After many, many years of digging through piles + piles of records in basically any place they can be found--one starts to build claimed habits to pick out those special gems hiding amongst the dust + grime of forgotten time. You pick up on strange and obscure labels that consistently impress--lesser known producers or even better known producers working under aliases. You pick up on well thought-out song titles that 'just have to be good,' or maybe you go by the instrument and gear used on a record to judge its possible greatness, or at the very least, strangeness. Personally, the artwork of a record sleeve is usually the most reliable way to find something special to scrape up, clean off, and take back to the comfort of my home.

In the not too distant past, I was doing one of my many rounds through the record shops + bookstores in Berkeley. I popped into Pegasus Books downtown and happened to stumble across a beautifully designed record from '87 called Sleeps With The Fishes by Pieter Nooten and Michael Brook. As I turned the sleeve over to investigate a little more, I was not surprised to find the classic 4AD graphic placed at the bottom of the sleeve. The 4AD label has always placed importance on the whole package to represent their overall aesthetic. Thanks to Vaughan Oliver and Nigel Grierson, a graphic designer + photographer/filmmaker duo who worked for 4AD throughout the 80’s as 23 Envelope, the perfect blending of the sound of this record is coupled with the outer + inner sleeve artwork to create a world you get absorbed by + even lost in for a bit.