Eliran Kantor

Eliran Kantor was born in 1984 in Bat-Yam, Israel, in a house his painter father had already filled with Disney scenes and the faces from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. At thirteen, Deep Purple and Scorpions led him to Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and Metallica covers, the kind of pictures a shy kid can study longer than the songs.

He visited Berlin at sixteen and moved there at twenty-four. The first paid album cover was for Solitary, an Israeli band, when he was seventeen. He still prefers the elaborate metal sleeve to a musician’s portrait: a picture that starts an atmosphere before the needle drops. Metalheads, he understands, keep the artwork as long as they keep the record. The sleeve is not a sticker. It is part of how the music arrives.

Gerald Scarfe’s political bite and Odd Nerdrum’s darker paintings sit in the same pile as his own favorites, Iron Maiden’s Killers and Cryptopsy’s None So Vile. He has declined jobs that felt copied or merely offensive, waiting for an idea that was not already hanging in someone else’s shop. The list that stayed includes Krisiun, Hate Eternal, Soulfly, then Testament, Helloween, Kreator, My Dying Bride, and Devin Townsend’s The Moth.

Those later names used to be written as if they were still on the desk. They are not. The covers exist; the moth has already flown. Bloodstock and Copenhell let the pictures leave the jewel case and stand in a field, which is where he has said he wants to keep putting the work. Killers and None So Vile remain the covers he will name when asked what a sleeve should do. Scarfe and Nerdrum remain the pile beside them. The declined jobs stay declined. Berlin was the city that stuck after the visit at sixteen. Solitary at seventeen was the first paid sleeve. He remains a discreet presence behind the music. He is not the singer. He is the person who decided what the record should look like while you were still in the queue.