The Long Road Home…
INTER ARMA Sky Burial
Cover Artwork

INTER ARMA:Sky Burial
Trey (Guitars):

Before contacting Orion about the art, we had come up with a few ideas that we thought would be accurate visual representations of the music. We wanted to incorporate Tibetan prayer flags and a lot of open sky. We really wanted a photograph, too. All of our art in the past had been drawn, and it was awesome, but we felt like a well done photograph could more acutely capture some of the ideas we explored.

But more than specifics in regards to the imagery, we really just wanted the album to come off as classy. It was our opinion that having this look like a typical “heavy metal record” would do it a disservice. When I finally talked to Orion about our ideas, he basically read my mind. It was almost surreal. He was throwing out idea after idea that completely resonated with everything we as a band had previously discussed. When he brought up actually constructing a funeral pyre and basing a photo shoot around that I knew we were in good hands. He had our full blessing from them on. We probably took longer on picking out a font that we liked than on the actual art itself. He really knocked this one out of the park. Much love.

Orion Landau (Artist):

TALKIN’ SHIT…
I spoke with Trey quite a bit about concepts for Sky Burial. The title was a little daunting to me at first being that Sky Burials have such a deep spiritual meaning to Tibetans. Not wanting to make the cover specific to one religion we talked a lot about different burial methods in various cultures that entail not burying the dead. I’ve always found the imagery of Indian burials on stilts so powerful. We decided to combine all these burial elements but in a way that would appear to be its own ritual.

MAKIN’ SHIT…
I worked with a friend Drew Pierce who creates special effects and film props with his company Cutthroat Studio. We both loved the imagery of tibetan corpses being picked away at by vultures as the monks watch and contemplate the impermanence of life. Drew had constructed this incredible decayed corpse, mostly skeletal but bearing these sexy chunks of meat and cartilage. We coated a lot of old decayed wood he had with white clay to give the structure a ghostly, stark feel. There was a lot of time spent on tea staining and shredding Tibetan prayer flags, rolls of burlap and cheesecloth.

NECK DEEP IN SHIT…
This is where shit got interesting. The initial concept was to build this structure and then take it apart, haul it out to the deserts of Eastern Oregon, reconstruct it and do the shoot. However, the wood was so rotten and decayed that rebuilding it became virtually impossible. Being out of time, out of ideas, but not out of beer, we decided to build it again in Drews backyard and shore the structure up with 2x4s and brackets. If you look closely at the cover you can actually see some of the support beams holding it up. The second challenge was trying to capture a cover shot in this seemingly uninteresting backyard. I was dead set on this looking as real as possible with very little post work. My good friend and master photographer James Rexroad (known for his work on the UNSANE covers) was with us helping compose and shoot these extremely long night exposures.

GOOD SHIT…
I was really honored to have the chance to work with Inter Arma for this release, I am a huge fan of this album and I really hope people spend some time with it.