Hippie Dance Takeover: Introducing The Boyos

Music

Hippie Dance is celebrating half-a-dozen years of happy existence. This underground record label was founded by Superpitcher and Rebolledo in the year Twenty Eleven and since then they have released many out of the ordinary sound stories that include offbeat characters like Fantastic Twins, Pachanga Boys, You and Your Hippie Friends and their own personal projects. It's also a known fact that the one and only King So So personally chose them to release his music, all the way from his Disco in the Sky.

Since the beginning of Hippie Dance we employed the magnificent services of creative agency 'Uplaod' to give form, freak and fracture to our projects and releases. Based in Paris and Brussels, the team of Georges Chaulet, Jean Gabriel Franchini, Esteban Gonzalez and Bastien Sozoo also work for other artists, fashion designers and even ethnopharmacologists in the USA.

The colouring book we made for the Pachanga Box (“We Are Really Sorry” LP, 2012) was a significant illustration job Georges and I did together. Our aim was to enter the world of the Pachanga Boys through their music, their looks, what they liked eating and drinking. We created lots of drawings and put them together to have a coherent object that could eventually be read as a story to colour. Knowing that the album was based on a story itself, with a beginning and an end, worked pretty well.

For Julienne’s first EP as The Twins – “Who Let The Twins Out?” – we made the link with the Twins’ appearance on the Pachanga Boys album and used the drawing we made of them in the colouring book as a starting point. That eventually took us to work with watercolour, a great way to represent the “two-faced” character we were trying to portray. For the label on the record, we wanted a contrast to the soft, “hazy” atmosphere of the front cover and we came up with this heavy-metal inspired font. We sensed the same contrast in the music so it worked very well.

King So So’s “Disco In The Sky” album artwork was a bit more challenging. We had the “King” and the “Sky” as two key elements and they kind of blocked us at the beginning. Our first ideas were too obvious. No joke, they were pretty all centered around a king in the sky. Then we decided to keep only the crown of the king and that became a little gimmick for the artwork, the video clip and the other goodies that were offered with the record. We went for black & white for the colours, because we felt it was a good contrast to the saturated colours of the video and the pictures.

Superpitcher’s “The Golden Ravedays” album. It probably took us a good year to create the final concept. We knew from the beginning that it would be a series of twelve LPs so initially we focused on that, brainstorming ideas around the number twelve (astrology signs, Hercules’s labours, hours, months, etc.). We finally steered away from that idea and decided to use Aksel’s studio and the objects he surrounds himself with, as our art direction – especially as he spent so many hours there producing the music. We listened to the whole body of music and matched a certain object or emotion with each track. Once we knew which tracks Aksel wanted to group together with each record, we invited friends of ours, all artists, and shared the artworks between us according to everyone’s skills and talents and what then followed was a very natural process. For Aksel’s press pictures, we called our friend Lou Benesch to paint portraits of him. The fact that all of us who designed the illustrations have a common passion for graphic arts and, at the same time, very different styles, made us feel that we could create something like a mini-label inside the label. It’s been an amazing journey to see how this whole story is unfolding artistically.

For the forthcoming Fantastic Twins “The New You” EP. We never run out of ideas working on the Twins’ artwork cause there’s this idea of split personality, schizophrenia that always inspires us. Knowing Julienne’s thing for trashy 3D animated girls with angels’ wings holding Doberman dogs on a lead, painted with airbrush, our choice of strong and weird colours came naturally and we could find the link between the first EP’s artwork and the new one, while incorporating the change of her alias pretty easily in the end. We can’t reveal too much since the record isn’t released yet but we also created a new logo which adds to the confusion, oscillating between bipolarity, control of the world and the spirits of humanity.

Meeting The Twins video: “As I was about to play a few exclusive live shows around my first EP release and the second one that come out on Optimo Music in 2014, we thought we’d make a little video announcement entitled “Meeting The Twins”. We shot the video twice, starring the two twins, with opposite personalities. It was impossible to lip-sync the dialogues so The Boyos came up with the idea of making the overdub even more obvious and adding subtitles in broken Spanish, to add to the general nonsense of the video. Some people say it was King So So’s voice interviewing The Twins, no one knows until today.” (Fantastic Twins)