are trying to control the way the energy flows and depending on how you arrange them you can get different results. I definitely think about things in a similarly abstract way where I’m moving things around until they feel right.

INT: Where do you see your work going in the future? I’ve noticed more of a Paul Clipson, ethereal video-collage style to your work recently… I’d love to see a movie directed by you. How ’bout it?

RB: It’s been funny doing something as high profile as these Boards of Canada videos. How many people have said they didn’t know I worked in video. I’ve made dozens and dozens of music videos over the years and lots of work for exhibitions and screenings, but none of it is getting over a million views on Youtube. That’s something I’m always working on, but the work I’m doing for other people often gets in the way of finishing things.

I am definitely fully immersed in the world of experimental film and video and spend a lot of my time reading about it or watching stuff, so it’s something I’m constantly thinking about and really informs everything I do. It’s cool you see Paul Clipson in what I’m doing, I love his work and he’s definitely one of the best modern examples of a long thread of abstract experimental film and was a master at what he did.