A Window Into Khruangbin’s Visual Journey

Laura Lee: Mark and I, we were in separate places when we were figuring out what the title of the record would be and what the album artwork would look like. We’d come up with the record concept before mixing happens, but all the music was recorded.

Mark Speer: The music and the artwork kind of informed themselves by that point. The music was done. We started working on the album art. Then I went back to mix it with Steve [Christensen]. We wanted it to sit even deeper into what it’s supposed to be, because now we kind of know what it’s supposed to look like too. And because we knew how the art was gonna look, it was much easier to craft the sound of the record to also match the artwork by that point. 

Laura Lee: There was this sort of intimacy around this record and there were themes such as the family unit, the three of us in the band. And me going through a familial life change. Mark and I were riffing and we were looking at former titles of our own music.

A LA SALA was the name of the dub version of “Evan Finds The Third Room.” And somehow that stuck out among all the other things we’d come up with, and then all of a sudden things kind of came together. It’s like when you unlock the right puzzle piece or you find the right key. All of a sudden, things make sense and then we can mix it.

Laura Lee: Mark started talking about a window out, and I remember we each took pictures of what our living room windows look like looking out, and then we kind of unlocked this surreal twist to it. Mark has this pretty vast collection of pictures he’d taken from various airplanes that we’ve been on. It was something that we used when Mark and I were DJing regularly. And our band name means airplanes. So it tied in. 

Mark Speer: And so I took a picture of the window in my living room and that’s the window that you see. All I did was Photoshop out a little gear that you turn to open the window. I believe the picture of the wall is from somewhere in our travels. So we put this window on to this wall, and created a composite of those elements. 

The back of the album, it’s from Rajasthan. It’s the Hawa Mahal. We were there and walked through it and I just happened to take a picture as I was walking through it. And I did the same kind of thing. So I took out the thing you see through the window and just replaced it with the sky or depending on the album version, there’s water from the pond or there’s all kinds of stuff. All the pictures are pictures that we’ve taken, It was all pretty much in-house. 

Mark Speer: And it’s like the whole thing about all these different versions. It really just came about from the practical thing that the record company always seems to want many variants. I prefer a black record that sounds great, but a lot of people love variants. 

Laura Lee: We had played around with this in the past but not with a bunch of lead time. But I think people do collect these colors just for the visual aspect of them. And with that in mind we were like, let’s really try to make the visual identity of these versions not just about the vinyl color.

Mark Speer: It was really early on I guess we decided that we wanted to have a die-cut. And so what you saw in the window was what the inner sleeve would be. And I came up with a bunch of different inserts that would be for the record. And I think I’d made those before we actually realized that we wanted to just match all the different variants, right? We were like, can we do that?

If we can do that, then here’s all the different ones we can use for the inside. So I also changed the colors of the front. And so I think someone did the math. To actually have all of the different variants of the covers and all the inner sleeves, and all the different vinyl colors. There’s what? 72 variants? Something like that.

Laura Lee: And then we have this Choose Your Own Adventure thing with the listening aspect of it. We don’t want to tell people what anything is about, and a lot of the songs have minimal vocals. And even when there are vocals, they’re not necessarily audible in terms of really being able to pick out what we’re saying so it kind of went along with that theme.

Laura Lee: When it came time to actually put those die-cuts into production. We had a lot of roadblocks on what was possible. We didn’t want the integrity of the cover to be lost with pulling the insert in and out.

Mark Speer: Nick Scott is the guy that helped us kind of get it formatted so that it would actually be able to be constructed correctly. So we had a call with him, and I think we started talking about art and inspirations and we got into Magritte. Then we started talking about this frame. 

Laura Lee: We didn’t even tell him that Magritte was in our world, but he came to us with this idea of making the die-cut possible if we put the record inside of a frame. Because then that would allow for enough border around what he was trying. And as a reference, he showed us this Magritte painting that had just been auctioned. And it was the exact painting that we had referenced to each other in terms of inspiration. So it felt like kismet. This is the way forward.

Mark Speer: Yeah, but the idea was just like okay, here’s the living room. It’s gonna be cozy inside. So it’s kind of like a nice cozy kind of vibe. And then you have the view outside that is a view that you would never see from a first or second story house. It’s what you’d see from 30,000 feet up, which happens to be the cruising altitude of an airplane. And so that’s the surrealness.

Laura Lee: Once this was unlocked, so many other things kind of came from it. Mark had an idea for the stage design. We ended up taking some photos that were based on the album cover and then the stage design became influenced by that. And then all of the show posters now have been influenced by the record cover.

Mark Speer: In this way, it’s all very cohesive in a way that we actually didn’t necessarily plan for. But we decided okay, let’s commit to this and just go down that path and I really like how all the stuff is looking. I ended up designing a whole bunch of merch as well. So all of it is very in-house, aside from the show posters. The show posters are designed by other people, but a lot of the stuff, most of the merch and the album art, it’s very much a product of us.

Laura Lee: We really created this visual identity in our show posters that you could always tell it was Khruangbin show poster and part of it was because there were sort of a caricatures of us. But there were contextual themes that I’d ask when we approached each artist. I wanted to have a significant change for this touring season to match the aesthetic of what we’d started. So it’s curating a series where you’re working with several different artists. It’s a real challenge and pleasure to figure out a brief that allows artists to fully be themselves while at the same time creating something that fits with everybody else.

Laura Lee: All of the show posters have a window that’s centered to that corner. And we’ve asked for no pictures or illustrations of the band and we’re kind of leaning more towards art and less like a concert poster. My hope is that if you’re a Khruangbin fan and you went to the shows and you’re familiar with this record, you’ll be able to know that a tour poster is from this cycle. 

Laura Lee: Another code we had to crack was listening events. Back when we put out our first release with Secretly, I pitched this idea to have listening events at James Turrell Skyspaces. But these listening events can be really cringy because people don’t listen. And they’re at places where people just mingle with the album playing. It’s not exactly a listening event.

At some point, we realized that this whole series is about the window and looking out and James Turrell Skyspaces are literally a window looking to the sky and his foundation was really happy about it. And we got to do these listening events at six of his spaces, which is just an amazing bow to tie on the visual representation of A LA SALA.

Mark Speer: It was serendipitous. It was kind of really wild how that all worked.