The Story
The final track on the initial Shlarb Trilogy EP Shlarb the Dode that I released in late 2022 is called Pareidolia, Mi Amor, so I started off with purchasing a cloud pareidolia pic off the interwebs and worked it up until it 'sort of’ looked like me as a man-(with his head)-in-the-clouds. I then adorned the art with a lot of extra extraneous bits and text (kind of like the word ‘extraneous’ there…).
Because I refer to the overall Shlarb project as a "guitar concertino series"—with THREE volumes, no less!—my original intent was to mimic a pompous old classical music album cover, like those put out by the prestigious/pretentious classical music label Deutsche Grammophon in the 1900s (DG is the world’s oldest record company!). I thought the idea of mimicking a windy classical album cover was the perfect setting for my brash hard rock instrumentals to balance atop, especially with my Zappa-esque titling in play. It all made sense to me anyways.
Along came a second EP of like-minded instrumental Shlarb material, and then a third! I was on a roll, so I kept with the original pareidolia theme of the first EP but shifted the colorway for each successive EP’s cover art, so that I ended up with the same sort of thing for all three EPs, Shlarb the Dode, Shlarb II: Beyond the Shlarbing, and Shlarb III: Return of the Dode.
When it came time to assemble all of the Shlarb material into a single long-player album, I started with the same cloud pareidolia picture but brought in color elements from the three EPs to flesh out the cover art, and somehow pull together all three bright covers into one for the final combo platter of an album.
However, due to the rules involved in putting musical material onto modern music streaming services, I had to simplify the art that would go to the streamers, forgoing the inclusion of anything other than the artist name (me!) and the name of the album (The Complete Wrx of the Shlarb Trilogy) on the cover. Literally nothing else is allowed for cover art these days if you want to see your hard work up and available on the likes of Apple Music, Spotify, and the others. So, with colors borrowed from each of the EPs—and one of my 3D 'dots' included to replace the admonishing TURN IT UP! 'sticker' that I knew could not be included if I wanted the album to be streamable—the Wrx album art was complete. I did use my wordy cover on my original Bandcamp release of the album, which can be seen in play there, as well as right here below.
The original 'wordy' cover for the The Complete Wrx of the Shlarb Trilogy album that was rejected by the streamers due to the inclusion of so many words in the art that aren't either my name or the title. At least one friend says they like the simplified version better, so that's a win, I guess.
An early album cover rendition, eventually rejected (by me first, but also by anyone who saw it!! hahaha). In any case, it certainly would have been summarily rejected by the streamers cuz of... words.
FINAL (simpler version used by the streamers):
Done. /\/\
