The Gradient - Walker's New Design Quarterly

How Do You Translate Sound?

Issue 1 | Summer 2018

E.T. Carlson

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Kickoff to summer starts with Rock the Garden, the best outdoor music festival of the season! One day, two stages, eight bands. Overlooking the iconic Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and an unbelievable view of the city skyline.

more info at rockthegardenfestival.com

KAMASI WASHINGTON

CHASTITY BROWN

FEIST

FATHER JOHN MISTY

LOW CUT CONNIE

NIKKI LANE

SHAME

P.O.S.

The Edgeless & Ever-Shifting Gradient: An Encyclopaedic and Evolving Spectrum of Gradient Knowledge

A gradient, without restriction, is edgeless and ever-shifting.

A gradient moves, transitions, progresses, defies being defined as one thing. It formalizes difference across a distance. It’s a spectrum. It’s a spectral smearing. It’s an optical phenomenon occurring in nature. It can be the gradual process of acquiring knowledge. It can be a concept. It can be a graphic expression.

It can be all of the above, but likely it’s somewhere in between.

A gradient, in all of it’s varied forms, becomes a catalyst in it’s ability to seamlessly blend one distinct thing/idea/color, to the next distinct thing/idea/color, to the next, etc. In this sense, it is the gradient and the way it performs that has become a model and an underlying ethos, naturally, for this publishing initiative that we call The Gradient, The Gradient is the new guise of the authentic Design Quarterly, edited by the Walker Art Center, for over fourty years, from 1954 to 1996. It is based on the omonimuous online blog. The Gradient is a spectrum that can be transformed without restrictions, which in this case is also represent as the connections between the design and any other topics, that changes in every issue.

glissando

[/glis·sàn·do/] s.m. pl.– i, abb. "gliss"

In music, a glissando is a continuous glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, to glide. Some colloquial equivalents are slide, sweep (referring to the ‘discrete glissando’ effects on guitar and harp respectively), bend, smear, rip, lip, plop, or falling hail.

From the standpoint of musical acoustics and scientific terminology, some instruments can change the frequency of their notes with continuously variable pitch over a substantial range.

These continuous glissando shifting included many instruments.

But glissando, as an abstract idea, can goes beyond the pentagram limits. It can be about project, science, technology and people.

So the question is, how can we translate sound? In this first issue we shifted between design and music and met who is behind the scenes. We rediscovered Bon Iver thanks to Eric Thimothy Carlson and Camerong Wittig's incredible works; Brian Roettinger showed us his long lasting collaboration with No Age; we had the unique opportunity to experience the work in progress of Tónandi, the new incoming Sigur Rós' project of Secretive Virtual Reality; and we had a chat with multimedia artist Herman Kolgen, with singer Iglooshost and with the eclectic designer Alexander Chen.

Ryan Gerald Nelson

AN INTERVIEW WITH

Eric Timothy Carlson DESIGNING BON IVER’S “22, A MILLION”

WORDS Emmet Byrne

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When I first started to see fragments of the artwork for Bon Iver’s new album, "22, a Million", I immediately recognized the hand of Eric Timothy Carlson, an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, originally from Minneapolis. Carlson’s work frequently mutates from medium to medium, a sketch becoming a poem becoming a sculpture becoming a shirt.

Through it all, the idea of reading—the fluidity between text and image, the discarded pictographic origins of alphabets, the semiotic slide between icon to index to symbol—guides his work.

In the following interview we present the finished artwork, supplemented with process work and related materials. Eric takes us down the rabbit hole, describing the intense, fluid work sessions with Justin Vernon and others at the Eau Claire studios, the numbers that permeate the tracklist, the influence of digital culture on the new album and the prevalence of cryptic symbolism throughout the Minneapolis and Wisconsin music scene.

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spreads from the newsprint zine of surprise listening parties

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Music has always been an important aspect of my practice. I’ve played music my whole life, and I come from a musical family, raised with it.

EB How were you approached to work on this? Do you specialize in music packaging?

ETC It’s been a long process. Five years ago, I received a message from Justin that said «I like what you’re doing, and I want you to know that.» A year or two later after actually meeting for the first time: «Can we work on something together? You should come over and we’ll vibe.»

Music has always been an important aspect of my practice. I’ve played music my whole life, and I come from a musical family, raised with it. In college I interned with Aesthetic Apparatus, screen-printing gig posters. My first design projects were for friends’ bands, and posters for art/music shows. Never really wanting to pursue any sort of traditional employment, I’ve made my way on small projects, working with musicians and artists and performers.

I lived in Minneapolis for a decade before moving to New York, so much of my work is born of that Midwest community. P.O.S’s Never Better was the first complete art direction project I had the chance to fully develop. It was a crash course in working with an artist and a label in unison, and aligning the intent and capabilities of all the involved parties/minds. I owe a lot to that community: P.O.S, Doomtree, Rhymesayers, TGNP, Building Better Bombs, Poliça, Gayngs, Skoal Kodiak, The Plastic Constellations, Marijuana Deathsquads, Dark Dark Dark, The Church, Organ House, Medusa.

It was an opportunity to participate in defining a decade of music in Minneapolis.

For a couple of years, I also worked with Mike Cina [→ p.], who is a book and record collector, and really learned and internalized a lot about typography and album art in my time with him. My practice has expanded outside of that through zines and the internet, but a lot of my work to this day has spawned from this continuum.

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E.T. Carlson

sketches about "22, a million"

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At April Base EB How did you work with the Bon Iver crew to create this artwork?

ETC Some projects, you can see what the cover is supposed to be—a floating image in the mind—or there are certain “rules” that you’re supposed to play by that determine much of what is being created. This project, however, could be whatever it wanted to be.

The original desire from the start was to create a robust world of work. So instead of pursuing a specific vision right off the bat, we just worked and experimented and tested ideas. I worked closely with Justin. I worked at April Base—the recording studio—a couple times a year, each time was a unique experience focused on that stage of the music. Usually with an intimate group of two or three guests (musicians, writers, chillers, curators) and the studio crew, for a week or so at a time, to make a unique creative space, where each of us would be a part of defining that period of creation. The whole Bon project is for the most part entirely driven in house. Each visit would be a new experiment—creating temporary installations and interventions, painting mu-

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rals, sharing books and inspiration, playing music. We came to listen and work and get to know one another, to get a feel for how to work and talk and think together. Not overthink anything. Developing the conversation, making art, and sharing our scope of vision and capabilities.

In the rural setting of Eau Claire, when it was freezing outside, almost everything took place inside the studio, and we barely even left the property. It puts you in a certain headspace, and you develop a pattern of waking up and just getting into the work and process of it from noon to midnight—an uninterrupted cycle for a week at a time. But we’d make sure to sleep and eat well too, and not miss too much of the limited winter sunlight.

There were some early birds in the studio, and of course the night owls as well. The amount of people shifted depending on what was happening, and the vibe changed depending on who was around. I think the Indigo Girls were recording the week before I first visited, and there was another project in one of the sound rooms overlapping with my time there. That first visit was one of the most frenetic, fluid experiences, multiple projects developing and recording simultaneously. Sax and string players visiting to record their own work, and then session on the album in process as well. The later visits were more focused— everyone was there for the album, in a no distractions kind of mode.

I’m a habitual drawer, so these visits to the studio resulted in an accumulation of many, many sketches, like writing. Later, these sketch pages became a reference point for the final work. There was an honesty in the notes and collection process that very much influenced the final work.

E.T. Carlson

sketches about "22, a million"

Drawings for the song "Circle"

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Drawings for the song "Circle"

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On The Symbols EB How does the artwork respond to the music?

ETC The songs were all numbers from the start, multiple numbers at first. So we would listen to each song, talk about the numbers, talk about the song, watch the lyrics take form, makes lists, make drawings. Real references and experiences are collaged in both the music and the artwork. I was able to interview and interrogate each song—digging into weird cores—and by the end of each visit, each song would develop a matrix of new notes and symbols.

Between the numerology, the metaphysical/humanist nature of the questions in 22, a Million, and the accumulation of physical material and symbolism around the music—it became apparent that the final artwork was to be something of a tome. A book of lore.

Jung’s Red Book. A lost religion. The Rosetta Stone. Sagan’s Golden Record. Something to invest some serious time and mind in. Something that presented a lot of unanswered questions and wrong ways. A distant past and future. An inner journey somehow very contemporary.

EB When I saw the artwork for the first time I immediately recognized the feeling of it, the general design language. The use of rune-like symbols felt very much like your previous work, and like the work of some of your collaborators—but it didn’t feel like Bon Iver, at least as I understood it. Was Bon Iver looking for something different than their previous, pastoral vibe?

ETC Early on in the process, it was said, “I want each song to have a symbol,” and I knew exactly what that meant. Symbols just naturally come out of me, which is why I use them so much. Icons, signs, symbols—they are cultural fragments and a well made one can cut so deep into our language. I’ve been mentally collecting these all my life. There’s an exercise I enjoy—sitting down to draw out all of the symbols you know without reference: logos, symbols, characters, etc.—and it’s often surprising what comes out, what we have locked away in memory. The anarchy A, yin yangs, Mr. Yuck, Super “S,” Kilroy, peace sign, etc. I admit that one of my desires regarding design and art is to add something to that deep cultural symbolic well of knowing. But they also come from a decades-long conversation within this specific community.

I designed the Gayngs symbol for Ryan Olson in 2010 and worked with Doomtree in 2011 on their No Kings album, which also involved the generation of a series of glyphs.

These ideas—claiming icons, masks, unk-

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nowables, unsayables, unpronouncables—resonate with that community. The Artist Formally Known as Prince, Zoso, CRASS, etc. I designed the Gayngs symbol for Ryan Olson in 2010 and worked with Doomtree in 2011 on their No Kings album, which also involved the generation of a series of glyphs. These ideas—claiming icons, masks, unknowables, unsayables, unpronouncables—resonate with that community. The Artist Formally Known as Prince, Zoso, CRASS, etc.

