Róisín Murphy and Bráulio Amado discuss their collaboration and the relationship between music and design

INT: And what was your jumping-off point when working on the 12”s?

RM: Well, outside of the graphics, the tone of the whole thing was a very earnest look into club cultural artefacts. I just really went into study mode, watching all this VHS footage of my time raving in the north of England. And so there was a great sense that we were the perfect match. It was so much more than I was looking for, you know, when you get that magic thing where one thing rolls into another and you just keep getting much more than you ever expected? You just delivered that and it was so consistent and so varied, it felt a bit rock and roll and felt a bit modern.

BA: I work like that because I’m so bad at talking about what I do. I just sketch. So part of the reason why I sent so many different ideas, different styles, is because I don’t know how to put that stuff in words. It’s almost easier to talk through images.

RM: We did work with lots of styles on Róisín Machine too. There isn’t one style but I still think there’s such a unity in the vision of it. I mean, really, the vision of the album’s design is just me and you, there was no big board table having a meeting about how sexy I should be and that. That’s all down to us! I was going to say as well, god knows what you thought when the photographs came in for Róisín Machine – some mad middle-aged Irish woman over in London rolling around on plastic. They weren’t even retouched! Were you thinking, what have I got involved in here? How am I gonna figure this out!?

BA: No, I loved it. I mean, all of a sudden, when I got sent the photos, I was like, alright, this is gonna be crazy.

INT: Róisín Machine is created as one landscape of sound, how did that translate through to the album’s design?

RM: We didn’t really discuss that.

BA: I think we discussed it but it was more that I got it from the material. It was much rawer, it was just me listening to the record and trying to make it speak to the visuals. It almost felt like I was trying to collage everything together in a smooth way. I don’t think we set a plan to do any of that stuff though, we were just seeing what happened.

INT: Do you often have quite a clear image of what you want then, Róisín?

RM: I have mood boards coming out of my ears darling. I cut mood films and do voice overs. I just try my very best to explain to people because there is a dissonance. If a woman comes out, she’s singing, she’s dancing, she’s flailing around and she’s creative directing, it can be hard to process. So I’m very, very, very prepared because I know that it’s hard to process.

INT: Before you were a musician, you wanted to be a visual artist, right? Is that something that impacts your approach?

RM: Yeah, and the more technology develops, the more it sort of feeds that for me and allows me to make reference boards and make little films and describe in other ways. When I started, I wasn’t even doing emails, everything that I did was face to face, trying to explain to people what I wanted to do. And then suddenly, I started to email and even that was a kind of a revolution for me to be able to say, well, it’s in writing: I want, fucking, 80s Italian porn, Bráulio.

BA: I remember when you sent me the first photos, you sent me an iPhone video of you going through the photos with the music playing over it. It was so good. And a lot of the times you would just take photographs with your phone of the actual photos and be like “use this one”! It was a faster way of working, I feel like that helped me to run. A lot of the time, I was looking at or working with frames from the videos you sent me instead of the actual images!

INT: Bráulio, you’ve mentioned before that Róisín is the best art director you’ve ever worked for. Why is that?

BA: So there are a few different ways to look at it. I work with so many different kinds of bands and musicians. Some are really small and some bigger. And usually, when things are on the same level as Róisín, everything is very precious. It’s not that that’s bad, it’s just very organised because there are all these people working on it and rushing. This is gonna sound stupid but Róisín really is like a machine. You’re doing everything alone. You understand that you know what you want, and you know how to do it. And you just fucking do it. It just makes the whole thing more fun, from my side, to see something happening and be adding to it and having a back and forth. That doesn’t happen as much with other bands or other types of work.

Most of the work I do, I send a sketch, or three sketches and they approve one thing and then I make that one super perfect and that’s it. But Róisín Machine had so much back and forth, trying this and then that. It was just more organic. And at the same time, you know, being a fan of everything you do, it’s kind of awesome to see that part of the process.

RM: You need to have a clear vision and execute it. When I say clear vision, I have a clear vision, but also it is a discovery isn’t it, a step by step? It’s lovely to see things fall into place because of the hard work and energy that you put into it, and it does always surprise you in the end.

BA: Yeah, exactly. Like you’re saying, that middle part of trying to figure stuff out – that is, for me, my favourite part. I hate when people are like, “I want this exact thing and this is what you’re gonna do.” And everything follows it.

INT: What were some of the key moments when you were making Róisín Machine where things fell into place?

BA: Once I got all Róisín’s references, I also got the photographs at the same time. So everything just kind of fell into place then. I love the whole aesthetic.

INT: It’s attached to something in the way that an illustration in a newspaper isn’t. An album cover is so associated with memory for people, they’re evocative.

RM: Ideally!

INT: I feel like visual culture is very much pushed forward by music because it needs to keep up. How important do you feel the relationship between the two is?

BA: I became a designer because I wanted to design record covers but being from Portugal, which is a small country, I knew that it was probably never going to happen, and that I’d probably be working in ad agencies doing boring work. So the fact that now I’m in New York and doing music stuff for a living, it’s crazy and unbelievable. But I don’t know if I’m thinking about that while I’m designing, I’m more like a little kid. And when the record comes out, it’s hard to believe that I did it. I’m on the side of still being excited about everything rather than thinking, “This is going to influence all these young kids for the next few years.” But the music I listen to does influence me, so hopefully, my work does do that too.

RM: Music and visual arts are doing a continual dance together really, they intertwine so beautifully. But I think the thing about music is that it remains the embodiment of what’s core, what’s important in any endeavour and that would be a sense of rhythm – a painting has to have a sense of rhythm, a poem has to have rhythm, an album cover does too. We get that and the purest form of that is in music and that’s in everything that’s creative I think! The most privileged thing in my life is that I get to make music – everyone I know, whether they’re artists, filmmakers or fucking bankers that you meet on a first-class flight and they’ve got a little guitar and that’s how he relaxes in between making millions of quid – which he bores you to tears about, of course – it drives everyone, there’s an elemental factor to it, like the wind or oxygen. I always say that, if you have the right music you can throw any visual at it and it will sing. If you start off with a bad bit of music, it’s very hard for really good, special things to develop out of that.

A limited edited version of Róisín Machine with a transparent vinyl, zine and photo is available from today.