Rune Glerup

Dust Encapsulated

Dacapo Records, 2014

Rune's cube

Rune Glerup came to the café at my workplace to brief me on his first solo release, titled after one of the pieces on his debut CD Dust Encapsulated.

As inspiration, he showed me a portrait of himself taken in a car park, where it wasn’t himself he was interested in so much as the lighting on the ceiling that repeated in a modular pattern behind him. He described for me the musical figures he constructs in his work – he sees them as objects that can be assembled in a group and viewed from different angles. In his own words: ‘Instead of focusing on the classic narrative in music, where you are guided through a story, I’ve been interested in exploring the spatiality of my works. You can go from A to B, but you don’t have to continue to C and D. You can easily go back to A. It’s almost a physical experience of walking around among a lot of different musical objects without having any direction.’

We talked about different objects coming from the same family, chaos within a strict system, hard edges and forms, things being out-of-register, layered and disrupted.

My first attempt at the graphic was to start with the objects or modules. I found a ready-made 3D model of a large cube that was made up of lots of smaller cubes. It was fragmented and appeared to be coming apart. Rune came back to me: ‘I think you have something that exactly corresponds to the form of my music. What I think is missing a little is something that corresponds with the ‘content’ of it which is very often very wild, brutal, sometimes with a very ‘dirty’ sound and very much ‘in your face’… And then occasionally surprisingly beautiful…’

I kept searching in the cube direction and came across some stock photographs of rusty-red metal cubes casting geometric shadows. The colour images were pretty ugly but when I desaturated them completely, they became all about the forms, the shadows and the texture. Not really wild or dirty, but suddenly the title Dust Encapsulated resonated with the image.

I composed the images so that the shapes and shadows traced the edges of the CD case. They fitted into the jewel case perfectly, so the design became my tribute to the 120×120 mm square format.