Hyperreal photography meets minimal tech house: Facta’s new album features award-winning Pelle Cass

Sometimes an album cover makes or breaks the record. When it comes to Gulp, a new record by Facta, the project name from Crack writer Oscar Henson, the album cover was an essential component to realising the personality of the album. A vibrant and high-definition exploration of contemporary club music, Oscar melds noughties minimal, tech house and ambient electronica into a unique instrumental escape. But with fifteen years of experience in DJing under his belt, Oscar had to bring another veteran on to do the honours of shooting the artwork – the award-winning and Boston-based photographer Pelle Cass, whose complex time-lapse composites create hyperreal tableaus of information out of everyday scenes.

“The album was largely written on the move travelling between gigs, so throughout the writing process I had this idea of it being filled up with the people and places I was moving between,” says Oscar, who also collaborated with album artwork designer Alfie Allen to create a home for Pelle’s photography. “To me, Pelle’s work is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary or making reality feel surreal.” In the musical world of Facta, familiar ideas are altered – vocals become scrambled and basslines become distorted – Pelle’s photographic style personifies this wonderfully through impressively composite images that suggest that something is slightly off. Both the music and artwork evoke a warmth and collectiveness despite a creeping darkness underneath – communicated through the elusiveness of Facta’s minimal production and Pelle’s clustered Where’s Wally scenes that make the viewer feel like they should be looking for something. But for what? On Gulp’s fifth track SLoPE, the mischievous shuffling of drums and arpeggiated beeps soundtrack the hyperreality of Pelle’s increasingly unnatural world, as if it is a picture that falls apart the more you look at it.

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Pelle doesn’t so much look at the people who flood his pictures, but more so the movement of the city space. “I’m always surprised at what people are up to when I go over the thousands of frames. I try to pick out all the special moments and put them into a single picture,” says Pelle. Easter eggs of Pelle’s advertorial work can be seen in the images, with models from that job seen wearing trench coats, thus creating his own shared universe between his works. As well as that, scale is an important element of Pelle’s photography. “I like the feeling of a very large print whose actual strength is in the miniature – all the little people bustling or milling around,” says Pelle. “Large print, tiny people.”

“Having been quite familiar with Oscar’s music I felt straight away like this LP was a turn towards a more metropolitan sound,” says Alfie. “The stop-start of traffic lights, the kind of digital buzz of a busy city, more MC vocals.” Helping glue Facta and Pelle together, Alfie’s keen eye was essential to this project, skills in recognising great design that was instrumental during his time at Crack and XL, culminating in a wonderful alt-house album where you feel compelled to stand above the record player exploring the artwork until the needle spins into the dead wax. Who’s there? Where are they going? Is that my dad?