Time Trails X / Life in 24 Frames

Life in 24 Frames and I have worked together for more than a decade — a partnership that has produced three album covers, an EP, and a single over the years. Time Trails X is the tenth anniversary re-release of the band’s 2011 album Time Trails, revisited and redesigned for 2022.

The original cover is quiet and considered — a bare winter tree, a flock of birds lifting into a cool cyanotype blue. It’s a strong piece of work, and my goal was never to replace it. What I wanted was to let a decade of distance suggest what the music might look like heard again with fresh ears.

That process started, as it almost always does for me, with the music itself. Listening through the record, my impression was one of color and shimmer — patterns emerging and cycling, small movements accumulating into something larger. I began working with puddles of flowing pigment, then introduced stochastic halftone dot patterns across the surface to capture that low hum the songs seemed to carry beneath everything.

The one thing I knew I didn’t want to lose was the birds. On the original cover they gather around a bare winter tree, still and waiting. Here I wanted them in motion — drawn across both covers toward a kind of beacon, a solar flare or eclipse suspended between front and back. The tree returns too, reappearing on the back cover rooted at the base of that glowing form, as if it had always been growing toward this moment. The track listing dissolves into the same light. Some things are meant to be absorbed rather than read.