After being out of town for the holidays and off the grid for several days, I came home to see some excited e-mails from friends about this awesome record review from Aquarius Records in San Francisco about the new Pegataur album, Eternal Flight.  This was particularly refreshing because some metal snob with a blog and a penchant for super obscure black metal killed us a week ago (why bother reviewing something that you hate unless you're Pitchfork?)... 

I think my favorite quotes from the review may be:

Any of you out there who perhaps found Boyjazz too jokey (you shoulda given them a chance anyway, what an entertaining band they were!), should have less of an issue with this, in fact, Pegataur not only shut up and play but really go off the deep end in terms of seriousness if you delve into their, um, mythology...Pegataur probably could have scored bagfuls of gold pieces (or weed) from The Sword or High On Fire in exchange for some of the best of these riffs and still had plenty of good ones left over.

Sweet....

We're about to release our first Pegataur album, titled Eternal Flight.  We decided that we wanted to do something a little more special than your standard CD packaging.  Basically, it is a 13.5" diameter circular image, and it folds up into a square to hold the CD inside and fits snugly in a nice vinyl sleeve.  This was a good idea at the time, but pretty difficult to execute due to the custom nature of the project.  Finding vendors who could do the custom die cutting and folding of the print was quite a chore, but well worth the leg work, because we made it happen!  In time for our show this Friday, no less.

When you remove the CD from the sleeve and unfold the artwork, the front panel looks like this:

And the rear or inside panel (with the track listing) looks like this:

So when you open it up and unfold it, you remove the CD and the track list is revealed.  When its folded up and put back in its sleeve, you see the Pegataur seal.

We're very pleased with this design, which was executed flawlessly against our vision for the artwork by our good friend James Kafader.  The design is inspired by a classic Eliphas Levi image that represents the Hermetic axiom "As Above, So Below."  The 12 sigils that you notice placed near the outside of the circle are actual sigils that were created by analyzing the songs qabalistically as mentioned in my other post about analyzing music esoterically.

Update

You can download the artwork from For Once Records, here.