Cuzo+Cabalgata Cósmica. NEW! Rock Poster & tees!

Rock poster for Cuzo + Cabalgata Cósmica's gig in Valencia. A3 Digital print.

PLUS NEW Silkscreened cotton t-shirts.

cuzo CabalgataCósmica valencia psychedelia acidrock mindbending keyboard anatolian BCoreDisc spacerock druggy Psych handmade lettering turkish

Cuzo are a veteran band from Barcelona. Their particular blend of german Krautrock, Giallo film score music and psychedelic seventies' Hard Rock, has been enriched with eastern scents due to their discovering of Anatolian Rock artists such as Erkin Koray, among others.

The result is its kaleidoscopic, hedonistic and psychedelic album "Son imaginacions teves", that literally explodes in each of its powerful gigs.

Opening for Cuzo, the locals Cabalgata Cósmica perform a raw, spacey sound consisting of proto-heavy psychedellic Rock inspired by late 60's/first 70's bands like Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath or The Stooges.

I first started doing some loose lettering exercices, inspired by Jimmy Page's Zoso symbol. Suddenly I found myself framing the logo into a circumference. This remembered me those panels from Istanbul's Hagia Sophia Basilica, so I decided to do a little research about the Turkish Calligraphy.

I realized very soon that Turkish Calligraphy had such a vast tradition, so I decided to be respectful and accurate with my lettering. Inspired by some samples, I used a custom vector beveled brush, in search of the proper balance among legibility and ornamentation. When I get satisfied, I printed and re-traced the logo with thick markers, in order to get some transparency, warmth and craftsmanship.

Instead of using the custom typeface I've crafted for the info section, I decided to go a step ahead and give some extra attention to Cabalgata Cósmica's lettering. Both bands were friends, so this poster had a special conmemorative meaning. Inspiration and procedure were the same as in Cuzo's logo.

Surrounding Cuzo's logo, I've decided to place a semicircular keyboard. The monophonic analog synthesizer first appeared in his previous album but now has more prominent role, so it would have it in the poster too.

I did the same rough and loose finishing as I've done with the other hand drawn elements, and then used special blend modes just to have more colorful psychedelic effects.

The development of the background was done simultaneously, and its configuration was changing and adapting to the hand drawn elements.

Inspirated by Jimi Hendrix' Axis: bold as love cover art, the background composition consists in a kaleidoskopic collage of arabian dancers and musicians, Apollo rockets and Jimi's himself portrait, put togheter over a galactic tapestry. Grain, registrastion mismatch and saturation were exaggerated as I ussually do in my posters.

The info section was finally put over a hand drawn grid, scanned from an imperfect sketch I 've done in a little piece of paper. The star and moon put besides gig's information nods to the Cuzo's taste in Turkish psychedelic music.

When theCuzo guys finally saw the poster, their first reaction was placing it as the Cuzo avatar in social media...and surprisingly it still remains in its place. But what made me feel really happy was their decision about using my artwork in a pair of silkscreen tees to be sold in their European tour.

The first option was a simple black tee with the central logo. I took the original source and vectorized it respecting its irregular edges and some noise by adjusting the threshold values.

The second t-shirt was meant to be an adaptation of the kaleidoscopic collage, so I adapted the central piece of the poster to be placed in the chest as some kind of baroque talisman.

I managed to respect the original spirit of the poster using halftones for the final files, pretending to gain some extra tonal range, by using red ink's transparency over the white printed areas and optical color mixing effects.