Yvan Sheremetieff:

Promotional Materials and Album Covers

Promotional Materials

In shooting Toronto-based musician Yvan Sheremetieff, I wanted to provide a set of images that would reflect the multidisciplinarity of his artwork. Whether he is composing for quartets, bending the rules of songwriting, or frontmanning heady artrock outfits, Sheremetieff’s music is always going exactly where you don’t expect it. Photographically, I wanted to follow those musical trajectories: explosive colours and drops into thoughtful darkness.

How to Even Believe Cover Art

The release of string-trio How To Even Believe represents the first of Yvan Sheremetieff’s forays into “tangentiality”, his distinct set of compositional rules based in disordered thinking. This method of composition, sometimes bordering on absurdity with its harsh devotion to never repeating any particular musical phrase, makes for difficult, if rewarding, listening. Sheremetieff compared this unyielding stream of heaviness and reverential irreverence to a sixteen-wheeler careening down a highway, and so I used that image as a point of departure to make visually palpable his musical vision. How to Even Believe’s cover began with hours of watching YouTube dashcam footage of motor collisions to find the perfect frame of vehicular carnage. This is combined with a text overlay that skirts the boundaries of good taste and a heavy Cyrillic “Ш” (Sh) which we developed together as branding for his musical projects going forward.

Introduction to Everything Cover Art

Sheremetieff’s exploration of tangentiality continues here in a transition from the traditional orchestration of How to Even Believe to a blurry palette of rock instrumentation. In an often hard-to-pinpoint intertwining of synthetic and organic elements that can perhaps be described as “new-age metal”, Introduction to Everything embraces its tangential limitations in a series of songs that again ride between irreverence and transcendence. Graphically, I sought to replicate this duality by layering a photo of the pine forests of British Columbia’s coastal range with vibrating colours. Traditionally a garish design faux-pas, I find that there is something hypnotic and mesmerizing in the illusory motion caused by two tonally opposite colours rubbing against one-another.