last week i finally got to meet suruba head honchos delmar and alvaro, and learned where the mysterious letters on my latest suruba x ep came from. i thought it was an exploration of the border between typography and abstract shapes, but it turned out to be much cooler than that.

this is the sleeve in about 1/36th of its full glory:

click to enlarge to 1/4th of its full glory

delmar, the designer of suruba, told me he took his inspiration from pixação, a style of graffiti that originated in sao paolo, brazil. the art of pixação is not so much in the letters themselves, but in the locations where the pixadores put the graffiti. the harder to reach, the better. sometimes with lethal consequences.

here's a cool introduction to pixação:

so here we have an old viking alphabet, taken by rockbands from the 70s, re-used in a brazilian graffiti style in the 80s and finally ending up in abstracted form on a techno record sleeve design from the beginning of the 21st century. and on the record itself is a track that takes an ancient arabic scale, which combined with electronic production techniques, ends up on dance floors world-wide. a fine lesson in both historical and geographical global interconnectedness, i would say.