The Jesus & Mary Chain

A visual interpretation of a few lyrics from the band The Jesus & Mary Chain through the use of typography and images. 

For every lyrics it was important to explore its meaning in an experimental way, free of rules. The typeface chosen for the entire project was 'Futura'. 

Futura is timelessly modern; in 1928 it was striking, tasteful, radical - and today it continues to be a popular typographic choice to express strength, elegance, and conceptual clarity. 
- 'Futura Font Family',linotype.com

Like the lyrics of The Jesus and Mary Chain, Futura also offers efficiency and forwardness in its simple geometric shapes that favors the meaning of music in a simple, sharp, intense and forceful approach.

Distinctive variations of this typeface were used: font sizes, kerning, leading, tracking. The tracking was intentionally used with letter spacing of size 100 to bring the lyrics detachment feelings ("distance", "disappointment", "desillusion", “lack of connection”). Each song received a personalized approach, but always concerned with the uniformity/consistence of the project as a whole.

Overall, black is the main color for this project. Black is a pure color by the result of the absence of or complete absorption of light - a color or hue that is unmixed with other hues. This color connects to the Jesus and Mary Chain lyrics inspired by the work of the artist Kasimir  Malevich's "Black Square" and his thoughts related to the Suprematist movement: 

"By 'Suprematism' I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling."
- Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism.

In addition to black, there is the white color. Black and white are the extremes of pure colors. Although they seem opposite and contrary forces, in the Jesus and Mary Chain songs they are complementary as they interrelate to one another to form a whole form. This concept is mostly found in the 'Dirty Water' lyrics: "It's off then it's on. It's on then it's gone".

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