Evan Crankshaw

Missouri artist EVAN CRANKSHAW is responsible for the majority of the artwork of DISCREPANT records.His love for Exoticism and Collage technique fit naturally with the label vision.We had a little chat about this :
I included 4 images from my new book, Atlas of Discovery, which is in-progress. No one has seen them really so I thought it would be fun to put some images out there.
There are also 4 sections from my collage book, Expedition, several years old now but one of the things that helped Discrepant and I get on each other's radar;
Here's a bit of a statement on my relationship with Discrepant that touches slightly on collage.
Gonçalo contacted me in 2015 – I had just self-published my collage book, Expedition, and MIKE COOPER had been a big supporter during that process. Mike is an incredibly generous and kind person, and he and I share a passionate interest in art that mounts a sophisticated response to exoticism or exotica ; he mentioned my work to Gonçalo and Gonçalo asked me to do the art for one of his own releases on the Discrepant label, Visions Congo. It was a wonderful fit – the album is a collage of field recordings taken on location and snippets from media that dealt with conceptions of the Congo region, with a really breathtaking stereo-soundstage, so it really had this effect of being an aural panoramic collage that functioned both as a modern, artful bit of armchair travel and a kind of critique of that very exoticist urge. Following that, I was very lucky to be asked to do the art for a Mike Cooper release on Discrepant, the really sublime live recordings that became Reluctant Swimmer / Virtual Surfer. Mike is a legend and a light so that was a high point and an incredible privilege, very early on.  The next thing we did was a Dead Mauriacs LP. If I have the story straight I believe Olivier Prieur of The Dead Mauriacs requested me for the art before he even knew I'd already been doing work for Gonçalo. Which is not to boast, he and I knew of each other fairly well by that point – his incredible work and "exotica concréte" method couldn't be more in line with my own thinking on exotica as both a material and a subject, and we'd been in mutual admiration for some time at least – but just to underline a happy moment when it became very clear we were all comrades of a certain sensibility, and it made sense for us to be working together. Those were the first three, and we've done more than a few since then. Everything Discrepant releases is adventurous and interesting so it's always a great pleasure to be a part of realizing the visual aspect. .”