ecollage

ecollage collects the collage work of Towa Tei, the Tokyo-based musician and producer best known as a founding member of Deee-Lite. He assembles cut fragments of vintage Japanese packaging, advertising, and print ephemera into layered, densely worked portraits.

The cover sets the tone: a woman's face and shoulders reconstructed from clipped magazine and product imagery, snack-food branding and pin-up photography fused into a single, slightly uncanny figure, titled in the same bright, mismatched lettering as the collages themselves. Tei has pursued this visual practice alongside his music since the 1990s.

Tei debuted with Deee-Lite in 1990, whose album World Clique established him internationally, before a long solo career spanning more than a dozen albums and the groups Sweet Robots Against the Machine and Metafive. His design and art-direction work runs parallel to the music: he was art director for Yellow Magic Orchestra's 40th-anniversary reissue and, with Tomoo Gokita, for Yukihiro Takahashi's Grand Espoir. ecollage sits at the intersection of the two practices, a visual counterpart to the sampling and recombination that define his music.