And as far as the feeling of the previous Bon albums, I mean, they brought me in

I’m In Carlson’s world, symbols rarely speak with the intent of reifying meaning, or branding something with repressive authority, but in a way that evokes multiple readings at once, asking to be adopted and infused with new life. for a reason. That version of Americana was ripe and appropriate when For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver happened, but the Bon project didn’t want to further perpetuate that aesthetic. The new album remains explicitly connected to those before it, but the feeling has undeniably evolved, as has the culture around it.

I spent years in a perfectly weird corner of the heartland making apocalyptic noise art in the vibrant community of Minneapolis.

High and low are just as much the fabric of our home as is a melting pile of snow. So on the surface, the new album aesthetic might seem like a dramatic shift in the Bon aesthetic, but I see it true and deeply bonded to its current state as well as the history out of which it developed.

For 22, a Million they felt automatic. I enjoy the puzzle of creating a ligature. Justin assigned a specific meaning to the numbers and a logic to their creation, but in the end, they are open containers to be filled with new meaning. Symbols in the context of music have a lot of power, and people are very willing to own and wear/display their cultural experiences and allegiances.

E.T. Carlson

Symbols about

about "22, a million"'s covers

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E.T. Carlson

Bon Iver's yin yang symbol for 22 a Million

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As the artwork developed, it became clear how we would seed the material into the public. With 10 symbols, we would make 10 murals, and 10 videos, and a 20-page book, etc. As with many numerologies—just follow the numbers—be them true or not.

The artwork is a collection of hundreds of pieces, icons, ideas, motifs, most of which are capable of standing on their own.

The proper album packaging is the legend of symbols, where you find everything all in one place. When applying the art to outside uses (murals, ads,Instagram posts, etc.), we could utilize individual components. But no piece should be as comprehensive as the album packaging.

EB How did you land on the prominent use of the yin yang symbol?

ETC In establishing that each song was to have a symbol or a set of symbols designated to it, I wanted to also arrive at an overarching symbol, to house them all within. The yin yang proper was in play loosely from the start, working well in the context of the humanist/spiritual pursuits of the project. I created the collage compositions for the LP package by hand at 33˝x33˝, as it proved the best way for me to deal with the amount of material produced, and to massage it all into a sound and organic composition. The center was originally occupied by an altered mandala, as a satisfying placeholder, waiting to be filled with the final symbol. The yin yang design we ended up with happened while working in vector—on something of a whim. Changing the symbol into a square format proved to be enough to keep it recognizable but make it unique to the project. The “smile in the mind” bit of the “i” and “b” emerging from the mark was the final step in both owning the mark, as well as settling its roll. It is a simple design, two circles centered, but the point where they touch in the center is sensitive and requires some optical adjustments. Following the geometric paths produces a little tick that requires massaging to look right. The proportions of the “i” work within the proportions system created for the LP design, and align with the typographic proportions as well. As organic as it feels, it’s a tightly made structure throughout it all.

E.T. Carlson

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On The Digital Milieu Of “22, a Million” EB You’ve described the way ideas of digital collage, digital formats, digital thinking really encompassed the creative conception of the album, both musically and visually.

33 "GOD"

ETC 22, a Million to me still feels very tied to Emma and the self-titled album. There is still the gospel and folk and mountain songs, but in the studio I could feel and see the visceral digital collage of it all, how our technology and the internet has truly affected the way we collect, organize, think, and make. This album is built on our history of music, noise, poetry, and Americana, but also seamlessly incorporates and celebrates the technological nuances of our contemporary—employing it and expanding it.

Visualizing music has been an exercise I’ve practiced since I was young. The first PlayStation had the visualizer function where you could customize your equalizer/screensaver with the controller, responding to any CD you put in, which informed a bit of how I approached it then. I try to let the ideas be more expansive now. When I first heard the digital disturbances crackling over these new songs, it was such a trip, seeing layers and relationships I hadn’t yet encountered.

The computer so readily pairs with futurist visions, pushing forward futuristic, technology-oriented aesthetics. But the reality of our relationship with digital technology always retains this messy pulsing humanity.

Marshall McLuhan predicted computers in every classroom, people connected around the world, utopian vibes. Technically he was very right, but we still have bad carpeting and ugly plaid couches and gas station tchotchkes and dirty bathrooms. Regardless of time passing, we remain in communion with the century preceding us, and even the previous millennium or two.

715 "CR∑∑KS"

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EB How do you understand album artwork in the context of the digital music economy? Prior to the proper release of the album, your artwork was published in a variety of ways, from a cryptic track-list graphic approach on Instagram to the YouTube lyrics videos. The graphics seem to be very front and center in Bon Iver’s pre-release strategy— they are presented as standalone thoughts, with very little context, in lieu of a slick marketing campaign. Was this the intent from the beginning?

ETC I believe Bon Iver has had unique success with both digital and physical album sales, perhaps an anomaly of sorts. Being of my generation, I can’t help but desire access to music and movies and such things for free–I understand how that is problematic, but upon tasting Napster, it was hard to go back.

Labels, album makers, vinyl fetishists–people love the richness of album art, the nostalgic object to own and consume. It’s fun to produce that stuff, and much of the best album art was made for that format. CD’s are junk, and Digipaks are junk, in my opinion.

(My favorite CD format is those massive Case Logic binders of poorly labeled CDRs.) Given the opportunity, I like to make artwork first for the LP format because it is the most generous format for artwork (assuming one pursues the object creation). Then I try to find a good way to make a system of format conversions. I love old cassette tapes where they just drop the square album art on the cassette cover, and type out the titles again bigger underneath in the worst/best way. So honest.

Format conversions are such a crazy part of doing a big release like this, because there are so many when it comes to international releases: LP, CD, Cassette, Euro LP, CD, Central/South American CD, Australian CD, Japan CD, etc… all slightly different sizes, with different printers, different distributors.

This work is thick—an extensive collection of symbols and drawings and texts that spill out from the dense LP design. The work is less a graphic identity for an album and more a documentation of a collaborative network of players, places, times, and tools.

There was a short conversation as we arrived near the final art design, where I wanted a very clear confirmation, «There are going to be yin yangs and down crosses on your album cover…and… you’re down with that?» and the response was more or less, «Dude, yesssssss!».

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Aspects of this obviously become a certain hell, but I can’t help but pursue quirky packaging details in the different designs, which, if done well, can result in so many unique details that make each version special in their own little mutant way.

When working with bands, I’ve often made the case that they should find a way to make an album available for free, since someone will do it anyway, and if you try to control it, you end up keeping people away from the work. I can’t back up any financial rubric supporting this, but it feels right to me. Most of my friends are posting their work on SoundCloud or YouTube. When they release an album that is freely available, the ideas that form around the real base are a little more true to humans than the rules as laid out by companies.

For 22, a Million, there will be lyric videos that I created with Aaron Anderson for each song that will be available for free on YouTube (save the ad experience/big data), which is great as it opened another gate for us to expand the language of the artwork into an entirely different realm–time and motion and the casually fluent–because internet.

EB Lyric videos are an interesting choice for an album like this. Vernon references Richard Buckner when talking about becoming comfortable with writing words that sound like something, instead of lyrics with explicit meaning. “Sound things out and find out what it means later. Gave me the courage to write like that.” I feel like your cryptic use of symbols matches that strategy pretty closely.

It suggests a deep, diverse world of language but the viewer is allowed to fill in the meaning of what it is actually saying. The lyric videos seem deliberately deadpan in their delivery of the lyrics—a little too straight up for lyrics that make very little “sense” at first listen.

There’s something unnatural-feeling about literally reading these lyrics while listening to the music…

ETC The lyric videos initiative came from Justin. I’m not sure they ended up looking like what he was imagining, but that’s one of the things that has been so great about the project: the trust in the work of everyone involved. I was originally a little hesitant about the lyric video concept, largely due to the quality of lyric videos in general, and because I was dreaming of an entirely abstract/ambient visual component to live with the music online, without typography. But many lyric videos found online are made by fans—iMovie/ After Effects motion graphics class projects. I feel that that amateur aesthetic has gone on to inform what official, professionally produced lyric videos look like. Those videos are getting a lot of views, so they are probably important to produce and control, but I can’t imagine any of them are allotted budgets comparable to that of a music video—they are more of a checkedoff assets category in the end.

But it was a good challenge, figuring out how to do it good/weird/right, how to acknowledge the format, and how to expand the album art into this realm. They didn’t need to be explicitly narrative, and they didn’t need to

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Bon Iver's yin yang symbol for 22 a Million

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live by the rules of the print material. They are made for YouTube, to ultimately listen to the music in that format—but we wanted to prod at the format, and use it to expand upon the inherent digital truth of the album.

The simple and natural aesthetic of digital collage that these videos utilize is deeply rooted in the core of 22, a Million. From the start, the note taking, the creative process, and the music embrace the idea of digital collage.

For example, “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ” samples a low-resolution YouTube video of Stevie Nicks casually singing backstage. These lyric videos where the perfect place to expand upon this digital aesthetic.

It would be amazing to take a 5K to New Zealand and make all the videos of Gandalf blowing lyric smoke rings. I’ve always loved making design work in text edit, for example.

The initial footage from “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ” is all video screen captured in Acrobat. The video for “22 (OVER S∞∞N)” is a slowed down video text message, with the lyrics applied in a broken subtitle generator, shot off the screen because it wouldn’t export correctly. It feels right to leave some of these inconsistencies, like a painting’s visible underdrawing. Something beautiful in mistakes—techno wabi-sabi. Folk motion graphics… motion graphics are so bad.I like the idea of domestic psychedelia. Which isn’t so much tie-dye as it is being half asleep on an ugly couch and the floaties in your eyelids.

The artwork certainly goes to reference something ancient—a lore—but so does the music, with the voice, the folk and gospel music. But it is also inherently new, and defining what comes later, the future, so it seemed important to address the contemporary, to break the contemporary, and show how fucked up good and weird our domestic tools can be through simple layered process.

