A small catalog of album covers, taken at their word — each piece lifts what one famous sleeve concealed into something you can rotate, hear, decode, or export.
BeSides is a catalog of interactive album-cover lifts. Each piece takes one famous sleeve and lifts what the design quietly contained — a chart of pulsar pulses, a colour cipher, a found sculpture, a substitution puzzle — into something the reader can rotate, hear, decode, or export. 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 the Saville / Vella / post-punk lineage because those covers were never just illustration — they were systems and chosen objects and ciphered messages. The cipher on the back of Power, Corruption & Lies is a working decoder. The pulse-stack on Unknown Pleasures is real Cornell-thesis data. The sculpture on Songs of a Lost World is a 1975 piece by Janez Pirnat that Robert Smith now owns. 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. Blue Monday is a colour wheel turned key. Lost World 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.
v1.0 is here in full: Ridgeline, Monday Decoder, Lost Word, and Three Imaginary Boys. v1.x carries Closer Stone, Faith, Disintegration, Substance Groove, and one in the pipeline from outside post-punk: a Hipgnosis / Newton-1666 piece on Dark Side of the Moon.
renato.design · b-side · 2026