Made By Heath Killen » 100th Window

February 3rd, 2010: Discography

100th Window—
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2003. Two years since that fatefull day in New York. The threat of a third world war looms. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam Hussein. Baghdad falls to U.S. troops. North Korea goes rogue. Suicide bombers. Protest. A blockbuster action star becomes Governor of California. The Space shuttle Columbia explodes. This is no golden age.

Johnny Cash dies. As do Barry White & Elliot Smith. Britney Spears attempts her first comeback while Avril Lavigne tops charts worldwide and Beyonce breaks out as a solo artist. Yeah Yeah Yeahs debut with Fever To Tell while Blur disintegrate with Think Tank. Radiohead say Hail To The Thief, Mogwai sing Happy Songs for Happy People and from the ashes of At The Drive-In comes De-Loused in the Comatorium. All the while Outkast completely dominate radio.

In many ways 100th Window is the perfect soundtrack to this era. The signature themes of melancholy and introspection that ran through the previous three albums are still present, but there are new subjects explored: technology, paranoia, politics and the future. It doesn’t feature the same quantum leap in sound that bridged Protection to Mezzanine, but it’s still a phenomenal record. Deeply personally, sonically adventurous, and containing some of the bands best and most accomplished songs.

Following the fallout of the Mezzanine tour, remaining band members 3D and Daddy G were divided on where to take their music next. G decided to take time out from the recording process and help raise his young daughter, while 3D opted to return to the studio for a series of experimental sessions with a revolving cast of musicians. One of the session players, Lupine Howl’s Sean Cook, describes the sessions:

“(they) essentially consisted of kinda minimal loops and noises that were fed to our head phones from the computer up in the control room. Then we would have this sort of extended jam session playing along to them and they would do various things to do the loops. Sometimes they would drop out the loop, sometimes they would start processing it with effects and delays and stuff like that, to try and make it change in various ways and see what that would do in terms of our playing. They also had a strobe light in the live room, which they controlled from the control room. They would kind of put that on and speed it up to dictate the intensity and try to affect the way we played with the lighting. It was a really good laugh; we got some good stuff. I mean, hours and hours of stuff, which they have taken back and cut up and arranged and done their things to.”

The majority of the music recorded from these sessions were eventually scrapped, with 3D citing that he was unhappy with the direction. Eventually Mezzanine co-producer Neil Davidge was reenlisted to help shape what would become the band’s fourth record.

100th Window features a more spacious and exploratory sound, and contains no samples (their first record to do so). There are middle eastern strings mixed with crystalline metallic beats. It’s a slow, hypnotic and engrossing record. While there is a great deal more instrumentation than previous records, there are no instrumental tracks, and the voice of irrepressible Sinéad O’Connor appears twice, most notably on the single Special Cases.

The album title is lifted from the book “The Hundredth Window: Protecting Your Privacy and Security in the Age of the Internet” which itself is an allusion to the idea that one’s security is compromised if even one window is left open. 3D went on to explain the concept and his use of it further:

“There’s always a way in, there’s always one thing you’ll leave and locks are undone, and something you’ve forgotten. It’s a great analogy to the human psyche and the soul, and the way we’re voyeuristic, we like to look at and see everything we can get our hands on, have that power and be able to look at other people and look into thoughts while closing ourselves off and keeping ourselves as private as possible.”

Tom Hingston returns as the band’s designer, and the results of the bands second collaboration with Hingston are extraordinary. The album cover features a dummy made entirely from glass and photographed at a point where it has just started to explode. Shards of glass fly out at the viewer, and one can just make out the vaguely human form of the statue.

Initial discussions with the band brought out themes of fragility and vulnerability, and it was Mezzanine photographer Nick Knight who introduced the idea of showing a delicate object in states of fracture. Hingston commissioned 14, five foot tall figures in various colours from glassmaker Andrew Hay at LA Studios, London. Three days were spent exploding the objects and shooting 35mm stills on high speed cameras at 500 frames per second. While the image used for the final artwork features a clear dummy, the single covers feature some of the alternative colours from the sessions, including Special Cases (yellow) and Butterfly Caught (blue).

Again we see Hingston’s ability to communicate a single and powerful idea in a unique way, and then translate this idea into all required media. Like Mezzanine, 100th Window features a restricted colour palette, this time featuring primarily grey-blue tones as well as black & white. The typeface used on the cover and all promotional materials from this period appears to be bespoke, and its design falls somewhere between Gestalten’s Blender Pro and Wim Crouwel’s Gridnik.

Danny The Dog (2004)

The following year, the band were personally invited by producer Luc Besson and director Louis Leterrier to score the film Danny The Dog. Over 11 weeks, the band created an entirely instrumental soundtrack. 21 pieces of music, each one made for a key scene in the film.

The soundtrack is what you might expect. Moody, ambient, haunting dub punctuated occasionally by some more frenetic and fast paced tracks. One of my favorite albums for late night working sessions.

The cover art and layout is the only piece of design since Mezzanine created by anyone other than Tom Hingston. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case, but Andrew Murabito at We Art You does a pretty fantastic job all the same. It’s quite reminiscent of the layout to Protection, with the metal plate background replaced by photocopy toner texture, and the flame logo replaced with that of a pit-bull terrier. The band name and album title are set in a serif font, all caps, and punctuated by some grungy splatters of red. Quite a splendid cover really, and not to be underestimated or passed over in the catalogue.

Collected (2006)

Three years later after the release of 100th Window, Hingston returned to create and compile artwork for the band’s Greatest Hits collection. Dubbed “The Ballisitic Rose”, the cover features a collage of dark and strangely beautiful images, including roses, military weapons and a skull. Hingston talks more about the sophisticated and unusual design solution:

“We needed to find a symbol that encapsulated or conveyed the emotions and ideals of the band. With it being a “Best of,” a more obvious route would have been to utilise their trademark flame in some way. So instead we thought, a nicer way to approach the cover was to adopt a technique that we’d used before on their other album “Mezzanine:” a collage or composite of different elements, but applied to a new set of images.”

“Working with Nick Knight, we took a still life of roses as the core element and introduced other layers over the top. When you first look at the rose, you see this very beautiful flower, or group of flowers. However on closer inspection, all these other hidden layers are revealed.”

The typeface used for Collected at first appears to be the same used for 100th Window, however there are numerous subtle differences, including a thicker weight and more condensed letterforms. The application is quite similar, although Collected features wider tracking. Again this seems to be a proprietary font, designed or modified by Hingston for the band.

Collected also contained a new single, Live With Me, a lush, haunting and evocative song featuring the vocals of soul legend and UN Peace Award winner Terry Callier, who was 60 at the time of recording.