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On Typography EB

ETC I didn’t want anything too tricky.

A system font felt good, since I was working with the lyrics in text-edit documents. Optima just looked so right spelling out “BON IVER.” It sung the first time I saw it. I didn’t share it with them right away, or even implement it in design off the bat—but it continued to resonate every time I went back to it, which is usually a solid test. The first example I found of Optima in use that stuck out was the McCain presidential campaign, and I thought, “That’s legit” — thought it was funny—so there’s your irony.

Helvetica-y was too sterile, and Garamond was too sentimental. Optima proved is a a font that can do both.

I also just use Univers and Garamond for pretty much everything I do, so I wanted to do some due diligence in playing with other things. I had been using Courier New for all of my process pdf’s—because I think it looks great digital—when its all the same size, but kind of loath it any larger.

Why Optima?

EB How did you approach designing the booklet?

ETC I was excited to limit the booklet to just typography, and find a way to keep that experience just as rich and nuanced as the rest of the system. I started using Courier, and that immediately started evoking the feeling of concrete poetry and ’60s conceptual art, employing the limitations of a typewriter. The hipster in a coffee shop working on a typewriter is the worst thing ever, and I was perhaps towing the line of steampunk a bit, but the direction felt right.By the time I was working on the book I had listened to the album in process nearly a hundred times, so the layout decisions proved natural and intuitive, knowing where the phrases broke, making visual decisions in response to the music of it, using parallel columns where the lyrics overlapped.

Personally, this approach also connects to strategies of working with text digitally, such as finding ways to successfully break a blogspot layout.

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Bon Iver's symbol for 22 a Million

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Bon Iver Words by Cameron Wittig

Picturing the man who wasn't there Photography by Cameron Wittig, Crystal Quinn

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In creative work, there’s individual genius and then there’s the genius of collaboration—the knowledge that, when combined, individual perspectives can be enhanced, morph, and grow in unexpected ways.

As we’ve noted before, Justin Vernon embodies both: an utterly unique artistic vision that’s enhanced through ongoing creative conversations with an array of musicians, artists, and designers.

On the eve of Vernon’s band, Bon Iver, headlining Rock the Garden 2017, we welcome another such collaborator—Cameron Wittig, the Minneapolisbased artist and longtime Walker photographer (2002–2012 —to share the process behind the creation of press and documentation imagery related to Bon Iver’s multi-Grammy–nominated 2016 album, 22, a Million.

I spent a day working with Justin and Volcano Choir, an extraordinary group of people, and it became clear that I wasn’t going to be heading back to Minneapolis right away.

We all stayed up until sunrise joking around a campfire in the backyard. In that short trip I met a group of people who would become some of the best people I’ve ever met and made many friendships that are still a part of my life today. I found myself returning to Justin’s house many times after that. Sometimes for work, but mostly just for fun.

INSIDE

A few months after posting an image of a rural dirt road shrouded by trees from my trip to Yazoo, I received an email from an A&R rep at Jagjaguwar, Bon Iver’s record label. The rep was inquiring about purchasing a print from my Yazoo trip, but instead of responding with a price, I quickly made a large print and put it a mailing tube addressed to the Jagjaguwar office in Bloomington, Indiana.

Two weeks later I found myself driving east on I-94, crossing the St. Croix river into Wisconsin with a Google map of a route to the home of Justin Vernon. Gifting the print landed me a job shooting his band Volcano Choir for promotional photos to support the upcoming release of the band’s debut album, Unmap (2009).

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Bon Iver

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Bon Iver

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Justin’s studio, April Base, is a former veterinary clinic that had been built into a ranch-style house tucked into the rolling hills of rural Eau Claire County. Stainless-steel tables and plastic waiting room chairs have been replaced with audio racks and monitors, drum sets, synthesizers, tube amps, and microphones. During the recording of the newest Bon Iver release, 22, A Million, I was invited to spend a day among all the gear to take candid photos documenting an artist at work, but with one caveat: I was told to not show his face.

I didn’t care too much to question the why of this limiting rule; I was more interested in the how. How do you photograph an artist at work in a recording studio and make it interesting? How do you communicate the place and the feeling of being there and make it be in

casionally popped in to do takes with his sax in the vocal booth. Occasionally Justin would enter the booth to layer vocals, jumping back to the mixing board to see what, if anything, took. In a matter of hours I probably heard about 45 seconds of a song part, possibly a few hundred times. Work in a recording studio is mostly about being able to tolerate repetition.

The song I witnessed being made eventually became what is now know as “22 (OVER S∞∞N).”

A curious aspect of the studio is the addition of a laser disc player connected to a large flat-panel TV, wall-mounted over the mixing board. Movies were constantly (and without audio) being played, creating both a visual backdrop and a distraction to the repetitiveness of the audio work. Something about

The way I met Justin Vernon happens to be strangely intertwineda with the Walker Art Center and choreographer Ralph Lemon. In 2006, I worked with Lemon on his residency for the 2006 exhibition OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement), and later I was invited to travel with Ralph \to the small town of Yazoo, Missisippi, where he was working on a project with 101-year-old former sharecropper Walter Carter. harmony with the music and the personality of the artist? Keeping Justin anonymous was relatively easy. Making it interesting was a bit trickier. After watching and listening to the band add manipulations to the sounds of instruments and voices I started thinking I could do a similar thing visually.

I arrived at the studio mid-day and, after the typical round of enthusiastic hellos, I settled in on an approach of being an invisible participant. I took a seat at the back of the studio and patiently waited for a vibe to emerge.

I watched as an engineer worked with Justin, who was chopping up previously recorded bits of a song in ProTools, patching cables in and out of rack equipment in an effort to get a particular sound just right. Bon Iver member and saxophonist Mike Lewis (pictured above) oc-

the linear nature of a movie storyline unfolding makes sense as a counterpoint to repetition. When I first sat down in the studio a Star Trek reboot was playing on the TV. After spending awhile not taking any photos and trying to stay invisible, I got brave and decided to change the movie to something more in line with the feel of the place I was in. Shuffling through a box of oversized discs I chose David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, naturally.

Lynch has a particular presence in the house. There’s a framed photo of Special Agent Dale Cooper hung in a bunk bed–filled bedroom in the back of the house. Similarly surreal imagery from Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s TOILETPAPER magazine hangs in a bathroom, and issues can be found throughout the house. Twin Peaks is the favorite choice.

Bon Iver

Justin Vernon at work on the album "22, a Million at April Base studio

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I took my first photo as the MGM lion roared above Justin’s head as he was seated at the mixing board. From that moment on I tried to follow along for opportune moments in the film to be used as a secondary point of interest.

Later, when I began to edit the images, it made sense to process elements in a surrealistic way: I made some small details melt away; others became artificially enlarged or misaligned.

Some images are left untouched, and some have hidden collage elements to be discovered later. I took a note from Lynch and his love for the work of painter Francis Bacon. The facial manipulations aren’t far off from that point of reference, but also nod to Philip Guston. Similar to the way Bon Iver’s vocals are processed, layered, and rendered as a supernatural ghost,

and infinitely talented artist Crystal Quinn.

She was a natural choice and rounded out a circle of Bon Iver collaborators having been part of the Hardland/Heartland collective with Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson, who also worked on packaging and promotional materials for 22, a Million.

After sharing proof-of-concept images with Justin—the Drake cover of FADER overlaid with objects, an altered image of Bonnie “Prince” Billy—we got the go-ahead to proceed. We set up a makeshift studio and workshop in a renovated barn at April Base, we would grab Justin to sit for portraits during breaks in band rehearsals that were happening throughout the day. We could get him to sit for 5 to 10 minutes at a time before sending him

I made some small details melt away; others became artificially enlarged or misaligned. Some images are left untouched, and some have hidden collage elements to be discovered later. the images of that day I hope show the process of a highly creative artist at work in a lively, strange, and anonymous way.

A few months after that recording session, I was invited back to April Base to help create some press photos for the promotion of the upcoming record. And the process for creating these images ended up being just as experimental.

Once again, the challenge was how to create portraits of an artist without expressly showing his face. This was a slightly more daunting challenge as press photos are different from documentary-style process photos.

After all, the face is the key element to a formal portrait. But then I did a bit of research and found that contemporary artists hiding from a camera lens is much more common than one would expect. Frank Ocean rarely shows his face, and Sia has made it a concept that is completely integral to her persona in photographs, videos and even performances.

As a solution I decided I would employ a concept of shooting and collaging portraits as a way of being able to mask the subject in a flexible way. I enlisted the help of good friend

back to rehearsal. Then we printed out portraits on paper and set in to experiment with collages over the images. With just a few new portraits being made each day we could create a dozen or more versions from a single portrait—by ripping, wrinkling, collaging images and objects over the top, and, eventually, rephotographing the compositions.

It was an extraordinary experience working in an environment like April Base— and one I won’t easily forget. At the end of the day, when everyone at the house puts their work down and sits together for dinner or for a fire, the true reason for wanting to be an artist working with other artists is unmasked.

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During the recording of the newest Bon Iver release, 22, A Million, I was invited to spend a day among all the gear to take candidphotos documenting an artist at work, but with one caveat: I was told to not show his face.

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Brian Roettinger On 10 Years With No Age No Age, the LA-based punk band is a two- piece operating somewhere in the outskirts of the power trio landscape. On stage and on record, the group consists of Randy Randall and Dean Spunt. However, a quick glance at the band’s discography and one gets the sense that their creative process is inextricably linked to the work of their long-time collaborator Brian Roettinger.

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Brian, the LA-based graphic designer, has been working with No Age since their inception, and in many ways has become an honorary third member, forming their own unique version of the power trio.

The latest No Age release, Snares Like A Haircut, marks over a decade of collaboration between Roettinger and the band. In the following interview, I chat with Brian, Randy and Dean about the development of their collaboration from recording music in a motel parking lot to hand assembling an entire run of LPs.

