“It all started in a very spontaneous way. I don’t want to kill the dream of people who say, ‘He’s the mastermind, he knew exactly where he was going.’ I didn’t write any master plan. I had no clue.”

For Pedro Winter, somewhat fittingly, it began at a party. Having managed Daft Punk since 1996, he already knew a thing or two about the intersection between music and imagery. And after founding the artist management company Headbangers Entertainment in 2002, Winter was now making plans for a record label.

In early 2003, a young graphic designer, Bertrand Lagros de Langeron, was attending a soirée in Paris. He’d just completed his first project – a book cover – and was excited to share the work with his friends. By chance, Winter happened to be there. He spotted de Langeron’s designs and was struck by the similarities to his company’s logo.

“Pedro saw it and asked if I wanted to meet,” de Langeron recalls. “I was like, ‘yeah, sure’, never thinking that it would happen. But Pedro doesn’t drink, so the next day, we actually met. It would be pretentious to say the rest is history, but if there’s a time to say so, it’s now.”

Initially enlisted to create a website for Headbangers Entertainment, de Langeron hand drew a design on A3 paper, which he later animated. Adopting the moniker So-Me, his tentative illustrative style went on to inform the identity of what would eventually become Ed Banger Records.

“It was already the cornerstone of what we were going to do,” he states. “Back then, all the electronic music and labels had websites made in Flash that were very minimal. We went for the complete opposite, like a fanzine with shitty drawings.”

As well as spawning a string of early hits, including electro house anthem Never Be Alone, a remix of English rock outfit Simian by French electro duo Justice, Ed Banger’s aesthetic influence was vast. Merging skater culture with hip hop, indie with dance, and rock and metal with electro, Ed Banger was at the forefront of something entirely new.

Double A-side 12” Radar Rider and F.I.S.T. from producer Mr Flash and Philippe Zdar of legendary electronic duo Cassius was Ed Banger’s first physical release. So-Me’s simple illustrations of a Marshall amplifier and a mixer adorned each side. Winter was so enthused by So-Me’s efforts that they would become instrumental in the next stage of the label’s evolution.

“I have no idea why, but I wanted all the art direction to be handwritten,” Winter muses. “It was the time where everything was done by computer. In the early 2000s, especially in electronic music, everything was digital. I think maybe I wanted the opposite of it. I wanted something with more soul, something warmer.”

I’m shooting from the hip as I draw. It feels like it could be very well organised and very well sketched out, but it’s completely improvised. I’m just talking gibberish

While the 12” artwork set the tone, it was So-Me’s striking promo sleeve design that acted as a statement of intent. Each was covered with a barrage of line drawings, doodles and rambling monologues. Everything about it felt quintessentially Ed Banger.

“Pedro didn’t ask me to do that,” So-Me recalls. “I just found it fun to use it as an introduction for people to get to know the label. Half of what I’m saying is complete crap. I’m shooting from the hip as I draw. It feels like it could be very well organised and very well sketched out, but it’s completely improvised. I’m just talking gibberish.”

For the label’s logo, So-Me conceived an illustration of Winter carrying his record box, which morphed into a shield badge first seen on collaborative record, Ed Rec Vol 1, in 2006. Its next evolution introduced the music note intersected by a pencil. The arrival of designer Alex ‘Bonito Boy’ Philipps on Ed Banger’s creative team saw another shift, when he suggested altering the logo annually.

“I loved the idea, because it’s still the same DNA for me – combining music and visuals,” Winter explains. “Alex comes from skateboard culture where reinventing and remixing a logo is part of the culture. Sometimes we don’t do it, but the idea is to use this music note and pencil and to reinvent it whenever we want.”

Moving away from line drawings, So-Me began to encompass brighter colour palettes. “Pedro and I have always loved maximalist aesthetics, like a Funkadelic record cover with all these details,” So-Me explains. “I love minimalism, but it takes a certain taste that I probably don’t have. I’d rather use a lot of colours that are not supposed to go together with a lot of words.”

As Ed Banger grew, each artist came to be defined by their own visual persona. While many of the label’s signees were graphic designers in their own right, one of the few constraints was that So-Me would design all of the imagery, ensuring a consistent tone.

“Luckily, everybody agreed to that,” So-Me laughs. ”If you’re gonna be on the label, you’re gonna have a hand drawn, colourful cover. My goal was to have a distinguished style for each artist, but also make it like ‘It’s an Ed Banger Records record’.”

For the disco stylings of Breakbot, So-Me created a graphic representation of the producer and DJ, which would become a staple of his early releases.

“If Breakbot wasn’t doing music, he’d be at Pixar in Los Angeles,” Winter states. “He knows about graphic design, but he really gave his trust to So-Me. They had this idea of using him as a character and he was totally into it. The smart move was to take the rules you learn at school, to never make something diagonal, and do it. He’s diagonal on the front of the record and now it’s his signature.”

Mr Oizo had already established a world of his own through his celebrated videos and Levi’s adverts featuring the puppet Flat Eric. When it came to creating artwork for his Ed Banger debut, Lambs Anger, So-Me looked to Oizo’s cinematic forebears in the form of fellow surrealist Luis Buñuel, recreating the infamous moment from the 1929 film Un Chien Andalou in which a woman’s eye is spliced open with a razor.

“That’s just me trying to understand Oizo’s universe,” So-Me explains. “He has a very strong universe, but he was never associated with a strong graphic design universe. It all comes from the videos he made and the music that he makes, but he was okay with being on this label with this graphic designer that was going to adapt him. It just worked.”

When Justice signed to the label, Winter had an entirely different vision. An electronic duo formed of members Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, both were graphic designers themselves. Though firmly rooted in the Ed Banger aesthetic, their stark, intense rock-inspired imagery has since taken on a life of its own.

“Electronic musicians often use visuals and art as a concept to hide themselves,” Winter explains. “At the same time, I wanted Justice to become rock stars. I didn’t want them to hide themselves, especially as we already had two robots hiding themselves with perfection.”

Their brash sound was an opportunity to expand the label’s visual palette. For the artwork of Waters of Nazareth, the first single from what would become the duo’s debut album, Cross, So-Me made a creative decision that defined their identity.

“It was just fun to collaborate with people who know what they want,” recalls So-Me. “But when I did the Waters of Nazareth cover, which is the first instalment of their heavy metal aesthetics, I did it completely on my own. I even put a cross in the ‘T’, which is where the cross stems from. It was another spontaneous gesture. I was like, ‘This track is really hard. There’s an organ in the breakdown.’ I just designed an organ in black and silver and they liked it. From that they decided to push that aesthetic further.”

As time went on, So-Me would take a step back from creating visuals, allowing other artists into the fold, such as Thomas Jumin, who would later work extensively with Justice, and illustrator Charlotte Delarue.

“I guess at some point, people were like, ‘OK, we’ve had ten years of drawings, so maybe we should move on to something else’,” So-Me explains. “That was also the right timing for me to do my own thing.” “We never tell them, ‘You have to do like So-Me used to’,” Winter adds. “It’s completely open. We never asked them to go in a special direction.”

Winter would part ways with Daft Punk in 2008 to focus on the label full time, leaving them to forge their own remarkable legacy. His time with the duo had a formative effect on his approach to Ed Banger and their influence can still be felt to this day.

“Everything artistically that I learned with them, I’ve tried to do my way with Ed Banger,” he states. “Daft Punk are the band with the most integrity I’ve seen. I’m a student of them. I’ll continue to share what I’ve learned with them. This is why I believe Ed Banger is so strong. There’s a definite family link there.”

edbangerrecords.com