The Singularity: Ekleipsis

Bear McCreary is one of the great screen composers of his generation, and The Singularity is the thing he makes for himself: a symphonic metal concept project with its own story and its own world. Bear enlists a rotating cast of collaborators that has included Slash, Chad Johnson, Duff McKagan, Stewart Copeland, Steve Vai, Serj Tankian, Rufus Wainwright, Jens Kidman, Buck Dharma, Joe Satriani, and others.

In 2024 I designed the cover for the first Singularity release. The goal had been to design a graphic representation of The Singularity. The visual needed to evoke a black hole without looking literally like a black hole. The graphic needed to work at any size, most importantly small. People digest music on their phones through apps like Spotify, and the album covers are tiny. What we landed on was a circular orb with multi-colored flames around the outside and a strange, almost pupil-like central element. It worked at any size and helped set the tone for a full album cycle that included a world tour, merchandise, and a graphic novel.

When it came time for the second album, Ekleipsis, I had the honor of designing all of it: the cover, the logo, and the full physical package. The timeline was a few months, and the direction this time was to create a part 2 to the original art. The "what happens next" moment. Bear wanted to evoke the original art in some way, but make it an evolution.

We talked about maybe a simple addition of different colors, but the same basic design. Maybe the flames changed colors and shapes, or the whole orb rotated a bit. We envisioned a possible simple option that was just a subtle change. This was a good place to start. I found the set of words and phrases that seemed to have been said more than once and I kept repeating them to myself as I worked. Evolution, change, the sense of unrest and general unease in society, and the omnipresent sense that something doesn't feel right. And then later as the project evolved, a sense of resistance.

Bear gave me room, and a couple of touchstones. Guns N' Roses and Use Your Illusion I and II, one album in two colors, for the idea that this could be a version of something we'd already seen, continuing rather than restarting. And Pink Floyd's Pulse, with its photorealistic technique.

The Process

I generated a variety of options: the eye at the center, different flames, different color casts, fire and ice, gold and blue. Some of it was good. None of it was right. After some discussion we decided to maybe try to add more than just a simple twist on the original art.

I had recently gone to a concert with my son, and the band had a backdrop behind the stage that stopped me. A lone figure on a beach, looking up at something, the whole scene built out of the wrong materials and pushed into off-key color: waves gone red, the beach made of something other than sand. The waves looked like a big piece of ribboned steak, yet still it was clearly a wave of some sort. It was hyper-real and impossible at once.

I built a new version, our orb approaching a scene in the foreground. I tried different versions of a foreground planet, maybe earth, with The Singularity orb on the horizon. I wanted a character in the foreground indifferent to the grand moment in front of them. I found a stock vector of a young girl. I loved the idea of someone young being the one standing up to, not afraid of, the moment. The feeling I was reaching for was cinematic and ominous, the anticipation of something bad, but someone not fazed by it. Bear responded to this. We were finally on a path to something that was going to work. It was exciting. Bear referenced War of the Worlds. A planet being watched, reached for, closed in on by something enormous.

From there it became a composite, built and rebuilt in layers. A road, a car, people on the horizon, the singularity setting behind the mountains like a burning sun. Then Bear started pulling elements out of the songs themselves. There's a track called “Black Box,” so we crashed a plane into the field. We tried to lay a broken chandelier across the road for another song, but that one fought us, and we let it go. We went back and forth on how many people would be running towards the orb. For the girl on the road, we used a photograph Bear took himself, of someone he knew. That's her in the final. It made the whole thing personal.

The logo had a hard constraint built in. I've made Bear's identity for years. Bear McCreary is fixed, and the last album locked in The Singularity beneath it. So Ekleipsis was a third layer stacking onto two things that couldn't change. Three typefaces in one lockup, and it had to feel effortless instead of crowded.

My first instinct was to simplify. A clean, wide-set sans serif, letting air do the work. One option I had thrown into the mix for variety was an interesting handwritten font. After a few rounds of trying different options, we finally returned to that script. It has more character than your normal script. It has an inky quality. I leaned into that. I added ink droplets to make it feel a little more immediate. Like it was written in a hurry. It had the drippy, ink-pen feeling of Gerald Scarfe's illustrations for Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Ekleipsis is Greek for a failing, a forsaking, an abandonment. An eclipse. So the wordmark needed an eclipse in it. I built an Illustrator brush out of the font's own strokes and drew an arc with it, the edge of an eclipse, the moment right before something disappears.

For the vinyl and CD, Bear gave me one reference: Pink Floyd's Meddle. I couldn't have asked for better, because I've always loved Hipgnosis, the designers behind those early Floyd covers. I went out and bought the record, brought it home, put it on, and studied the art. The trick I took from Meddle was to layer images and texture until neither one is legible and a third thing appears. I pulled the materials straight out of the cover's own story: metal from the plane and the car, broken glass, smoke, fire, concrete, grass. I worked with quite a few images and started layering them in Photoshop, then dropped the cover's exact color cast over all of it so every surface felt like it came from the same world. After that, almost anything I put underneath started to look right.

The gatefold is the piece that pulled it all together. The broken chandelier that never worked on the cover finally had a home. Bear's team literally bought one, dropped it, and photographed the wreckage for me. I built the spread out of seven or eight textures: the chandelier, ink, concrete, flowers in one corner, and abstract close-ups of airplane engines. I found a variety of images of airplane engine parts. They tie back to the crashed plane, but they also feel like some machine bearing down on you, and they're circular enough to read as another eye. You can't tell what any of it is. That's the whole point. It's the way an album felt for me when I was a kid, the art telling you a story you couldn't quite explain, that made you feel something anyway. Before I even knew what graphic design was I would sit and stare at vinyl packages like they were books. An open-ended story, like a set of lyrics that can mean anything to anyone.

Type

For the typography I went with Futura in a nod to early '70s album design. The one flourish is that same script from the logo, used sparingly for the side markings, A, B, C, D. A nod to Scarfe and The Wall.