BS How did you meet Dea and Randy of No Age? At what point did you begin working together?

BR Dean and I grew up in the same suburb outside of LA, so we got to know each other in high school, post–high school, and pre–No Age. We ended up reconnecting years later at The Smell when they were both in a band called Wives. It wasn’t until I was on tour in Europe with the band Liars, playing a show with Wives that Dean, Randy, and I began discussing design.

We were looking at a lot of the design for Wives and I was explaining to them ways which I felt it could be better. When we returned from tour, Wives eventually broke up, and Dean and Randy formed No Age. That was the beginning of our collaboration.

BS What was the first official No Age project you worked on together?

BR The five EPs were the first projects we worked on together, which all happened simultaneously. We thought, rather than just putting out one record, we could release five EPs with five different record labels that all came out at the same time. To make things even more confusing, none of the covers really said No Age on them, with the exception of the gradient T-shirt. On the back of each record was a letter from the band’s name, so when you collected them all it spelled out “N-O-A-G-E.” The idea of multiple EPs really just came from the number of letters in the band’s name.

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Liars went on a month-long tour with No Age, and during that time we had to design the packaging for Nouns. Every night after the show we would collectively get together and talk about what the record could be. It was a fluid process of designing, conversing, and then responding. [...] the finished project was absolutely a product of being on the road.

BS And following the five EPs, was the full-length album Nouns?

BR Right, and for that album, we were again on the road. Liars went on a month-long tour with No Age, and during that time we had to design the packaging for Nouns. Every night after the show we would collectively get together and talk about what the record could be.

It was a fluid process of designing, conversing, and then responding.

Through the process came the idea to feature people, places, and things that had influenced the band. It was everything, from shows that the band played, pictures from The Smell, outside influences, other bands, even other record labels. The entire experience lead us to the record title Nouns, something I don’t think we would have come up with had we not been on tour together.

BS Were you exploring any new ways of making at the time? I’d imagine being out of the studio and working on the road meant varying constraints.

BR It was definitely a new set of constraints. Any element I wanted in the design I would have to photograph with my phone and email to myself. This was around the time of the first iPhone so you can imagine the photos were pretty crappy.

I remember one time in a hotel in Lawrence, Kansas, there were no notepads in the room, so we took down a painting and began drawing on the wall behind it. We ended up photographing the writing, which was then used for a 7-inch EP we did later. We liked the idea of someone eventually taking down the painting and finding the writing. That night we also recorded a song in the hotel bathroom and in the parking lot. There is a photo of Dean playing drums outside and you can see it star-

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entire time Dean was playing someone had to hold an iPod for him so he could have a track to play along to.

BS The whole idea of making Nouns on the road, did that come out of necessity or were you thinking about it as a sort of design experiment?

BR I wish it was more of an experiment, but it was definitely more of a timing issue.

It was a really useful process though, the finished project was absolutely a product of being on the road. An example is the lettering on the album cover. When we would take a break at truck stops there were a bunch of those reflective letter stickers for radio codes or the back of big rig trucks. We bought ones that said No Age and put them on the bass drum. The sticker backing had this really nice hairline bleed of the letters, which created an interesting outline. Those outlines eventually formed the type on the cover.

BS And that album art was nominated for a Grammy, which seems surprising given the type of artists they generally look at‌

BR Yeah, no one knew who they were at that point. It was pretty crazy.

For every city the band stopped in, I would make a new cover for the split 7-inch (with Liars) that commemorated that particular tour date. [...] that was the only time and place you could get that 7-inch with that cover. [...] Once we left a particular city, all the leftover covers form that city were destroyed.

BS You also put out numerous city-specific 7-inch EPs on that tour. Could you talk about those?

BR For every city the band stopped in, I would make a new cover for the split 7-inch (with Liars) that commemorated that particular tour date. I would design them digitally then find a local copy shop to print, cut, and assemble the sleeves. We would estimate how many records we would sell at each show and only make that set amount. If they sold out that night then that would be it, that was the only time and place you could get that 7-inch with that cover.

BS So every record became a limited edition?

BR Right. Once we left a particular city, all the leftover covers form that city were destroyed. If you had that record you would always remember where you got it from.

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My role was always a bit more than just graphic design or art direction. [...] Because the band is a two-piece, having a third person involved is really beneficial.

BS And coming out of this tour the band released the Eraser 7-inch?

BR Right, it was on this album where the writing from the hotel wall appeared on the back. Quickly following Eraser we did the Losing Feeling EP. For that cover, we used a Riso which barely fit into my laundry room. We did the entire cover on the bed of the Riso in one night. Conceptually we were exploring the idea of growing up and struggling with how to hold on to, or let go of, past influences. The cover is a literal transition, or melting moment, where you don’t want to forget about the past, but want to continue to move forward. The record as well came with a limited-edition zine further exploring that concept.

BS At this point in your collaboration, how do you feel you were integrated into the band’s creative process?

BR My role was always a bit more than just graphic design or art direction. With Nouns, for example, the record was almost done but there was no title. Coming up with that was a group effort. Because the band is a two-piece, having a third person involved is really beneficial. Any issues could be settled with a quick vote.

BS After Losing Feeling came Everything InBetween, the first full-length since Nouns.

Did you approach this record any differently than past projects?

BR There was a lot of pressure with Everything In Between following the Nouns Grammy nomination for CD packaging. As a result, we decided to do the opposite, put most of the focus on the vinyl. We turned the record sleeve into a zine where we really explored the theme of “in-between moments.” We had been thinking about how most memories are made up of beginnings or endings, but rarely anything else. Both the music and the design tried to really highlight these often forgotten experiences.

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BS Despite Everything In Between feeling like a larger label release, you are still working within a particular DIY aesthetic (the simplicity of materials on the cover, the making of a zine, etc.). Is this lo-fi approach a sort of self-imposed constraint?

BR No, I think it’s more the product of immediacy that was such a big part of our backgrounds. That aesthetic is very much a part of their ethos: the way they think about and write music could definitely be called lo-fi. So to gloss it over or to give it some sort of elevated status never really made sense from a design perspective. I think the materials and the objects definitely became more elevated as time went on, but from a surface level it was definitely meant to feel low-tech.

BS I loved that zine. I bought the record without owning a record player just so I could own a copy.

BR Thanks! Yeah, it was a sort of extended tracklist exploring the idea of in-between moments—in this case in between the start and end of the record. The photos in the zine represented moments during the process of making the record. Looking at it or talking about it now might feel a bit abstract but, for us, the whole thing felt very clear at the time.

BS And there are definite graphic ways that the idea is played out. For example, the letter spacing which plays up the “in between” of the characters.

BR Right, that’s where the concept becomes a bit more concrete. And it’s funny, the Glitter EP had a similar design move with the large spacing in between characters. On that the cover, we actually put 3 “Ts” in the title so it spaced out evenly.

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BS That same year you worked on the Artist Music Journals with No Age, where you actually wrote songs and played with the band.

BR Yeah. Actually, come to think of it, Artist Music Journals came out before Everything In Between. If you look at the type on the inside of the Artist Music Journals and then at the type of Everything In Between you can see how they influenced each other. Like you said, though, this is the first time that I collaborated with No Age on the music side of things in addition to doing all of the visuals. In the past, the band is always entering my world when collaborating and working on the design. So this was a really nice chance for a role reversal where I was entering the recording studio to create. The process lasted about two days and we stayed in their studio just making tracks. I was playing everything from bass to synths to percussion. It sounds a little bit like No Age, but then again, not really.

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BS Afterward, the band participated in another side project, which was Collage Culture—a book you did with Aaron Rose and Mandy Kahn.

BR Right, so Collage Culture started off as a book, and eventually, I thought it would be great to have a soundtrack to a book. Dean and Randy read Collage Culture and got an understanding of what it was about, and then we talked about ideas for the soundtrack. The album works where the left channel is people reading the book and the right channel is the music. So if you put the record on you can pan and hear either version or you can hear this sort of audio collage by playing both channels at once.

BS It’s great that as collaborators you are both willing to explore these side projects or odd scenarios and see how they play out. For example, doing a joint lecture at Cal Arts…

BR Right, that talk was meant to be on the 30th anniversary of when Black Flag played at Cal Arts, on the same exact date in the same exact room. We didn’t get the same date, but we did get the same year. I talked about my design work and they talked about their process in the studio. The lecture ended with the band playing three or four songs in the same room that Black Flag played in.

BS The next release was An Object, which revolved around the band producing every aspect of the release themselves—from the music to the printing to the assembling.

BR An Object was this idea where we wanted to take over the entire process of making an album. We were sick of the idea of making a record and then just sending it off to a label for it be finished. Our idea was to take over the entire production from printing to die-cutting, assembling to making custom boxes. We really created this sort of brand for the album.

BS What made you want to rethink the standard music release process?

BR I think it came out of wanting to know how things were made and wanting to know the cost of producing everything ourselves.

We asked the label for the entirety of the budget and promised them a final delivered album.

Initially they were reluctant, but they were up for trying it. And we did it; we took care of everything and delivered the album.

BS I also see the project as a means of investigating or questioning the “object-ness” of music in today’s stream-based culture.

BR Yeah, absolutely. It was a complete embrace of the physical. The cover treatment with multiple punctuations asks that question, “How do you define an object?” It is open-ended, and you can define the title how you want.

BS And then you did a part B with The Thing Quarterly as a cassette?

BR Right, the band played the songs live, changed them up a bit, and it was recorded live to cassette. If you were in the audience you got the finished project immediately after the performance.

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We were sick of the idea of making a record and then just sending it off to a label for it be finished. Our idea was to take over the entire production from printing to die-cutting, assembling to making custom boxes.

We really created this sort of brand for the album.

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BS And that takes us to today, to the most recent release, Snares Like A Haircut. For a band that was pretty prolific through most of their career, four years seems like quite a long time between releases.

BR It was definitely the biggest gap between projects. Some of it had to do with the band growing up, having kids, and getting married.

