Dark Matter arrived without any visual direction from the client, so the music became the starting point. There was no mood board or predetermined style to follow; the artwork developed directly from listening to the recordings.

The music felt dark, dense and unpredictable, with a sense of tension constantly building beneath the surface. I wanted the artwork to have that same quality. I started with a simple geometric form and developed a system that could push, compress and distort its surface, using the album’s own audio as one of the inputs controlling how the form changed.

As the music and procedural controls worked together, the original geometry became increasingly fractured and unstable. The challenge was knowing how far to push it. Too little distortion lost the intensity of the music; too much became visual noise. The final form sits somewhere between the two, retaining enough of its original structure to remain clear while still feeling tense and unpredictable.

Working this way produced hundreds of variations from the same underlying system. I could watch the form change with the music, adjust the amount and character of the distortion, and identify the moments that best captured what I was hearing. The published artwork was selected from that process and developed into the final album cover.

The animation reveals how the image was made. Small changes to the noise controls create significant changes in the surface, moving from the smooth original geometry through increasingly complex levels of displacement. It shows the system behind the finished artwork and how a simple form was gradually pushed into something that reflected the character of the music.