The brief to these artists was to capture the feeling of a song that inspired them. Three illustrators from mattblack, a Cape Town-based art collective, and one from the Durban design agency Science, took on the challenge and turned the musical mystic into a larger than life, supernatural sci-fi hero. They all worked with the same photograph, but the results are varied and reflective of how Redwire DLX Jeans offer the wearer so many more options.
First up to the canvas is Senyol, who chose Tom Vek's On the Road as inspiration. He wanted to strengthen the inherent link between music and driving by creating a style that pays tribute to the freedom of movement that a long car journey affords the traveller. It's a road trip into graphic line art, with keys, frontloaders, tapes and door handles floating around MXO in a beautifully simple tornado of colour.
"Rock and roll is about having an open mind and a sense of freedom,' explains Senyol. It's the very same attitude that the Levi's brand advocates.
Ree Treweek interpreted the brief with a fantastical design influenced by the psychedelic classic Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by The Beatles. When illustrating, she let the song take over, going into automatic mode. "I just let my pen draw as freely as possible, letting the lines turn into elements on their own," she says.
At some point the Carpenters' (They Long to Be) Close To You popped into her head and the lyrics from both songs started to merge on her page. The result is a twisted, intricate interpretation that elevates MXO into a magical space-age world.
Scott Robertson took a South African approach, choosing Falling Mirror's classic Johnny Calls the Chemist. He reinterpreted the unrequited love story into a series of emotional reflections on the obsessive nature of one-sided desire. "The mind is a cool place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there," Scott offers as an explanation for the illustration.
It's an energetic work that seems to delve into MXO's inner self and give vent to a whole host of feelings, the type of emotions that only music can address.
Keti felt that Pixie's The Sad Punk was a song waiting to be illustrated. "I've always liked the imagery of singer Frank Black's lyrics," he explains. The visual nature of the song seemed perfect for this campaign and resulted in a work that focuses on dislocation, an emotional response to a line in the song that goes, "he was struck by a bullet and he melted into fluid named extension." As a result, this MXO poster pits his intellect against his physicality in a tense conflict of graphic proportions.