They were rethinking what it means to actually be in a band. A lot changed for what it means to make the type of music they are interested in. It’s not that people didn’t care anymore, but things were definitely different. Even elements of the design had changed. It was the first time, for example, that a cover featured someone else’s artwork. The idea was to try and make something anonymous and mysterious—something along the lines of Joseph Beuys’s readymade sculptures.

BS

Whose work is on the cover?

BR The photo on the cover is an installation view of a work by Daphne Fitzpatrick. On the back are two images that are posters that she made, but I placed them at the size of thumbnails. Also on the front of the record is the price of the album in each region it is available, and on the back is the phone number of the record label.

BS

The real phone number?

BR Hah, yes. You can actually call the label if you want.

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BS I also love how the CD has no backing card.

BR There is no tray card. The CD is put into the package upside down and it just becomes the back cover. So it’s really just limiting the number of things that need to get printed.

BS It’s really nice to sit down and look at all of this at once and really see how the two practices have developed hand in hand.

BR Yeah, it’s been really nice to have this strong collaboration that has unfolded over a period of time—about a decade. Especially a band with two members. I think it speaks to that classic notion of the power trio in rock music, but in this case the third member isn’t really a member. I love looking at the relationship and seeing how, while each project is unique, there is a shared sensibility that permeates the work. It would have been easy to sort of “brand” the band and make it look the same across the board, but it just wouldn’t have been interesting. They are constantly exploring— new sounds, new ways of writing, new ways of recording. And with each record, we had to sort of redefine who we were without forgetting what we had done.

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Five Questions For No Age BS Could you talk about the process of working with Brian? At what point do you begin to engage with the visual side of an album, and what are some of those early conversations like?

NA I really don’t have an idea visually what the album is going to look like until we sit with Brian. Those are two different creative minds for me, writing music and designing.

With the exception of An Object, which I was thinking about the packaging and music together, but the image never really gets there until we all sit around and start talking. I will usually send in my lyrics to Brian shortly after the first time we all meet up, which is the first time I have typed them and the first time Randy has read them as well. Then we start riffing, like an extension of the writing of the album, throwing ideas and words around until we all get excited. Usually we get a good laugh out of it.

BS One typically thinks of album art as a byproduct of the music (and not the other way around). However, because of your strong creative relationship with Brian, do you feel that the visuals have had any influence on the writing and recording?

NA Not usually. We have always had the entire album finished by the time we meet with Brian. But it is amazing how after we get the design done, the albums color stays with these songs. I think of that salmon color every time we play songs off Nouns, or green and orange when we play An Object songs. And again speaking of An Object, we had met up and talked about manufacturing the record ourselves before we started really writing for it, so that is probably the best case of the design and packaging influencing the music. Also the Eraser and Teen Creeps 7-inches we were coming up with the design at the same time we were recording the B-sides, so I think the design and the feel of the songs go together.

BS As you continue to work with Brian, how has his role evolved in your creative process?

NA I think we continue to treat Brian as a member of the group in the sense that we have equal say in the design in that way. It is less like we hire Brian to design our album.

We would never do that. It’s a place to get creative and have someone who has an extremely crafted practice engage with the silly ideas we have. And hopefully for Brian it’s a chance to collaborate in a way he doesn’t normally do. We are sitting together and working on it together, trying to push each other. At this point it’s just what we do: meet up and make something that feels special and twisted that holds our music.

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BS Looking back, do you have a particular project that the three of you have worked on that you feel most proud of?

NA Nouns was particularly special looking back. We had no idea people would be into what we were making. The label was hesitant to spend the money on the CD book art; we were designing it on the road, and it was ambitious and hilarious. Also meeting up every night after the show and adding more text or images and ideas to the package was a really nice way to capture the vibe we were going for.

BS One last thing: so many people, when I mention No Age, bring up the shirt with the band name and rainbow gradient. What’s the story behind it?

NA The shirt was made at my mother’s silk screen shop. She started a shop with her sister when I was just finishing elementary school so I was always around silk screening and worked at the shop when I was younger. I remember vividly all the color blends she would do for local businesses in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was a very hip thing to do back then. So when it came time to make a shirt, it was really simple to think what the design should be.

Big type says, “Yes, I am buying a shirt because I want people to know I like and support this band.” I’m really glad the shirt made it onto the cover of the Get Hurt EP. The image was from a friend of ours who took some photos of his niece wearing it. I think the graphic eventually did get bigger than the band. People loved it and had no idea who we were.

I think we continue to treat Brian as a member of the group in the sense that we have equal say in the design in that way.

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Everything In Between CD booklet, 2010

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↓ IN-HOUSE STUDIO'S PROJECTS ↓

Snapshots

The Walker embodies progressive design through its Design Department. This in-house staff of editors and designers originates not only designrelated exhibitions and lectures, but also produces the institution's graphic identity and publications program. Take a look at some of our recent works!

Editorial graphics and illustrations created to promote articles published on walkerart.org

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Snapshot

Flyer for the Walker Cinema’s lineup (cover and spread)

Panel flyer for Cinema Revolution / Cine de la Revolution showcasing groundbreaking Cuban films from the 1960s (front, back and inside covers)

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Detail of "32" graphic element from the poster, in reference to the 32nd year of Insights

Poster for 2018 Insights Design Lecture Series (front and back side)

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Music plays a in my daily lif as a source of Whatever job working, mus complement i — Michael Cina [→xx]

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a huge role fe. I use it f inspiration.

I am sic will it.

E.T. Carlson

↓ OUTSIDE WALKER ↓

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Herman Kolgen An interview by Estela Oliva

A renowned

Iglooghost, ŠTim Swiss

multifaceted A true audiocinetic sculptor, he draws his primary material from the intimate relationship between sound and image.

Kolgen works to create objects that assume the form of installations, video and film works, performances and sound sculptures.

artist.

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E.T. Carlson

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Internationally renowned, multifaceted artist, Herman Kolgen, has been creating emotionally intense multimedia performances for over twenty years.

Constantly exploring, the MontrÊal-based artist works at the junctures of different media, as well as elaborating a new technical language and distinctive aesthetic. He has performed at prestigious international events such as Berlin’s Transmediale, the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica and Elektra and Mutek festivals in Montreal. We caught up with him to talk about his creative process, current projects and other interesting things.

EO Hi Herman, how is everything with you?

HK I am very well, thanks. Still getting used to this time zone, as I have been travelling a lot for the past two months.

EO You must be really busy working on Eotone, your kinetic sound and generative urban installation. Can you tell us more about it and your experience working with artist David Letelier?

HK David Letelier and I have collaborated for the past two years on Eotone. I feel particularly attached to this project because it picks up on several aspects of our creations and interests. The world of architecture has never stopped inspiring our career paths and projects. Our relationship with space is particularly important.

In my case, I have spent the last 20-years in the middle of the dynamic tension between image and sound, and I have concentrated the past 5-years in the notion of territory. In particular, on the impact that natural forces can have on us.

Dust explores a microscopic and energetic relationship: flesh+ wood + metal, the urban topology. Eotone in the same line as my other project Urban wind, explores wind as a raw material. We customised a wind data caption system where multiple wind sensors were installed in different cities around the world, allowing us to analyse the wind flow. The data was then transmitted real time to immense rotating diffusers especially made for the public space. Each diffuser device was assigned to a specific city or place. The overall system rotates depending on the wind direction, discharging at the same time frequencies and harmonies specific to the city pulse.The idea is to create and hear a dynamic dialogue between cities.

One can then easily imagine Tokyo harmonising with Paris or London by simply combining their breaths.

Working with D. Letelier is interesting in many ways. Our creative dynamic plays both spontaneous exchanges and awakens brainstorms, all serving the

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The world of architecture has never stopped inspiring our career paths and projects. Our relationship with space is particularly important. In my case, I have spent the last 20-years in the middle of the dynamic tension between image and sound, and I have concentrated the past 5-years in the notion of territory concept and the project to be realised. We are happy to see that our egos take a second place in this approach. In fact, beyond our joint forces (specifically techniques) we have made use of our differences in order to enrich the project.

EO We've realy appreciated Inject and Dust. What is the creative process behind these performances and where did you get the ideas and inspiration from?

HK The two projects are very different. The creation of Inject came alongside the end of the Skotlz _Kolgen partnership and also my mother’s death. Inject in a way, represents the intensity of this period. During that time, everything started with an image, a single image in my head: a naked body infected inside a water tank with formalin. The next steps - and the ending - were articulated around an immense water tank where I submerged Yso, a Cambodian from Montreal. During the course of 6-days, underwater cameras tracked the different physical and physiological reactions that gradually evolved from a meditative stage to extreme anxiety. In the case of Dust, my purpose was to apply different fields of microscopic material both real and virtual. The approach is different to Inject but it is also related, since Yso’s body is considered as a malleable material, surrendered to the invisible forces of water, isolation, ethereality and silence.

Dust is based on a 4 to 5 year personal photographic project during which I envisaged pictures of floors and dusty surfaces. The point of view, the frame and the graphic composition of the subject in close-up, and out of context reveal a beauty rarely attributed to this type of material that our aseptic and allergic society completely eliminates. During all that time, I accumulated over 4000 images without knowing that they were going to feed Dust. Sometime later, by chance I came across the famous photography “Dust Breeding” by Man Ray. This captivating image was a turning point during my adolescence. With this reference I started the project and the study of dust on all its states and all its forms.

The work was developed in 2 stages. First, through the development of a vast area of dust moved by fans and hydraulic pistons. The system is controlled simultaneously digitally and by sound frequencies. Second, the digital analysis of the camera movements to which I superimpose a layer of virtual dust. Just like in the real world, this method allows more control over every microelement by using a 3D space, where fields of forces act over the virtual particles. This combinatorial and symbiotic recipe gave birth to a single image in which the real and the virtual homonym are inseparable.

EO Your work takes the form of installations, video, live performance and sound sculptures. What’s your background and how did you come about bringing together different disciplines and tools to create your work?

