Sleep / Walk / Listen Closes the Expressional Gap Between Electronic Music and Visual Arts

Visual arts and electronic music have always been intrinsically linked. Sleep / Walk / Listen, a new online music and art series, aims to bring these mediums closer together by presenting collaborative partnerships between electronic music producers, DJ's, and visual artists.

For their latest release, SWL004, the series paired Kompakt recording artist and Pallete Recordings label boss John Tejada with visual artist and graphic designer David Grey. The two are frequent collaborators; recently, Grey provided the artwork for Tejada's latest LP Signs Under Test. For Sleep / Walk / Listen, Tejada chose to dive into his early DAT tapes. The tapes were produced between 1994 and 1996, well before his rise to techno prominence in the mid-2000's. He presents THUMP with a mix created from those original tapes. Grey then listened to the mix and created the accompanying original artwork. We caught up with both artists about their inspiration for the Sleep / Walk / Listen collaboration.

THUMP: John, when you were going through your DAT tapes, what were you looking for while compiling the SWL mix? Were you surprised by what you found?
John Tejada: I've digitized pretty much all of my DAT tapes now. There's a few missing, though. The issue was going through all these 60 to 90-minute audio files and making each song a trimmed file. I started doing this on flights to waste time. I enjoy doing more interesting things with podcasts these days and thought it would be fun to feature some early unreleased works. There were some surprises on the tapes. Some of the tracks I found really interesting were some I must have recorded just to be doing something. I had never listened back to some of those and truly didn't remember a few.

In comparison to your other releases, the SWL mix is distinctly more raw and hardware driven. How do you think your music has evolved from recording those DAT tapes in 1994 to 1996?
J: Back then there were no DAWs or plugins. You couldn't do all this multi-layered production that you can now. Currently, my work is hardware based and has been for a while so in a way I've come full circle. I've learned a lot along the way, of course. The songs featured in the mix are quite stripped down. These were from the same sessions that ended up in my first album and some early singles. When going through the older tracks, the more developed songs were not as interesting to me as the more stripped down ones were

You and David frequenting collaborate on album artwork. What were you expecting from him after you finished the mix? Why are you drawn you to David's designs?
J: When David and I collaborate I have total trust in him. I want him to design whatever he sees fit and I don't meddle in the process. I think with a true collaboration you have to trust the other person. As far as direction goes, sometimes we share ideas at the beginning but there's no nit picking once the work is done. Sometimes there are options. I'm just the biggest fan of what David is doing. I like the fact he is using real physical objects to create his designs and I like that he has a complete understanding of what he's doing.

David, in the past you've said that graphic designers must develop a heightened sense of perception in order to authentically reflect the external world through design. How does that belief affect the way you approach designing your artwork to reflect John's music?
David Grey: Having a heightened sense of perception can mean a lot of things. I pay very particular attention to the gravity and magnetism of form and composition. The subtle push and pull of objects can express everything from excessive tension to deep calmness. One pixel to the left or one pixel to the right can make all the difference in the world in terms of how we recognize and label visual relationships. Heightened perception can also refer to the recognition and exploration of colours' emotional tonality. I often enjoy working with saturated rhythmic color palettes to reflect a more complex and subtle emotional tone. Another aspect of this view is to be mindful of one's immediate surroundings. By allowing man-made and natural environments to influence your visual agenda, you can bring about enormous surprise and genuine expression. In regards to John's mix, I let these ideas and a handful of others guide my process.

David describes the mix as an evolving narrative. John, what journey were you attempting to take the listener? David, how does your artwork reflect that narrative?
J: I was just trying to put together something for myself. It was interesting to put these songs together as most of them I didn't remember. It was like making a mix of other artists work but it just so happened that it was my own.

D: I think I'll leave any kind of conceptual narrative to that of the viewer's mind. What I can say is that it was very important to me to visually explore the combination of multiple rhythmic movements. In this piece, color and form move up and down and in and out while having qualities of both narrowing focus and ever-expanding spaciousness.

The hour-long mix and an original composition, 'Silver Fears', can be streamed and downloaded from the Sleep / Walk / Listen website. Prints of David Grey's original artwork for the partnership are available the Sleep / Walk / Listen store.

John Tejada is on SoundCloud // Facebook // Twitter
David Grey is on his website.

Alex is on Twitter.