After Communication:Duration, [DARYL] moved from Urinine Records to Beatville Records for their second release, The Technology. The band asked me to design the album, and aside from getting logos and production specifications, I don't remember having much contact with the new label. I talked with the band about their ideas, then went off to do my thing—one concept, my photography, and apparently enough trust that I don't recall much discussion about the finished artwork.

The album's title felt like a deliberate continuation of the themes explored on their debut EP. I returned to the photographs I'd taken at Chicago O'Hare in December 1999, supplemented by images from airports in Detroit and Minneapolis. It's amazing how much mileage I got out of those first four rolls of film.

I wanted technology to dominate the imagery, with people appearing diminished, lost, or swallowed up by their surroundings. There was also something decidedly retro-futuristic about the photographs, like the original Star Trek television series and its increasingly dated vision of the future. That felt right for [DARYL], whose synth-heavy sound owed as much to the Cars as it did to the Rentals. The stainless steel phone booths, mysterious machinery, and endless fluorescent-lit corridors all seemed to belong to a future imagined decades earlier.

The band also wanted several song titles and phrases from the lyrics rendered in Japanese, which wasn't particularly easy to accomplish in 2000. I found someone to translate the text, discovered that Microsoft Word on the computers at my day job had Japanese fonts, then had to try different keyboard characters until I found what I needed. Once I did, I printed everything out and scanned it back in to use in the layouts. Technology, amirite?

The six-panel insert had three interchangeable covers. I'd liked the idea of issuing the album with different covers—one for CD, one for cassette, and one for vinyl. Of course, with a small indie label, that was never going to happen. But I had three panels of lyrics and liner notes to work with, and using the additional panels as alternative covers was a way to give the package that multi-edition vibe I was going for.