Book cover design
Musikken og kødet
Cover design and illustration for Vibeke Marx’s novel of music, desire, conflict and eight intertwined voices.
The cover came from a piece of fabric a friend had once given me. Its pattern had exactly the kind of tactile charge I was looking for. The curling shapes began to suggest the f-hole of a violin or cello, and from there the association moved toward the shape of the instrument and the shape of a female body.
Musikken og kødet is one of those books where restraint would have been the wrong answer. The novel moves quickly, almost recklessly, through the private lives of people gathered around a concert hall. The blurb calls it a discordant work for eight voices: not one clean line, but several bodies and several tensions crossing at once.
The key word for me was sensuality, and I translated that into materiality — surfaces, texture, pattern, skin, fabric, wood. I tried several directions first, including backgrounds built from the worn surface of an old violin. None of them had what the scrap of fabric had.
Music, desire and conflict run through the book, but so does a dry sense of humour. I wanted the cover to hold that too — not as a joke, but as a slight twist in the image.
Something sensual, a little excessive, and not entirely well-behaved.