Elixir—Music + Mathematics + Magic; Album Cover by Mike Faulkner of D-Fuse

The cover of Elixir's 2000 album Music + Mathematics + Magic was designed by Mike Faulkner of the London-based arts company D-Fuse (https://www.dfuse.com). This album was featured in the book Metalheart is Movement (2003), which became the namesake of a short-lived experimental art movement known as “metalheart” (sometimes referred to as “depthcore”). 

The movement was heavily influenced by neofuturism, brutalism, and early 3D graphics that developed during the late 1990s and early 2000s. As 3D graphics became more popular and accessible,  many works featured 3D-rendered elements as well as a variety of other media including vectors, textures, and complex imagery. Adobe Photoshop, Cinema 4D, Pixar Typestry, Autodesk Maya, and a variety of other rendering tools were commonly used. The movement was pioneered by Andreas Lindholm and Anders F. Rönnblom. Mike Faulkner and several other artists and designers also contributed to this movement, including Richard Krall, Cem Gül, Halvor Bodin, and many more.

Many works from this stylistic movement did not gain mainstream notoriety due to their experimental nature. Because of this, archival efforts have been limited and many works remain unavailable outside of print. The metalheart movement gained mainstream attention in the late 2010s after the DJ and electronic musician Porter Robinson drew inspiration from it for his Virtual Self EP.