Behind The Artworks: EKTÖR - Ekt​ö​ristan (2024)

As musicians, it's always been difficult for us to form an objective visual representation of the different worlds we traverse in the course of our creations.

The very idea of the Ektoristan album is a musical journey to a fantasized land, on the edge of dreams, on the border of the absurd: “The Immunocratic Pontentorate of Ektoristan”. We worked on this idea with two graphic designers and began by imagining a national coat of arms: the two yin-yang snails alone symbolize our rhythm of hard work.

Aware that taking our place in the concert of nations would be a tall order, it became clear to us that a detailed cartography of our new homeland would enable us to assert our territorial and musical ambitions.

Our music tends to go off the beaten track, so it might as well evolve in a virgin environment where getting lost would be easy.

We put the latest artificial intelligence technologies at our service to generate and adapt this vast country to our needs. Negotiations with machines and software quickly turned to our advantage.

The deliberately old-fashioned feel of the performance is no doubt due to our dreamlike and perhaps "out of nowhere" perception of a journey into the unknown, be it sonic or graphic.

Uniquely for our collective, the first version of this cover won unanimous approval in the first round of voting!