You do
a lot of work related to music. What do you strive for when expressing
something invisible like music through design?
In my eyes music is far from invisible.
Emotions are much so more vivid than pictures. So I usually start with that —
what’s the emotional chord we want to strike when you see that record on the
shelf? You want the listener to see the art and have a very introspective
moment, but you have to do so without offering too many answers. Good art
always leaves room for interpretation, and it’s those different interpretations
that spark the best conversations.
I see
a lot of collage works in your portfolio. What is the appeal of collage as
expression?
I say this in all my interviews at this
point, but I think collage is maybe the most genuine form of making sense of
the world around you. As an artist, there’s this gray area between having good
taste and being talented enough to make work on that same level. Ira Glass has
a book about this called The Gap. So back to my teenage years when I was
deep in that gray area, or the gap, collage for me was a way to harness it —
taking images I was inspired by and running them through my personal filter. I
liken the process to Madlib or J-Dilla collecting records, finding samples, and
making beat tapes. As a technique, collage has
always been my beat tape.