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HK When I was a child, I was constantly drawing and playing drums on my Mum's pots and pans. My dream was to become a musician, a percussionist. During the seventies, I integrated a synthesiser to my drum kit, and then an oscillator or a vibraphone. All of these have marked my style.

Born to a family of four children, I enjoyed a great freedom at the time. The home became my experimental territory and my imaginary laboratory that hosted the small chemist, the electrician and the secret agent I became to my friends.

I am primarily an autodidact who also holds a degree in architecture. At the heart of my learning, I realised pretty quickly that the practice of this profession wouldn’t meet my expectations or my need for freedom. My life is dictated by my interests and creative passions. Around the age of 18, in parallel to my training as an architect and percussionist, I produced many paintings, abused the trendy air brush, exhibited in galleries and seeked above all my style. My career continued between music, percussion, synthesisers and visual arts for many years.

Later on, when digital arrived, it dramatically changed my life and way of thinking.

I merged my two favorite mediums in one: audio and video. All that without putting aside my penchant of tactile percussionist and crafty architect for the hand-made and physical approach.

I have many interests from the pictorial field to architecture, from music to chemistry, and from biology to physics. They nourish by extension my creation as my artistic projects explore both the strengths and tensions that surround us. And these at different scales: microscopic, human, territorial or even...endless.

EO What does your artist work day look like?

HK When I am at my studio in Montreal, most of my day is devoted to research and projects. I alternate development and creation phases with international tours. With my schedule, I often have to work overtime with up to 15 or 20 hours of non-stop work. This is a good way to maximise my time during the never ending winter in Quebec and hibernate in my own creations. And upon the return of the summer, my programme alleviates and my routine goes back to normal.

My home is also a world of its own. 7-years ago, I bought an old warehouse in Montreal that I have totally rethought from an architectural perspective. The space allowed me to create different areas for life and work that today are dedicated to

Later on, when digital arrived, it dramatically changed my life and way of thinking. I merged my two favorite mediums in one: audio and video. All that without putting aside my penchant of tactile percussionist and crafty architect for the hand-made and physical approach. different mediums. We have wood and metal workshops, a small shooting studio, a picture studio, a studio dedicated to digital imaging and sound, and not to mention my little electronic lab‌ like a little boy! At the heart of my long days of work, I often pass from one pole to the other and as a result I get re-energised. I also find many creative answers through the dialogue of the different mediums.In addition, my days are not just filled with work but also with breaks and time for meals. I love to cook and I pay attention to my diet, so I prepare myself good healthy dinners. And there I find the finest fuel and the best reward!

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Inject, Tokyo, 2016

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Inject, Tokyo, 2016

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Michael Cina

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Michael Cina is a world-renowned, award-winning art director, typographer, and visual artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the founder of his design agency, Cina Associates and also an accomplished abstract painter whose work has been exhibited worldwide and can be seen on numerous album covers for various labels, most notably, Ghostly International.

Michael Cina is an artist working in the fields of graphic design and painting.

Having tried his hand at most every medium in his near 20-year career, Cina has resurfaced as a major force at the height of his creative powers.

Educated close to Dallas, Texas, Cina spent countless nights playing records in its reemerging dance music scene. The unorthodox approach to music publications and packaging that flourished in this period would prove to have a lasting influence on his work in design.

Cina began his design career in 1996, leaving college in pursuit of an advertising job in Minneapolis. At the time, he was one of a handful of designers who had begun posting new work and typefaces on the web. Within a couple of years, he had garnered the attention of numerous publications eager to feature his "personal" design work, a relatively new concept in the world of graphic design.

He later expanded this personal vision to trueistrue.com, where the notion of art and design blurred into a virtual gallery of ideas.

As co-founder of the award-winning design studio, WeWorkForThem (established in the early 2000s), Cina was propelled to the forefront of America's design scene. While other design firms were closing their doors, his company flourished. YouWorkForThem followed shortly thereafter, becoming the preeminent design shop for typefaces and art/design books. Importing the world's best art and design books, Cina sought to further the field of graphic design, educating and inspiring countless professionals and enthusiasts.

Joining Ghostly International in late 2007, Cina fused his love of design, painting, and photography into an aesthetic whole, bringing a radical new visual perspective to the company. In 2010 Cina left YWFT to return to the world of commercial design, founding his own studio, Cina Associates. That same year, he entered a prolific period of artistic experimentation in painting and new creative processes that continues to this day.

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It was simply the act of getting back into art again. At first it was awkward and foreign. [...]

It was great because I had no direction, no goals, no pressure... just doing new work.

It felt so good.

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I feel that artists should have no boundaries when it comes to medium. [...] I think when you work like that, each medium you explore influences the other. It is an artist’s role to use everything at his disposal to push thought and limits.

SM Something you said that has stuck with me was: “The future of art is artists.” How has the role of the artist changed?

MC I feel that artists should have no boundaries when it comes to medium. If you look at the crew from the Bauhaus, they were working in every arts profession and excelling in them all. I think when you work like that, each medium you explore influences the other. It is an artist’s role to use everything at his disposal to push thought and limits. I feel capitalism has changed that aspect of art. If you look at the difference between artists today and artists 70 years ago, you will see stark differences in their body of work. Artists used to be so robust in their interests and exploration, and that is what excites and inspires me. We are in an extremely pivotal time where the public is taking back art. This will be a huge shift for every aspect of “art.”

SM We’ve entered an era where art is often disembodied from its maker.

A result of Google Image Search and re-blogging becoming a craft in itself.

Does the web signal the death of authorship?

MC I have a lot of thoughts on this. The Internet has created a level platform for people to share, and recent technology has made it more open than ever. Your voice is equal to anyone else’s now and the rules for art and its boundaries are being completely rewritten.

Four months ago one of my images was featured on a multitude of blogs, but it was never credited and I never saw any traffic from it. Recently one of my paintings Burning City was featured on the art blog Mecene and it went viral– about 25,000 people “liked” and reblogged it from the tumblr platform alone, not to mention the other art and fashion blogs that picked it up. This was all done without a gallery’s assistance or representation. Is this the death of authorship or is it reformation? All of this is so fascinating to me on so many levels. I think it is a new form of authorship that somewhat ties to how our society is starting to value information.

SM Describe your early days in graphic design, as an occupation. Did it feel like business or a new kind of art?

MC When I got into graphic design, the baton was being ripped out of the past generation’s hand. It was a silent takeover that went under the radar. A lot of people did not perceive the undercurrents of design in the late 90s on the web and unfortunately it was never documented. The Internet provided a free publishing platform to use however one wished. Previously the only format for design was print which cost thousands of dollars.

The Internet gave designers the freedom to make whatever they wanted, unconstrained by a client. So yes, it was a new art and we see the evolution of it

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SM What was the fundamental shift that moved you into painting?

MC It was simply the act of getting back into art again. At first it was awkward and foreign. When I began, I would stay up after my family went to sleep and just draw. It was great because I had no direction, no goals, no pressure... just doing new work. It felt so good. Eventually fine art began calling me more and more and I would spend more time working on a piece. I was experimenting with different materials and the work was slowly coming together. I started painting again right at that point and it just clicked. It was at a really challenging point in my career, so that helped fuel the fire. I was in the process of starting my new studio, and more importantly, we were expecting a new child, along with a long list of other things.

A lot of change was happening at that time.

I enjoy music that embodies the creative struggle.

You can’t listen to someone like John Coltrane and not hear it. He was looking beyond the mundane; he was exploring. My work comes from that same struggle.

SM How does your new work relate to music (your passion for music)?

MC Every interest that you have manifests itself in different aspects of your life.

Music plays a huge role in my daily life. I use it as a source of inspiration. Whatever job I am working on, I will find music that will complement it.

I enjoy music that embodies the creative struggle. You can’t listen to someone like John Coltrane and not hear it. He was looking beyond the mundane; he was exploring. My work comes from that same struggle. I push myself harder than anyone could ever push me. I create more work than I could ever show on my own.

SM Is there any music that you’re enjoying right now?

MC I’ve been listening to a lot of Bohren & der Club of Gore. It’s really dark, moody jazz, and I really like their newest album, Piano Nights. I love Lone, too: that’s a staple. Recently, I’ve really been enjoying Hiatus Kaiyote’s Tawk Tomahawk record, but I listen to pretty much everything. I like drone music, jazz, soul, ambient, hip-hop, and electronic.

I have a really crazy record collection, and I’ve been going through my soul section to find records I can sell or get rid of. I pulled out about 700 records, but that’s less than half of what I have in my soul section alone. My jazz collection consists of two five-by-five Ikea shelves—in total, I have about 15,000 records. I’ve been trying to reduce my collections and live simply, but I’m addicted to buying books and records. It’s not something I am proud of anymore.

SM How did your work with Ghostly International (American independent record label) begin? It was a very long engagement. You spoke a good deal and when you finally connected, both your work and their desire for bold new styles were coalescing.

MC It is hard to really pinpoint how it all began, it was really organic. I remember talking with SV shortly after Ghostly began. A couple of years passed and he was stranded in Minneapolis, so I took him out to eat. Then, out of the blue, he contacted me because Ghostly needed some help on the Dabrye single for Get Dirty.

Looking back, the timing couldn’t have been better. Ghostly was becoming a force

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Thoughtful art is not easy to do. To me, I analyze the big picture. Is the form solid? Does it have a refined maturity? Is there thought involved? What does the artist’s full body of work look like? What is his background and what is he trying to communicate?

And so on.

to be reckoned with and I was starting in a new direction. We now feed off of each other and it’s about as good of a working relationship as one could ever hope for.

SM As a team, you’ve tried to think about music and art working in unison, not one serving the other. Art is art, so to speak (Will Calcutt/Boym Partner’s Totem for Matthew Dear, for example), so how does one work in a conceptual realm without losing sight of pure feeling?

