LET US COOK: New Work From ULYSSA's Ideation Dept.

Art, Packaging & Writing for Jonathan Rado's 'For Who The Bell Tolls For'

DING DONG DING DONG. In early March, artist/producer Jonathan Rado (a known co-conspirator of ULYSSA) reached out to gauge our interest in creating art for his upcoming album For Who The Bell Tolls For. Of course, we were all in from the get. It’s an album about the loss of two friends and artists. We’ll get into the meat and myth of the album later, as we also had the honor of writing about it. Today, the great Austin-based label Western Vinyl (the home of two cornerstone influences for ULYSSA) officially announced Rado’s record, due Dec. 1.

In those initial conversations, Rado said he would like the artwork incorporate the spirits of Brian Eno’s Another Green World; Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo; and the raw art of the late Richard Swift.

The cover of Eno’s 1975 masterwork was a crop of a larger piece by the artist Tom Phillips that we think is called ‘After Raphael.’ It’s stunning to see that the greater image is of a dying man surrounded by doctors and overlooked by The Virgin Mary — and that the dark-clad image at the window (seen on Eno’s cover) seems to be Death himself.

Ye’s album famously had a couple different looks (and different audio versions for that matter). Flattened, off center kerning and found photos (?).

And Richard Swift’s raw, irreverent black-ink tomfoolery has been an influence on us for nearly two decades. Without his work and encouragement, we wouldn’t be here. In fact, it was Swift who first turned us on to ULYSSA hero Ray Johnson way back when.

How do you thread these three iconic needles? Well, you see the results way up above at the start of this piece. We think it’s pretty good. A coffin/bell shape encasing the faceless, suited figure over a blurred spelunking image — surrounded by blackness. We’re not sure what it means. But we’re pretty sure it began with a photo we took of a lonely chemtrail on the East Coast of Florida. In the day or two after Rado’s call, we kept going back to the photo (taken around the holidays a couple months prior). Even though we’d snapped it, the pic felt like a discovered talisman — a photograph one would find in a rusted, screeching file cabinet, forgotten or tossed off by the creator but imbued with meaning by the finder. It also reminded us of our favorite Pharaoh Sanders album Journey To the One. We ran our shit through a scanner because, well, we love our fucking scanner. It’s our Ray Johnson Machine. In fact, we call our scanner Ray.

Rado’s album is about the untimely death of two friends. And so, the coastal sunset photo wasn’t quite it. We started thinking about deeper blues, about Swift’s black inks. We pulled this image we’d taken of a television screen in Mexico playing a film we still don’t know the name of. In the image, we immediately saw the silhouetted profiles of the two people Rado is singing about — on the left, Rado’s mentor Richard Swift; on the right, Rado’s longtime friend and animator/illustrator Danny Lacy. Ultimately, we Sharpie’d and watercolored the shit out of the photo we took. Then, we ran it through our stupid scanner/printer process.

Around that same time, we also remembered this odd creation of ours. It’s a leatherfaced businessman, a blurry Polaroid image taken at a diabolical banquet.

The chemtrail, the spelunking image and the leatherface Wall Street trader. Things started to make sense — at least to us they did.

Right away, Rado cottoned to this image.

But we were determined to make it more “toejazz.”

All you see above was systematically shot down by Rado. “I like that first one,” he kept saying. And so you see where it went. For the innards, we used our chemtrail scan and added our trademark Marching Dandy (sometimes seen doing a leaping toe touch). And for the vinyl labels, we took a note from Ye’s Yeezus cover. We thought it was funny to have CD-R images as the labels on a piece of vinyl. Can wait to see it in person. Fun Fact: We misspelled “Jonathan” on the back cover in our original files and Western Vinyl had to print new cardboard sleeves (Sorry, Brian!).

And so that’s that. We love this shit. Hire us. We will make your final project unexpected and special. Rado also asked us to do some writing for his album. We’ll leave you with those words. Our friend Rado made a touching album. We’re proud of him and proud to be a part of what he made. Give it a go.

Every week, another legend drops dead. And if our sources are correct, it’s just going to keep happening. Jonathan Rado’s For Who The Bell Tolls For is maximalist mourning for the loss of two such legends. YES AND — it is funny as hell. YES AND — it is also not a joke. YES AND — it’s got one foot on a banana peel and another kicking the Devil in the arse. Bleak Strategies. The Afterlife of Pablo. And tho I may rollerblade through the Valley of Death, I will fear no Eno.

Before Rado realized he was making a full-on album reckoning with the loss of two dear friends — mentor, producer Richard Swift and illustrator/animator Danny Lacy, both untethering from this planet within a year of one another — he gave the album its title. He only endeavored to lose himself in the making of a new, experimental music with no final intention, to fully give himself over to the art and see what happened. Friends would come over to his studio to fuck around; make chords and sounds. Rado would take these pieces and roll ‘em like Play-Doh logs, squish ‘em between his fingers, press ‘em into new forms (“I didn’t know I was even making an album. And I guess I couldn’t even express anything into words then,” Rado said. “Just expressing whatever with production and a musical language.”)

But ever-so-slowly, something of a tribute album began to emerge. “But eww, no, not a tribute album,” Rado would say to himself. “Not that dreck.” So he did it his way. The result is not the sappy hot garbage you’d expect from such a musical eulogy. We’ve all heard them. For Who The Bell Tolls For is more irreverent and sly. It’s full of confidence, bravado, and yes, again, yucks.

That’s not to say For Who The Bell Tolls For isn’t also a Capital-T TRIBUTE ALBUM. Sorry, Rado, there’s no getting out of it. “Easier” borrows directly from The Richard Swift Songbook of Chords and Tempo (itself pulled from Tin Pan Alley classics). “You made it easier,” Rado croons over jaunty piano, speaking of course to the rough-and-tumble methods of production Swift imbued upon Yung Rado back when his band Foxygen recorded an album in Swift’s studio National Freedom in 2012. But in saying “You made it easier” there’s a little saltiness. Rado’s also saying “Now, in your absence, you’ve made it harder.” It’s heavier than meets the ear. Now put that in your jazz apple and smoke it. Album closer “Yer Funeral” pulls from Swift’s personal vernacular and the bucolic, yard sale painting on whose dilapidated barn he scrawled a “YER MOM” in White Out on its broadest side. “I wanted to use Swift’s stupid language,” Rado said. “I always felt like he had a levity when it came to serious situations, for better or worse.” The glammy, T. Rex romp of “Blue Moon” seems to call out to Lacy, who pushed friends away in darker times.

“Mostly, the songs started to be meditations on both Swift and Danny,” Rado admits.

He found inspiration in Eno’s 1970s rock albums, Eno’s Oblique Strategies and the back-to-back masterpieces of ‘Yeezus’ and ‘Life of Pablo.’ “I love the story of Rick Rubin getting the final mix of ‘Yeezus’ and just muting a ton of tracks,” Rado said. Rado is pushing at the edges of everything he’s done before, both as a performer and producer. Look no further than on “Walk Away” a jazzy, epic dirge that would be right at home in the Another Green World Expanded Universe. There’s a primal yalp and a mature self-confidence on For Who The Bell Tolls For. The album looks ever forward and so therein is also a tribute album to those of us left standing. We living who have to muster on with humor and a wobbly grace until our own number is drawn.

— ULYSSA, AUGUST 2023