Album cover of The Ruby Cord by Richard Dawson features an intricate illustration by Phil Tyler that captures the album's collision of pastoral folk and a "sinister" augmented reality future. The central figure is a nomadic wanderer or "The Hermit," draped in a heavy blue hood and carrying an impossibly large hoard of scavenged artifacts. This collection of tools, bones, fishing rods, and discarded tech serves as a literal burden of history, mirroring the 41-minute opening track's slow, detailed world-building.

The landscape is bisected by a literal "ruby cord"—a red stream or tether—that snakes through a desolate, beige wasteland. The presence of a marionette hanging from the pack and the wanderer's staff topped with a carved head reinforce the album's themes of mutated social mores and the evaporation of physical boundaries. The detailed, "Where's Waldo" style of the artwork invites a meticulous gaze, paralleling Dawson's dense storytelling and the "Museum" of future-history he constructs across the seven tracks.

https://richardmichaeldawson.bandcamp.com/album/the-ruby-cord

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