HELP US FIND THE CLOUD BOXES
I love how some of my favorite artists used to go so far to make something feel special.
Not just the music. The whole world around it.
While working on the Elephant Six podcast Don’t Bother Wearing Seatbelts with Rudy Fischmann and Mathew Bell ... we were talking with Kelly Hart, Will Cullen Hart’s widdow, about the original promotional campaign for the first Circulatory System record, which would have been in the summer of 2001.
She started telling us about these incredible things they made called Cloud Boxes.
They were sent out for press only (music writers). It was the first big release for Cloud Recordings and the debut record from Circulatory System, so to make it special, john kiran fernandes and Will Cullen Hart created them by hand.
They used old suitcases they found at Goodwills and thrift stores. Will painted every one of them himself. Inside were cotton clouds floating around the album, magnifying glasses so writers could read the lyric sheets, bird books, and other small artifacts. It sounds less like a promo package and more like something you would find inside a museum of someone’s fantastic imagination. And sure as hell beats an album in a manilla envelope.
Art like this never meant for mass production.
Total handmade creative chaos.
The album went on to receive rave reviews, including Pitchfork’s glowing 9.5 rating, a score only around 150 records have ever received or surpassed. By then, those press only Cloud Boxes were already out in the world, sent to all the major publications.
And yet none of them have ever surfaced online anywhere.
No photos. No eBay auctions. No reviews even mentioning them.
Just hand painted suitcases full of clouds, floating somewhere out there.
So we are trying to find them.
If you were in the press as a music writer back then, or knew someone who was, or somehow ended up with one of these pieces of Will’s art, we would love to at least see photos.
Circulatory System, Olivia Tremor Control, and so many of the Elephant Six related bands never separated the music from the magic of the object. They made the entire experience sacred.
And those Cloud Boxes are just a little missing piece of that story.