In just 18 months, I had four Urinine Records projects under my belt. Though bands weren't obligated to use me, I'd effectively become the label's in-house designer, so it felt like a foregone conclusion that being introduced to a band would automatically lead to getting the assignment. 

Like The Capsules, namelessnumberheadman was another Kansas City band. Unlike The Capsules, their music was like little else I'd heard before. I wasn't into the 90s lo-fi indie rock scene during my college years, but their combination of acoustic guitars, real drums, and layers of electronic sounds was fresh and exciting. It appealed to me immediately.

My notebook from the project includes two columns headed by the words ORGANIC and ELECTRONIC. That combination was central to the band's sound, and I set out to explore it visually. But the idea quickly expanded beyond music into other opposing forces—past and present, wild nature and manufactured control.

I paired figures from an old book of diagrams—whose original purpose I've long since forgotten—with a photograph I'd taken using my old 128 camera at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. I was intrigued by the idea of trying to diagram nature, even though nature doesn't particularly care about our attempts to measure, organize, or control it. The border of an old family photograph, complete with a September 1971 date stamp, brought another layer of time into the composition.

The typography followed much the same thinking. I chose Futura for its geometric precision and Utopia for its more formal, bookish character, then introduced my own handwriting into the liner notes. With ruled notebook paper as a background, doing so was both natural and obvious. Elsewhere, a sepia-toned photograph of a telephone pole I'd taken in Bloomington, Indiana, echoed the diagrams on the cover—a real-world example of our tendency to impose order on the world.

Even the album title seemed to suggest something more complicated than it first appeared. When We Leave, We Will Know Where We've Been almost sounds nostalgic, but I read it another way: We'll know where we've been because we'll have left our very human mark on it.