David Bowie fans uncover even more secrets in Blackstar vinyl release

Including one message hidden in Bowie’s choice of font.

David Bowie fans have uncovered further secrets in the artwork to his final album Blackstar, after the album sleeve’s designer teased in a BBC 6 Music interview this weekend that the vinyl release contains surprises that had yet to be uncovered.

In May, it was discovered that if you expose the vinyl release of David Bowie‘s final album Blackstar to light, it reveals the image of a galaxy. “There’s actually a few other things as well,” designer Jonathan Barnbrook told Mary Ann Hobbs on Sunday. “Actually, there’s one big thing which people haven’t discovered yet on the album. Let’s just say, if people find it, they find it, and if they don’t, they don’t. And remember what Bowie said about not explaining everything.”

This sparked further examinations of the artwork by fans, one of whom discovered earlier this week that the cover, when exposed to a blacklight, appears to change the design to fluorescent blue.

You may have heard what happens if you expose it to sunlight. Well, it turns out that if you put the Blackstar LP under a blacklight…. pic.twitter.com/WvDg7xkF8t

— Matt (@RobboRobson21) November 13, 2016

Now, as reported by SPIN, it’s been revealed that the LP casts a reflection revealing an image when angled onto walls or ceilings. “Reflecting light off one side of the vinyl at certain angle creates what looks like a star,” SPIN reader Robert Matthews told the magazine, with another claimed that “when you reflect light off of side one you get a bird in flight. Side two, a space ship.”

Another fan claims that the run times on the album’s back cover appear to be written in a font called Terminal, which appears in a design suite called Lazarus –the name of a Blackstar track and a musical that Bowie composed before his death. It’s thought that this is a subtle nod to the terminal liver cancer that the songwriter was diagnosed with a year before he passed on January 10 2016.

Another fan, Matias Hidalgo, told SPIN that the inside gatefold art of the album, which shows a star field on one side and a portrait of Bowie on the other, can be arranged so that Bowie’s image is reflected on the opposite cover. As the magazine point out, this could be accidental, but as they admit, “it’s a nice thought to imagine the Starman among the stars.”