Artist Note:
This was my end-of-year project in art school, which—although I didn’t admit it at the time—was always meant to become the cover for Bedouin Soundclash’s album Sounding A Mosaic. I had no idea then that the record would go on to include the multi-platinum single “When The Night Feels My Song.”

The image itself is a loose combination of my face and Eon’s (Bedouin Soundclash’s bassist), layered over excerpts from a paper writtenabout the fatal flaws of a liberal society in which all cultures remain isolated from one another. The argument was that any liberal society will eventually absorb communities with illiberal ideas and be unable to effectively respond to them—because opposing those ideas risks being labeled illiberal. In this way, the society will continually capitulate.

That paper also referenced Canada’s history of compromise, and specifically the vision articulated by Pierre Trudeau: that we were not a “melting pot,” like our neighbours to the south, but a “cultural mosaic.”

This is why the album is titled Sounding A Mosaic. It’s still fascinating to see how our music and a band like ours continues to be contextualized within this debate even today. The pendulum always keeps swinging one way to another in what is “acceptable and unacceptable” to ‘liberal western society.’ The phrase “Framing The Colonials, mind the gaps please” references the London Underground and speaks to the shared origins that bind countries across the Commonwealth.