MC Thoughtful art is not easy to do. To me, I analyze the big picture. Is the form solid? Does it have a refined maturity? Is there thought involved? What does the artist’s full body of work look like? What is his background and what is he trying to communicate? And so on.

In the end, work either communicates something to the viewer or not.

That is the long and the short of it. Great work can do something without saying anything. It touches the heart and soul. You can look at an excellent Rothko in a book and dismiss it, but when you see one in person, and it doesn’t touch you, you are dead.

SM How can we imagine the forward movement of art within the context of a commercialized culture?

MC If someone needs to make a living solely from art, they make decisions based on that tension and will usually gravitate toward a commercial outlet. Art can be a way for people to sincerely interpret the world around them and and how they interact with that world. I am able to do client work to support my explorations in the fine arts but a lot of people don’t have that luxury. We are starting to see a tidal change where artists are moving beyond the traditional structure of the gallery.

Artists are taking more risks and making things up out of lack of opportunities to communicate their ideas. There are a lot more questions than answers at this stage. It has been an extremely exciting time to be an artist and a designer.

A big change is germinating. There is a substantial shift in ideas and technology transpiring right now and it’s great to be in the middle of it all.

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Michael Cina E.T. Carlson

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E.T. Carlson Michael Cina

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Michael Cina

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Michael Cina

Iglooghost, ŠTim Swiss

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You will never An interview by Madeleine Morley

what an

guess

Described by Pitchfork as “an agent of chaos… thriving in mayhem,” 19-year-old Irish producer Iglooghost a.k.a. Seamus Malliagh) blends juke, two-step, IDM, and bass music to create a sound that seems to spiral with motion.

iglooghost is.

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We think his music calls to mind the noise of gelatinous worms flying through pastel-colored portals,one look at his album art we think you’ll see what we mean.

One reason the fever-dreamy visuals are so in tune with his music is because the young Iglooghost doesn’t simply produce his music, he designs and creates its accompanying characters, too.

MM Shading isolated shapes to form 3D geometric creatures and landscapes, the world Iglooghost inhabits seems located somewhere between Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, the puzzle game Monument Valley, and an image by illustrator Jack Sachs. Iglooghost is following in a long line of musicians who cre- ate their own artwork, such as Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, or Joni Mitchell, but what sets him apart is the very interconnected role that the process of graphic design plays when it comes to music production. The two seam- lessly rely on and inform one another.

IG I’ve always drawn pictures, so combining the two just felt so obvious. I’ve always been intere- sted in the way you can look at different images while listening to music and kinda change how you perceive the sound—so I’m always trying to accentuate qualities of the music with the imagery.

MM After getting signed to Flying Lotus’ prestigious independent electronic music label Brainfeeder, this year has been an whirlwind for Iglooghost. He’s just released his latest al- bum, so he’s touring and promoting, and next week he’ll be starting his first year at university in Bristol, UK, to study graphic design.

IG I’m kinda excited but kinda scared that it’s about to kill my music productivity. I’m probably just gonna have to sacrifice downing kegs and be a hermit in my room and making stupid music all night. I hope it's not gonna happenging, I'll still continue doing my stuff.

MM Aside from the music itself, we wanted to know what else informs his graphic work. We should have been prepared for the answer.

IG Neô Wax Bloom was inspired by meeting the- se little beings who started talking to me through this portal in my garden. I reproduced this tale in the album’s accompanying large format, 12-page Risoprinted comic booklet and character sticker sheet. They told me about a foggy world made of chalk called Mamu, and how a pair of giant eye- balls fell from the sky and sent their world’s natu- re into chaos.

I thought it was all pretty cool so I made an album about the things they told me.

MM This vision, hoax, fantasy, or possible truth is inevitably whipped together in a mind raised on cartoons.

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designs from 2000-2003 had this really simplified, kitschy aesthetic that I fell in love with as a kid. I was too young for the first load of Pokémon, so I was raised by the second ge- neration—all the weird looking guys like Aipom, Sudowoodo, Wooper, etc. Silly ass designs with big googly eyes and cheeky smiles.

MM Asked whether he’d ever let another designer touch one of his covers in the future, Igloo- ghost digs his heels in.

IG I’m a total control freak when it comes to the Igloo stuff. If something doesn’t go exactly how I intended it to go in my head, I feel like the wor- ld’s ending.

Even if my favorite artist in the world had to do the artwork, I’d probably have a heart attack and die. This shit is so important to me.

Iglooghost

Iglooghost, ŠTim Swiss

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Iglooghost’s method is one of madness and chaos.

Someway—perhaps credit is now due to the garden portal and the characters it holds—Malliagh concocts his million-ideas-a-minute philosophy into a coherent, fascinating, exhilarating listen.

Bristol, England can look pretty ugly. That's the first thing Seamus Malliagh, best known to the world as the producer and artist Iglooghost, has realized in the time since he moved there. Parts are loud, the streets are grey, there's graffiti everywhere, it can sorta smell bad in the way that all big cities do. Over a Skype call on his first day of school studying graphic design in the city, Malliagh explains that he's suffering a bit of culture shock after living in smaller towns for the first 19 years of his life. "I've always wanted to live in a city," He says, hesitantly. "But when I look at it really hard, it's like... 'This is fucking gross.'"

Based on the music that the Malliagh has made over the last few years, he doesn't neces- sarily mean that as an insult. His version of dance music is one that's not based only on pleasure, but mutation. There's dancefloor abandon contained somewhere deep in tracks like Peach Rift, but his memories of happy hardcore and juke are melty and surreal, their colors vibrant and garish, like a Geocities-era.gif slivered by years of end-u- ser artefaction.

Point is it's both bright, ecstatic, and kin- da malformed, which is likely what's drawn him fans from all corners of the electronic music wor- ld—from the hi-gloss beatmakers like Slugabed (and his label Activia Benz, which once released an Iglooghost EP as a helium balloon) to Mallia- gh's childhood hero Flying Lotus, who released some gross-out fare of his own earlier this year and whose Brainfeeder imprint will release Igloo- ghost's debut LP Neô Wax Bloom on September 2017. Over the years, he's expressed some disbe- lief at the turns that have gotten him to this point, at least in part because he didn't grow up in a city like Bristol, he grew up bored.

In the years before Malliagh started making music as Iglooghost, he lived in a small town in the South of England called Shaftesbury, which he's never had all that much nice to say about. In the past he's said diplomatically that it's "not that good," but over the phone from his new house in Bristol, he expands a bit."I grew up in the sticks, in a town on a hill in the middle of nowhere," he says with the relieved laugh of someone who's gotten away. "There'll be people from nearby towns who haven't heard of it. It's kind of a shitty place to grow up in that there's not much to do—it's a place where old people go to die."

He had friends growing up ("I wasn't a hermit boy," the 20-year-old assures me), but mostly the- re wasn't all that much to do. He says his parents sort of let him loose on their home computer; he was free from the beginning to explore even his strangest impulses. "I say I grew up in this town but I was raised on the inter-

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net," he explains. "That's where I hung out from when I was nine years old."

He took shelter in Pokémon forums first, ma- king pixel art of characters both real and imagi- ned, and hand-drawing his own trading cards for beasts more absurd than the original games and animé—some of which he says still lives on the internet if you know where to look. Eventually through those forums, he ended up on the early music social media site Last.FM, which introdu- ced him to all sorts of strange electronic music and inspired him to start making his first pro- ductions when he was a tween, unfurling twisted renditions of breakcore and speedcore that he describes now simply as "not music."

From there, inspired by the stylish teens in Odd Future, he started making rap beats, then developed more outré interests when he came upon FlyLo and the rest of Los Angeles' blunted beats scene.

He started using the production software Reason and picked up on everything fast. By the time he turned 17, blogs were starting to post his first warped Iglooghost compositions. He mentions, endearingly, in one interview from that era that he still had to rely on "weird 20 year olds" to buy him drinks. In another, he said that he used to "lob cassettes" of his music at Flying Lotus whenever he would tour to cities nearby.

Soon enough, the Brainfeeder boss would catch on of his own accord and offer, via Twitter DM, to release some of Malliagh's music. That re- sulted in an EP called Chinese Nü Yr in 2015 which formed the basis of the current iteration of Igloo- ghost. Malliagh envisioned a pantheon of pastel gods that make up of Iglooghost's mythology. "Xiangjiao" introduces a gelatinous worm in a witch's hat whose sad, surreal existence is built upon being shot through worlds of made up offruit and pink mist, which if nothing else is a po- tent metaphor for the colorful and malleable music that made up the EP. Neô Wax Bloom is a continuation of that worm's story, along with a cast of other players—a bug thief, a witch leading a band

You'll never guess what an Iglooghost is.

"An Iglooghost is a being that exists for a few seconds, creates a levitating object like a fruit or something, then disappears." of anthropomorphized melons, and a multicolo- red monk—who are represented

by Malliagh's warped design work in the album's artwork.

The record relates the events an ecological disaster in a land called Mamu that somehow involves the crash-landing of a pair of giant eyeballs. It's wild stuff, and Malliagh responds opaquely when I ask him about it. "It's weird that a lot of journalists are saying that this is a concept album because all this stuff actually happened," he says. "I was literally in my garden and there was this portal, and these little creatures, and I started learning about that this weird world called Mamu."

I ask him if he feels his reeling recordings and vivid artwork these creatures accurately and he offers a smirk: "They doesn't translate into what we see, as humans, but it's sort of an approxima- tion I suppose."

It's the sort of imagination that can only come from life in a small town escaping on the inter- net—the interminable boredom and colorful re- treats into worlds of your own making. "It all kind of stems from the fact that real life is boring as shit," he says. "Everyone's all just walking around trying to fuck each other, escapism is pretty ap- pealing."

But there's more to escape from than just ru- ral boredom or the oppressi-

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veness of modern cityscapes. Malliagh has said that this record is meant to deal with some sort of "primal religious themes." It's a way for him to grapple with the "fucking millennial nihilist thing" that's stopped him from developing his own spiritual beliefs. Iglooghost has become a way of channeling tho- se feelings.

