Creative Influences

[CORRUPT_DATA]

I wanted to create this thread to talk about where people draw their influences from, whether that be for Music or Artwork or both. I don’t produce music myself, just artwork. But a lot of my inspiration comes from music, I try and channel the energy, the mood, the overall feel of the track and try to I picture the sounds as if they were imagery.

I find leaving the UK has a massive impact on my state if creativity, just seeing new scenery, new shops and logos, a different language. Although I may not set out to be inspired, it seems to work its way in subliminally.

Ive recently been into shipping containers, the colours and fonts on the are crazy especially when you get a good beat up one.

I try not to get inspiration directly from artwork as I find somewhere down the line your going to end up recycling someones idea, whether you intend to or not.

Below is some of my work. Where do you guys find sources of inspiration ?

[mortenhd]

i find it hard to pin down, i just know what i like, but im not sure how that is expressed through my music (except for musical influences obviously). i do think writers like philip k dick and grant morrison combined with my lifestyle when i started reading them has had a major impact on my worldview and how i create and what i create. i’ve always been drawn to the layers underneath or parallell to consensus reality/society too.

[str_apx]

I tend to find certain things stick with me for no apparent reason, and I do end up recycling ideas, but due to the constant churn of new stuff available these days a lot of stuff slips through the net and gets less eyes on it than it should. I basically accept it as long as I try and do something slightly different with it so it’s not a complete rip off.

I cld give a million examples but one thing that really stuck with me was David Spero who is a photographer that I became aware of through the liner notes to The 5 EPs CD by Disco Inferno. I got intrigued and looked at his site & was inspired by the sort of inertness and flatness of the photos which made them v compelling to me and I’ve never really been able to get them out of my head. Here are some of his photos:

[owenlikeyou]

I’m a photographer. Lately my biggest inspiration has been Neoclassicism. Jaques-Louis David. Harsh light from a single source, figures that are composed to tell a story.

Modernism and Post-Modernism removed humanity from art and I have really been trying to bring that back into my own:

[Meddle]

the walk to the arsenal…

[str_apx]

Oh I also was going to mention nuclear war. Nuclear stuff has always had a weird paranoid hold on me and is one of those weird inspirations where it definitely has an effect but it’s not obvious how it manifests.

Particular favourites are Threads (be prepared when you watch it, it’s horrifying), The War Game, the spooky Protect And Survive information films commissioned by the Thatcher government to be shown in event of likely apocalypse, and the hypnotic Crossroads, particularly the bit with the gorgeous Terry Riley organ soundtrack.

[mortenhd]

yeah ever since my dad let me stay up and watch Testament when i was a kid nuclear war has taken up a considerable part of my mind

[DAICON]

I keep hearing about threads since they put it out on Blu-Ray and it’s got me morbidly curious. We need more anti-nuclear media.

[str_apx]

It’s horrible but totally worth watching.

War Game is also great particularly with regard to the immediate aftermath of an attack. Firestorms using up all the oxygen so ppl suffocate in the street etc.

For a quick scare look up the “casualties” video from Protect and Survive on YouTube. Some grim advice delivered in eerily calm RP.

[Hypna]

I use http://archillect.com quite a lot. Scrolling through it until I find something that stucks and I’ll start writing music based around the atmosphere of the pic or gif.

[shortwavestatic]

I doubt there’s anyone of a certain age in Britain that hasn’t been utterly scarred by watching Threads.

[POLY]

Sometimes I struggle to make ‘nice’ music despite being a lovely person and I blame that on growing up in a dirty industrial town. Music often sounds like where it comes from though doesn’t it?

Memories can give me a sound that I want to achieve. It’s hard to explain why though. Somehow these half-memories just give me a feeling that I want to express in music.
Like the way people always go on about Boards of Canada’s first couple of records evoking feelings of nostalgia and childhood memories (and I do agree). I want to reverse engineer this and put my own feelings of nostalgia and melancholy into music.

When read something like a Ballard novel for example (or watch something bleak as fuck like Threads), Ballard in my imagination is associated with cold stark Brutalist architecture. When i’ve made this association between two things in my head and I feel they compliment each other I feel like filling in the blanks between and making music that also fits this feeling.