Nathaniel Whitcomb’s Motion Collages Bring Life to Record Covers

My buddy Tim Thompson over at Smoke Don’t Smoke, is having a show tomorrow night at Lot 1 in Echo Park with Jeans Wilder, Holy Spirits, Mutual Benefit and Steffaloo. It’s a great line-up and should be a super fun show. But to enhance the bands performances he’s teamed up with Los Angeles based designer Think or Smile, also known as Nathaniel Whitcomb, to create some great visuals for the show. The way he thinks of it, this is a natural progression of the record cover.

They are my way of marrying art to music the way 12″ cover art did decades ago. I remember getting an album as a teenager and staring at the art and inserts as I played it, letting the images fuel my imagination as I listened, attentively. Now it seems with mp3s and bloggers putting up found images for every single track they find that appreciation for art as music and vice-versa seems to have fallen by the wayside – and ADD sets in hard. My hope is that these function as modern day album art, used as another means to experience the music.. a way of getting lost in it.

I think this is a pretty great idea. It seems so simple, like someone should have thought of this before. I’m excited to see Nathaniel do more of these and maybe some other people pick up on the idea as well.

Bobby