ET: I thought we could start by going right back to the beginning and talking about how we came to divide New Psychedelia into four sections – Nature, Synesthesia, Digital Ritual and the Anthropocene – with the album artwork interleafed between each theme.
It strikes me that those concepts go from a micro to a macro level as the book progresses. They go from your personal experiences with nature and with Synesthesia, and the art that reflects those things at a micro level, and then the book moves towards the more-outward facing artworks that explore and reflect issues in wider society at the moment, including the growth of the digital world and the Anthropocene. So it’s you seeing yourself, the micro, as part of the universe, the macro.
LP: Yeah, the structure really reflects the inner and the outer themes within the book, looking inside and outside. It felt as though those themes grew organically in a way that worked really well to represent that.
ET: There’s definitely a sense of the interchange and cycle between the micro and the macro in your work too. A sense of an endless loop, in that lots of the pieces give the appearance of stretching beyond the confines of their frame – starting from a concentrated point, perhaps, and expanding.
LP: Infinity.
ET: Yeah, infinity. I suppose in some ways the existence of an ending makes things good, because there will inevitably be an ending, and that adds value and a sense of comfort to experience.
LP: I heard this quote, or maybe it was a story, about these two musicians on tour. They played this really long, repetitive song, it lasted for an hour or something and then at the end of this song, the musician just realised it was super scary to him, this idea of infinity. It always resonated with me – the idea of infinity being equally scary and beautiful at the same time. There’s something nice in the repetition. It’s calming and reassuring and you know what’s coming, but it can also be super scary to think that it could keep going forever and ever with no end.