Lanes: Mirrors Are Black and AFTERIMAGE

When the deep-house productions arrived, the question was whether they were still StrategyX. They sounded different: fewer vocal hooks, less trance euphoria, more groove, repetition and atmosphere. Some used only loose lines of text as texture.

The answer was to think in lanes: not a new artist name per subgenre, but separate musical and visual spaces within one world. Lane one is song-led, melodic and progressive (I Am Over You, All At Once, Higher Than Memory). Lane two is deep house (Mirrors Are Black, AFTERIMAGE).

The first StrategyX artwork was monumental: dark architecture, geometric systems, reflective floors, a small figure facing a vast space, cool blue against warm amber. An early cover for Mirrors Are Black used the same language — a figure before a huge black circle — and immediately looked like another chapter of the song-led lane. We rejected it.

The deep-house lane was scaled down from scale to surface: black glass, night, rain, condensation, reflections, skin, fragments of a body, amber light on a wet surface, a city only as bokeh in a reflection. The final Mirrors Are Black cover uses an almost black mirror, water and a partly legible human reflection. The track order moves from Design Gigantic through the triptych Painted On My Mind – Mirrors Are Black – Pollock On My Mind to a dry close with Told You So.

AFTERIMAGE was not allowed to become Mirrors Are Black II. The production is harder and less pop-sensitive; the concept is what remains after the source is gone. Its cover shows a face through layers of wet glass, with offset reflections as visual residue.

The design principle: a lane has a grammar, not a template. Each album can say its own sentence within it.