A small catalog of records pulled into something you can rotate, hear, decode, or export. Most take a famous sleeve at its word and lift what it concealed; one or two invent the cover a record never had. More of this nonsense to come.
BeSides is a catalog of interactive pieces built from records. Most take one famous sleeve and lift what the design quietly contained (a chart of pulsar pulses, a color cipher, a found sculpture, a substitution puzzle) into something the reader can rotate, hear, decode, or export. A few don't excavate anything: when a record has no sleeve (a song generated whole, say), the piece invents the cover it never had. The covers are sacred; the pieces are not reverent. They are tools, instruments, teaching props.
The figure is sacred. The reading is ours.
The suite leans into a post-punk design lineage because those covers were never just illustration - they were systems and chosen objects and ciphered messages. One sleeve's back-cover cipher is a working decoder here. Another's pulse-stack is real Cornell-thesis data. A third's cover sculpture is a 1975 piece by Janez Pirnat that its owner still keeps. These covers reward being taken at their word.
The pieces are named by their figure, never by the band wordmark. Ridgeline is a pulsar's signal stacked. Monday Decoder is a color wheel turned key. Lost Word is a stone in deep space. The band wears the cover; the cover does the work; the piece extends the work. We do not decorate page titles with trademarks we don't own.
Here now: Ridgeline, Monday Decoder, Lost Word, Three Imaginary Toys, Moss Mirror, and Eloquent Mirror - the first that invents its own cover rather than lifting one. Ahead: Closer Stone, Substance Groove, two more studio albums from the same catalogs, a Newton-1666 piece drawn from a classic prog-rock sleeve, and whatever other nonsense earns a place.
renato.design · b-side · 2026