"Dial-Up" and "I Am Become Christmas" Zines

An ill-fated project celebrating Neil Cicierega's music as "Lemon Demon"

In 2020, I joined this project to make merchandise to be sold alongside the finished fanzine. Originally, it was just a poster and sticker, but I was also asked to create a postcard to ship out with orders shortly before everything went to print.

Despite having gone to print, these orders were never sent out. I am still quite proud of the work I did though, especially on short notice.

The only confirmation I and other participants were given that the zine was printed. They're out there somewhere...

The idea for the poster design was spurred on by the bonus track version of "Cabinet Man," which has a real laid-back vibe. Plus, it was summer at the time, so I decided to use a sort of "lazy river" theme. The strange subjects of the album get to have a nice day in the sun, how nice.

Look, it's a niche audience. Just trust me when i say the references are clever.

I also made a standalone sticker design for the project, based on a song called "Cat Hacks," which does indeed kind of sound like you're being chased by a feline axe murderer.

This was the last piece I did for Dial-Up, on rather short notice. I had a lot of free time then, as this was during 2020 and I was isolating for 2 weeks before moving home. So I decided to be a bit of a tryhard about it. The look that the team wanted was that of a a vintage postcard with all of the little vignettes in the letters, except instead of locations around a city, each vignette was a reference to something off of Lemon Demon's Spirit Phone album.

A similar postcard from the real city of Nashville, Tennessee.

"I Am Become Christmas," named after the Lemon Demon Album, was a smaller, Christmas-themed mini-zine that I was asked to to a spread for. I chose the song "Aurora Borealis," a bizzare song about the holidays in what most people thing is a nuclear winter, or similar apocalyptic event.

I wanted the piece to have a disconcerting look, and decided early on that I wanted to use forced perspective to make that happen. That was my primary focus in the sketching phase, but I also struggled with the posing of the two people in the foreground. Originally, they were facing the viewer, but I thought that keeping them anonymous, with their backs turned and parka hoods up, was more appropriate for a strange theme like this.

"Let's go to the windmill, let's find some catharsis

Let's go to the graveyard in cover of darkness"