Sensational Conversations

Cover, back cover and label for the extraterrestrial Sensational Conversations, Lugar Alto latest release featuring the Brazilian artist Bruno Tonisi in collaboration with Sensational and distributed by Boomkat.

The story behind the album cover is as weird and intriguing as the music itself. If you are into the uncanny odd, this is for your. Photographs by Marcelo Mudou.

“An engrossing and deeply weird slab of unclassifiable ephemera from the margins, Brazilian sound artist Bruno Tonisi engages in a sort of long-distance artistic exchange with legendary New York rapper and producer Sensational. It’s a sort of phantasmagoric dialogue between two people who have never met and who don’t speak the same language, finding their own mode of communication on a tip like Wanda Group and Klein casting spells on DJ Screw – all wafts of squashed dub, gloopy rhythms and mystical sound poetry.

Sensational sticks to those crookedest steez that have seen him work with everyone from Bill Laswell, Spectre, Madteo and countless others since ’93. Thirty years later, he’s still a fiercely individual creative spirit, a perfect foil for Tonisi’s supremely twisted production as the duo play snakes & ladders with a sampler and FX, rolling the dice on rudely short-circuited styles that come to resonate with the kind of choppy crankiness you might get from a DJ Spanish Fly mixtape chewed up by an over-eager tape deck.

Attempting to fully decipher the session is a fool’s errand, but it’s a rare pleasure to try and follow their combined logic, transcending the sum of its parts in a persistently amorphous trip that’s as disassociating as a heavy K-hole, but also lit up with fleeting moments of clarity, vertiginous drop-outs and deeply weird, psychoacoustic space, jumping in and out of the box in a mode that feels wickedly disorienting, always compelling.”
—
Boomkat

Category: Graphic Design
Client: Lugar Alto
Collaborators: Marcelo Mudou
Year: 2025