Behind The Artworks: Red Elm - Arena (2022)

For the artwork of the album, of course (we have already mentioned it in the composition of the album), in the beginning, we wanted something very sober, in black and white and the reference was the cover of "Cognitive" by the Swedish band "Soen". Then, as it happens when you work together with the vision of another artist and things mutate, you see what may or may not work, etc, it ends up being a design quite far from the main idea, but not worse.

It was not easy to define the elements that were going to appear. It was then analyzing the lyrics of the whole album that graphic ideas of what the cover should convey appeared.

The themes that are always present in Bubu's compositions are death, the brevity of life, the passage of time, getting the keys to try to be a better human being and we believe that in the end, along with the exquisite ability of Ione Navarro to capture all our ideas and elements in a single image, the artwork reflects in a very coherent way what you can find inside "Arena".

The main image, where the attention is focused, is an hourglass. We wanted it to stand out, so Dany brought the creativity of a very visual and elegant color palette, plus we knew it was going to be a clock with a lot of presence and that was achieved thanks to the filigree and ornaments that Ione added all around the contour, giving a personality to the object of another level. We decided to put an hourglass and not a traditional one because of the hypnotizing aesthetic that these clocks have and that so well reflect the passage of time, held in turn by a reaper in the background, watching the sand fall with a key inside the clock giving sense to the difficulty of achieving the desired and how time is that ethereal slaver who does not understand beginnings or endings.

We do not remember if the title of the album came before or after the artwork, we believe that before, since it also gave sense to this hourglass, in addition to the word arena also took us to that meaning where in ancient times the gladiators literally left their lives to distract and satisfy the audience, giving to understand a little that this album has also been a battle for us, where we have left our skin in each song.

As a curious detail, under the word "Arena" (Sand) in the title of the album, Bubu came up with the idea of ornamenting it in some way. It was very bland and we didn't know how to highlight the whole thing, so we decided to make a creative underscore, simulating the fall of the sand from the clock. Later, Dany did very well in proposing a framing that played with the tones of the clock and in this way we got a quality cover of which we are very satisfied.