"It feels like there's something missing from my brain," he says. "That's probably the driving force behind why I'm doing this. Which is fine, it's productive. I could be downing loads of tequila or driving 100 fucking miles per hour on the freeway. There are worse ways of having an existen- tial crisis."

So he built a better world. The central narrati- ve of the record—real or imagined—isn't exactly legible on it's mostly wordless compositions, but tracks like Sôlar Blade (premiering up above) are still suggestive of whole biomes in themselves.

Chirping synths, sprightly woodwinds, and jit- tery juke percussion wow and flutter with all the life and biodiversity of a rainforest floor, baking in the summer heat. By the end of Göd Grid, an eight-minute track that blazes by at an unfatho- mable 220 bpm by Malliagh's count, you'll start to feel like you've been sucked away from your mundane city streets and piles of municipal trash to his world of candy fog, misty monks, and jellied snake people. It's gross too, obviously, but at le- ast it's somewhere new.

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Tónandi

Words by Marc Hogan

Is Secretive Virtual Reality Startup Magic Leap Dreaming Up the Future of Music?

A first look at the billion-dollar company’s potentially game-changing collaboration with Sigur Rós.

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Our tech overlords have come to a realization: the internet is as ambient as the air we breathe.

Confined first to computer screens, then phones, tablets, and watches, online information may soon be seamlessly embedded into our lives like never before. Silicon Valley’s big players are currently betting heavily on glasses that could replace Siri or Alexa with a digital assistant that looks and sounds as present as another person in the room. Turbo -boosted by machine learning, and with their power of illusion limited only by the human imagination, these new devices could herald a major cultural and economic shift.

All of which sounds kind of goofy, especially to anyone who remembers the epic flop known as Google

Glass. But it’s the next step in technology companies’ expensive pursuit of virtual reality. Classic VR brings into being the sci-fi dreams of an entirely computergenerated world. But now there’s also “augmented reality,” familiar from 2016’s Pokémon Go craze, where digital information is layered over a person’s physical surroundings.

Most transformative of all could be “mixed reality,” which allows virtual objects to interact with a person’s natural environment: The Matrix, but set in your living room.

One of the most closely watched practitioners of mixed reality is a secretive startup called Magic Leap. The company has raised almost

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$2 billion in funding from Valley heavyweights, including Google.

A Wired cover story from last year marveled at the company’s “magical goggles,” which can project virtual objects that are indistinguishable from the real-life scenes around them. Despite all the attention, Magic Leap has yet to publicly demo a prototype, let alone release a product, and serious questions remain about whether its extravagant virtual reality promises will ever near actual reality. So when the company recently invited me to travel down to their South Florida headquarters to test some new, never-before-seen wares, I started packing my bags. Why? Because, Magic Leap also has its sights set on music.

For a little more than four years, the unearthly Iceland art-rock band Sigur Rós have been working with Magic Leap on a new audiovisual

project that tests the limits of mixed reality and offers a tantalizing glimpse of how we may soon interact with music as a medium. The result is Tónandi, an app that someday may be available for download on Magic Leap’s mysterious device, which still has no official release date. The app aims to complement the band’s dreamy aesthetic: its name is a made-up Icelandic portmanteau that literally means “sound spirit,” which is represented in the VR environment as a multitude of lifelike organisms. The demo I try out at their sprawling facility lasts about eight to 10 minutes and incorporates new music the band recorded especially for the app. The ambition is to conjure up an entire ecosystem out of sound.Fantastical as it may seem, the demo pulls this off beautifully.

Upon my arrival at Magic Leap, I’m quickly fitted with the current incarnation of their device (the

I can influence the sounds with my hands, but it’s neither a musical instrument, requiring skill, nor a toy, effortlessly spouting out unmusical noise.

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company has strict agreements prohibiting visitors from discussing its hardware; following the publication of this article. Magic Leap revealed the look of their headset, which will begin shipping next month). And then it begins: There’s a nervous hum, and then I see a group of little sprites floating around in front of me.

The jellyfish-like creatures seem to match the waveform of the music I’m hearing through headphones.

Encouraged to explore with my hands, I reach out, causing the waveforms to alter shape—both visually and in the audio playback, like a SoundCloud embed that’s somehow alive, three-dimensional, and responding to my movements. After initial sheepishness, I chase these non-existent Tónandi like a clumsily psychotic bear in a very expensive gadget shop.

The real-world demo space I’m in is decorated to resemble a living room, and the Tónandi adjust to account for a table with oversized hardcover book on top of it. At one point, waving my hands near the table allows me to summon up the roar of lead singer Jónsi Birgisson’s signature bowed guitar; in another corner, banging on virtual white puffy wisps releases different tones of what is unmistakably his voice.

Whatever I’m seeing, it isn’t just something pasted over my surroundings, but something that acknowledges those surroundings, and therefore seems more real.

Each user of the app can have a different experience. The three members of Sigur Rós check out this latest iteration of the app the same day I do, and we compare mental notes afterward. When I ask drummerkeyboardist Orri Dýrason about drum sounds I swear I heard in the app, he protests, telling me he didn’t

hear any. But later on, the Magic Leap team confirms to me that there are some drums near the end you just have to find them.

While using the app, I don’t burst into tears. I don’t suffer a psychic breakdown. Still, this is an experience I won’t forget anytime soon. It has a musical arc of its own, but it’s not a “song” in any conventional sense.

I can influence the sounds with my hands, but it’s neither a musical instrument, requiring skill, nor a toy, effortlessly spouting out unmusical noise. I can maneuver through a visual environment looking for computer-generated interactions, but it doesn’t feel like a game.

Obviously, there’s music and video, but this is not a music video either. The Tónandi experience is more like hiking or scuba-diving in your house while also being surrounded by supernatural beings.

It’s appealingly disorienting. By the end, orchestration is sizzling— I can almost feel it—through my fingertips. When it’s over, I ask if I can go again.

Though Tónandi feels like it’s nearly ready for public consumption, it took years to get this far. In October 2013, after playing a show in Miami, members of Sigur Rós visited a garage outside of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where Magic Leap’s founder, Rony Abovitz, invited them to try out his original mixedreality gear. A the time, the setup was reportedly refrigerator-sized and nicknamed “the Beast.” Abovitz and the band ended up talking so late into the night that Jónsi remembers only getting about 30 minutes of sleep before he had to wake up again. “The reason we’re attracted to Rony is because he lives in the future,” Jónsi says of the colorful CEO, who once gave

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Tónandi: its name is a made-up Icelandic portmanteau that literally means “sound spirit”.

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a TED Talk in an astronaut suit.

“It’s so inspirational.” A visionary collaboration was born.

In undertaking something so different from how music is usually presented, the band clearly has wide-ranging objectives with Tónandi. “It might birth something new,” muses Jónsi. “This could maybe replace everything that we know: phones, TVs, computers…” Hólm interjects: “This could be the new way to release an album. Maybe this is the future of that.”

He has a point. If some form of VR truly is what’s next for society, then music may be forced to take part—if only to keep up with movies, videogames, and other media possibilities still to come. In fact, as the Sigur

Rós app illustrates, music may have a virtual leg up over other art forms. Unlike most film and TV, the way music can wash over listeners, envelop them, and generate emotion on a level deeper than language naturally lends itself to the 360-degree perspectives and freeform shapelessness of this emerging format. Tónandi has clear precedents, too, in the wayfaring experiments of Björk’s 2011 “app album” Biophilia and the firstperson dreamscapes of Radiohead’s 2014 app PolyFauna.

But sound recordings are still nowhere near as interactive as online games. Could they be?

Should they be? Magic Leap says it’s still working out the right balance between passive and active

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listening, and the company’s partnership with Sigur Rós also has meaningful implications for listeners who would rather just hear music instead of participating in it.

Tónandi, and the immersive new realms it points toward, run tantalizingly counter to decadeslong trends in music. The space for visual artwork accompanying a collection of songs has shrunk from LPs to CDs to a fingernail-sized graphic squeezed within a streaming app on your smartphone.

Music videos, though ubiquitous, are often crammed into the same phone screen. The notion of music itself being worthy of concentrated attention has been further eroded by the record industry’s growing reliance on streaming’s passive playlist listening. That’s all a long way from the glory days of the concept album, when artists could presume to give listeners a full— that word again—experience.

Now, Magic Leap and Sigur Rós are presenting a format that could allow an artist’s musical vision to be enormous, cohesive, and profoundly engaging. “Musicians have lost what filmmakers get, which is the IMAX theater,” Abovitz says. “What if you had the entire world as your album cover?”

the list of tech titans working on one kind of artificial reality or another includes Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. With advances in artificial intelligence, the process for creating a Tónandi-like app could eventually become much simpler.

Back at Magic Leap, Jónsi is contemplating the creative ramifications of a device that can absorb musicians’ sounds and cultivate them into something they wouldn’t have conceived of otherwise. “Maybe it will inspire us,” he says. “Maybe we will learn something from them and feed it back into the machine.” Hólm, the bassist, continues, “Something beautiful could come out of it, but it would be really interesting if something scary and ugly comes out of it as well.” Abovitz brainstorms about a dedicated park in Iceland, where a larger colony of Tónandi could roam for miles in a majestic landscape. “Art that’s able to give you feedback and be aware of its creator is very interesting,” he says. Amid all the bluster and billions behind Magic Leap, this last point actually sounds like a huge understatement.

After years of publicity, and multiple cash infusions, Magic Leap’s technology may soon become available to select users. In September, Bloomberg reported that the company was aiming to ship out a small number of headsets within six months, or by March. Other companies, from massive Microsoft to upstart Meta, have already launched mixed-reality headsets, though nothing as ambitious as Magic Leap’s nascent designs. Overall,

Tónandi

Sigur Rós ©Mark Metcalfe

EDITOR

PAPER

Ryan Gerald Nelson

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Dear person in Minneapolis who is not linstening to "Rock the Garden" playlist, You OK? E.T. Carlson

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