August 2009 Archives

"Self-Referential" from Audio Dregs Recordings on Vimeo.

This is the video loop I did for the big video show that Peter Burr curated earlier this year at Gallery Homeland as part of the PDX Film Fest (sorry, Pete I'm spacing the name now), with a new soundtrack that I recorded the other day. Hold down option+play to get it to loop and drive everyone insane.

I got the finished version of this album cover today, something I designed for Sack & Blumm on Berlin's Staubgold label. It's a bit of a return to my 2002 "Conscious" style design, working with more abstract, high contrast sketchy automatic drawings, with lots of negative space, a bit formal expressionist and a bit anti-formal.

Sack & Blumm were an influential band for me, a collaboration between Cologne's Harald "Sack" Ziegler and Berlin's FS Blumm, their self titled debut on Tomlab (2000?) made me an instant fan. I admit I picked it up based on the lovely album cover and then soon fell in love with the music which was somber yet playful; a variety of acoustic and toy instruments. Loops played and recorded in real-time and shuttled between Cologne and Berlin via cassettes; it didn't quite sound like anything else I had heard before; sparse and experimental, outsider yet informed, melodic and strange. This record eventually it led me to do a collaborative EP and comic book with Harald Ziegler, a collaborative compilation with Tomlab entitled For Friends, and a release on Audio Dregs with FS Blumm. A couple summers ago when I was staying at Extrapool in The Netherlands, Harald happened to be coming through town to play a festival and I got to see him perform live for the first time, in the ruins of a castle outdoors. I was happy to learn that they decided to make a new album recorded between 2004-2007, and they ended up asking me to create the artwork for it (I even helped out with the album title a bit). Now I feel I've come full circle somehow, and I'm listening the the new record and its a nice feeling. I'm still not sure where I'm going with art or music today, but the at least the journey has been good.