Following on from Tim Johnston's PhD thesis album Green Grow the Rushes, the next stage of his musical development took the form of a single ~12-minute composition, reworking three traditional Gloucestershire folk tunes and incorporating spatial audio techniques as part of the intended performance experience, and I was asked to design a cover image which reflected the work's compositional process of breaking down its source material into tiny pieces and then rearranging them into a novel form.
Realising that the title contains 16 letters, i.e. a 4x4 square, I suggested sourcing a number of public-domain photos (maybe half a dozen) of natural landscape features, blurring them, and chopping them into smaller square pieces, which could then be reshuffled and intermingled to form an abstracted mosaic effect, with each letter of the title centred in a different 'tile'. This would, of course, break up the words 'Tonal Atmospheres' into 'TONA LATM OSPH ERES', slightly obscuring the original phrase, but I felt that any reduction in legibility would be a price worth paying for the thematic aptness of the effect.
The design went through a few minor alterations, but the core concept stayed the same throughout. The one point where Tim and I diverged a little is that I initially made a bit more of a colour contrast between the letters of the two words, and slightly blurred the word 'Tonal', aiming to reinstate more visual differentiation between the words, but Tim voted this detail down, preferring to have all sixteen letters equally sharp and very close in colour (although there is still a subtle difference, with 'Tonal' having a marginal blue tint, and 'Atmospheres' orange).
