National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 33

I i Li I Ll NATIONAL POST, THURSDAY, JANUARY 19, 2006 PIANO MEN Richard Greenblatt tickles Tom Lehrer's ivories. AL3 24 HOURS LONG? Kiefer Sutherland's real-time TV show may hit the big screen. AL2 I I ft jj AVENUE 41 tfii 1 i i VICTORY RECORDS THREE GUT RECORDS HOW SOME ARTISTS ARE KEEPING INNOVATIVE ALBUM ART AHVE AND WELL IN THE MP 3 AGE I i i i LOOKING FOR MEANING West Coast artist takes photos in a new direction. PageALlO FILM HOOKING PIERCE How an obscure director landed a major star. PageAL8 DANCE KUDELKA'S LATEST Choreographer's modern Christ.

PageALS STATS entertainment CANADA'S TOP NEW BOOKS 1 Saturday, Ian McEwan, 121, Vintage Canada. 2 Ptolemy's Gate, Jonathan Stroud, $23.95, Hyperion. 3. Small Steps, Louis Sachar, $2i95, Doubleday Canada. 4.

Heather Ihe Violet Fairy, Daisy Meadows, $5.99, Scholastic. 5. The Golem's Jonathan Stroud, $10.99, Hyperion. From actual talej of titles Lin UNIVERSAL MUSIC ARTS ft CRAFTS Music to their eves released last week in more than 200 Canadian independent booksellers. 2006, BookManagerLtd.

By Mike Doherty For every audiophile who mourns the death of vinyi, therefc an art lover who looks back longingly on the days when album covers were large, creative and iconic. Glitzy photography and lurid, digitally processed IS THIS YOUR GLOVE? SPECS: Green fleece glove with blue nylon trim on cuff and a red Jacob tag The idea of painting a faceless person on an album cover would be anathema to most marketers, but 24-year-old Toronto-based artist Martin Wittfooth has drawn praise for just that His artwork for Discovering the Waterfront, the second album by the Burling-tonOakville emo band Silverstein, is a series of moody paintings depicting a loose narrative about a young man escaping a decaying landscape and heading out to sea. Many of Silverstein's lyrics, Wittfooth explains, "come down to a singular level where people feel betrayed. That's why, in the imagery, it's just one guy versus the entire world. The idea is to make it so that anyone seeing the artwork or listening to the music can relate, because if you put a face on the guy, it becomes more impersonal.

You can relate better if you plug yourself in there." Often, making album artwork can serve as a bridge between artistic interests and commercial necessity. Wittfooth, for instance, supports himself largely by painting images on snowboards, some of which feature combative fantasy images that are much at odds with the more impressionistic and surreal work he exhibits in galleries. James Mejia, whose stately, disquieting and often anatomically influenced art adorns covers and posters by such acts as Greg Keelor and Glen Milchem of Blue Rodeo, Toronto indie-rock legends By Divine Right, and highly-touted electro-rock upstarts Holy Fcuk, makes money working on art projects for commercial film; recently, he drew comicbook artwork that Hilary Duff's character supposedly created for last yeart The Perfect Man. While he admits it's "really cool" to see his art used in a Hollywood film, Mejia finds he has more creative control working with musicians, who consider his work important to their success. "It gives that idea that it's more music and art rather than just making videos and getting them on MuchMusic," he says.

Artists and musicians "recognize the importance of each other music as an art form rather than just a reason to go out, drink and turn your radio up." See CD ART on Page AL8 WHERE FOUND: Johnston Street, near the public market, images are now used to browbeat the MTV generation into buying CDs, but a new generation of musicians and artists is looking forward by harking back. They're aiming to rekindle peopled love of music shopping by the archaic methods of painting and drawing covers, and their efforts are striking a chord with fans. "One way to counter downloading and the culture of MP3-ness," says Toronto painter and designer Tyler Clark Burke, "is to make a cohesive art project, so people spend the money on the packaging as weLL" Burke co-founded the Three Gut record label in 2000; focusing on Toronto and Guelph-based acts, it became known as much for its do-it-yourself aesthetic and Burke's artistic sensibility as for its music From the outset, Burkels stark, but colourful and oddly playful album covers for musicians such as Jim Guthrie and Royal City invited the prospective buyer to discover something in the artwork, and hence in the songs. This strategy was to have an important influence on the city's indie music scene. Labels such as Arts Crafts, Six Shooter, Aporia and Paper Bag all picked up on Three Gut's celebration of the intersection between Toronto music and visual arts communities, using local artists to present interpretive, rather than representative, covers for their discs.

Interpretive artwork, for Burke, has much to offer: "It speaks to the spirit of aUegory, where it's OK to have an illustration that might represent different parts of your music. If you have a photograph of yourself on the cover, particularly as an indie artist, it seems superficial Major labels are like, Well, we need to market you. It's not your music; itls not your art you are the product" Granville Island, Vancouver. WHEN: Dec. 11, 2005 FINDER: D.

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HSU 1 NATIONAL FO TOTEU0fOXTHZaEFK)X JAMES MFJ1A DEPENDENT MUSIC James Mejia's design for Holy Fcuk's album cover, above; Top, shown clockwise from upper left Martin Wittfooth's painting for Silverstein's Discovering the Waterfront; Tyler Clark Burke's cover for Royal City's Alone at the Microphone; Kevin Drew's cover art for Broken Social Scene's self-titled lab st album; and Stewart Jones's cover for Sarah Planner's Tm a Mountain. National Mitten Poll, Page AL2.