Maps - We Can Create CD, created on a 16-track recorder in a bedroom over the course of about four years, the debut full-lenth album from Northampton, England's MAPS (a.k.a. a really nice bloke named James Chapman) is definitely the best thing I've heard this year, and quite probably the best thing I've heard in about five years. Add to that the fact that it's on one of my favorite labels (Mute), co-produced by Valgeir Sigurosson and mixed by Ken Thomas (of Sigur Ros fame), and you've died and gone to Shoegazer Heaven.
Plus, for you nerds out there, the cover art is not just your average black and white art photograph. MAPS' graphic artist, Ben Brown explains, "The idea was we wanted to make the artwork for the album create itself, so if one day we fired it into space and it landed on the moon then someone could pick it up, decipher it and remake the album. Simple really. The first thing we needed to do was to find away to take data from the music and turn that into something that looked organic, interesting and beautiful. After about 2 weeks we found a program called Walrus that allowed us to do exactly that. So, we stripped data from the album, fed it into Walrus, and converted it into huge decision tree diagrams. Once we had created the Walrus model, we then rebuilt it in 3DStudio Max on a hired Supercomputer, then we rendered and lit the huge structure that was around 5 million faces. This part of the project took about 3 months as each tiny tweak of the camera meant the computer re-rendering everything. When we had great looking shots of each song's structure we took those renders into Photoshop for some final work on the lighting and atmosphere." Trust us you will like the Maps - We Can Create CD so buy a copy now.
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