Last year, John Malkovich released Like A Puppet Show, an album that saw the American thespian recite Plato’s Allegory of the Cave over music. For the album, composer Eric Alexandrakis recorded a set of ambient tracks and asked Malkovich to record the poem over them before sending the tracks on to artists like Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, Placebo, and Dweezil Zappa to reinterpret as they saw fit. The results were very peculiar.
Now, some of those songs are being issued as a new picture disc 12” called Illuminated, as FACT report. As you can see, Malkovich posed nude for the album cover striking Rodin's famous thinking pose (there’s a second disc where he’s pulling the same pose while wearing a suit).
The image was photographed by Sandro Miller, who previously shot Malkovich as Jean Paul Gaultier, Madonna, and John Lennon, and who is also directing a forthcoming film of Allegory of the Cave starring Malkovich.
Listen to selected tracks from Like A Puppet Show below.