I made it in to Toronto tonight, pretty easy day of travel. Unfortunately there’s a little bit of rain but I hear it will let up by tomorrow evening. I went over to Function 13 Gallery tonight to get started setting things up, I’ll be hanging all the artwork for the ISO50 show tomorrow.
The gallery show will feature a lot of new work along with some old stuff. I ended up going back and reworking everything, pulling out the text and just leaving the artwork. It was a pretty fun process stripping things down to their core elements, it’s always a nice test to see which images stand on their own without the accompanying type. A couple posters — such as 1971 and Madrone — couldn’t do without the type so I just tried stripping out some other extraneous elements. Going back through some of the older files was pretty surprising, it was interesting to see how much my technique has changed over the years. Some were just a mess, it felt like restoring an old house removing all the heavy handed distressing and randomly placed elements. It was great to see the results, I feel like the core concepts of a lot of the pieces can breathe a lot better now.
I’ve also got some new stuff in store for the live Tycho set; a few new songs, some remixes, and reworked live visuals. It’s been pretty stressful over the past week getting ready for this but it all came together over the past few days so now I’m just excited to get it all out there. Hope to see you out tonight. Click the links below for more info.
Also, if you enjoy all the music posted on this blog (which is pretty much all Jakub), then you will enjoy Jakub’s DJ set tonight. He’ll be playing as his DJ alter-ego Aarnio tonight at the show.
As promised, here’s the final poster for the Analog Visions show on Friday in Toronto. In case you missed it, I’ll be doing a solo show at Function 13 Gallery this Friday, November 20th. I’ve been working out concepts for how to hang the posters throughout the past week, I’ve decided against frames and want to go with something a little more raw feeling for this one. The work that I’ll be showing are all printed on Hahnemühle German Etching paper which has this incredible texture. I don’t want anything to get between the viewer and the piece. I have been working with Bulldog clips and nails, spray painting the clips matte white and using longer nails to let the piece stand off the wall a little. I think it’s going to look nice, but I’m still open to any suggestions, if you have any ideas for alternative poster hanging methods, let me know in the comments.
As for the poster design itself, I spent way longer than expected on this one. It was meant to be a quick promo poster for the gallery but the deeper I got into it the more I realized I had to finish it off properly. Once you hit on a concept you kind of have to decide whether to go all the way with it or save it for when there’s time to do it right. It was a stretch, but I was able to get it done in time (deadline was this morning) so it’s pretty nice to finally see it in it’s completed form. As you can see, this is another take on the Nocturne poster, featuring the same model. Seeing as how these events are the same night I wanted them to be related, but not exactly the same. I wanted the Nocturne design to be a little more divergent from my earlier work while this one was meant to sort of bridge the gap between new and old given the nature of the gallery show. You can see a larger version of the image over at the studio site.
The version above is probably the fifth or sixth, not counting the various in between states. The final file ended up around 4GB, 24×36″ at 300dpi but I did most of the heavy lifting with low resolution smart object stand-ins so it wasn’t too slow. In case anyone was wondering, this is the project I was referring to in the Photoshop Question / Problem post. All of the circles were smart objects based on the same photograph. As stated above, I worked with a model I shot here in the studio for the silhouettes, but I worked with another photographer for some elements of the background. I used some shots from Jacob Sargeant’s beautiful Experimental Set on Flickr for the detailing and color shifts. Thanks to Disign Police for turning me on to Jacob’s work.
Time for a day off and some much needed rest, hope to see you out in Toronto.
I’m doing a solo exhibition at Function 13 Gallery in Toronto next Friday where I’ll be showing some new work and large format stuff. I’m still working on the main poster for the event so I’ll be posting that on Monday probably. For now, here’s all the details:
I just wrapped up the poster for the upcoming Tycho show in Toronto (shown above) which can also be purchased at the ISO50 Studio shop. I’m doing a solo art exhibition at Function 13 Gallery and then a live Tycho performance afterward at Nocturne on Friday, November 20th, 2009. I’ll be posting the gallery show poster tomorrow with all the info, for now you can find all the details for the Tycho (music) show here and details for the Function 13 Gallery Show here.
This poster is sort of an alternate take on the gallery show poster (which will be released tomorrow), they are both based on the same subject but have very different aesthetics. This is the first time I’ve worked directly with a live model for a project — I shot her against a light bouncer with a flood light coming from the back to get the silhouette. Although rather time consuming, it was a pretty fun process and I learned a lot. You may notice that this piece in similar to the Coastal Brake cover in it’s use of negative space. I’ve employed this concept in various ways throughout my career (the Past is Prologue cover [2004-2005], for example) but have only recently found the time to truly explore it to the extent that I have with these recent pieces as compositions in this style are the most time intensive of all my work. When creating these, I treat the process more like painting than graphic design and so things can become much more complex. This particular piece is not quite as complex as some of the others, it’s a composite of about 20 image layers overlayed using various blending modes and masked by the silhouette image, the negative space was then filled with photographed paper which was colored using color balance. It will be on display at the Function 13 ISO50 Gallery show on the 20th.
Tycho Show Details
ISO50 Toronto Art Show After Party
TYCHO (Live Audio / Visual Performance)
With Guest DJ’s
Aarnio (Ghostly/Moodgadget, New York)
Noah Pred (Thoughtless Music, Toronto)
Nocturne
550 Queen Street West Toronto
ON MSV 285
$10 Advance / $15 Door
Doors: 9PM
Sten aka Lawrence held my #1 spot on my Top 10 list of 2008 and his 12″ vinyl single Jill on Mule Electronics in 2009 will probably be in my Top 10 list of singles in 2009. I’m a sucker for these lush melodies over the well crafted rhythm sections Peter Kersten puts together. He uses delay so well and mutes notes perfectly like some gentle tribal lullaby if there was such a thing.
I’m not sure what synth it is but it almost sounds like a faint chime in the melody, I think I heard it in 80’s-early 90’s sitcoms, now that sound is just a killing me its so good. Here’s a big fake Pitchfork review rating of 10/10.
Daedelus and his friends started their new label FoF Music which features split EP’s by different aritsts as one release, clever idea if the artists don’t mind, only problem is if you’re not feeling the other music by the other musician on the same release but that’s not the case here since Jogger really delivers some good tracks too. One thing is that vocal sample Billy Corgan? or does Alfred just have a great voice and we didn’t know all this time.
10:32 is Tim Koch who you may know from the free Ghostly Swim compilation on Adult Swim or from the Merck label if you have followed the Tycho catalog follows up with a digital EP on Ghostly with integrating acoustic guitars, female vocals, and raw found sound in a pretty distant and perfect way.
I feel like I talk about Marumari a lot on the blog, he is definitely a favorite producer, this track called A Girl I Met At the Rest Stop was the first song I ever heard by him, its off the infamous IDM compilation series Bip-Hop Generation. The track sounds like a more up front live Selected Ambient Work track like Pulsewidth but way more calm and slower going.
