Autograf Believes Ice Cream is a Good Motivator

Autograf, a bi-coastal house music trio, believe making visual art is just as important as making their music. In the past, they've elevated their live shows beyond the quirky background visuals and blinding lights of most electronic acts by crafting pop-art installations of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans and Brillo boxes to accompany their performances. Now, for each new song they write, the group creates an accompanying piece of visual art.

Here, the band discusses the inspiration behind their summer hit "Don't Worry," the accompanying visual art project they created for the song, and why ice cream is the ultimate form of inspiration.

None of us are vocalists, so we usually either work directly with a vocalist or we get vocals from a sample pack. And with our song "Don't Worry," that's what happened.

I went through an old sample pack I found. For some reason, that phrase—the don't worry phrase—just kind of lept out at me. I've dealt with stress for a while with various things in my life. When I worked on that song, [that phrase] spoke to me. I was like, "Yeah, there you go. Don't worry. We're going to make a song."

People are more productive when they're in a happy, positive space. The same applies to us as a group. When we encourage each other and speak in positive terms, we tend to be more creative and have more motivation and work harder. I think the whole mantra of the band is to leave your autograph, to leave your mark on the world.

And for us, we took it a step further and put it out on the street to offer an alternative to the negative stimuli out there in the world and in the media. All they talk about is what's going wrong in the world. I feel that if we took a different attitude collectively and focused more on what's going right in the world, people would get along better and make better things happen.

The goal with everything we do is for the art to inspire the music or the music to inspire the art. As a visual component, we wanted to inspire people to go out there and create more, and not worry about what the consequences of that [creation] would be. That's where the Don't Worry mural project came from.

It's essentially just subliminal messages interjected into people's daily life, whether it's their commute or walk to work. It's a simple message of 'don't worry, live life,' 'don't worry and follow your passions,' or 'don't worry, eat ice cream.' Making art is good for stress relief—for us, anyway. Something that reminds us of that, for example, is ice cream, so that's why we included that imagery. It didn't really have to be anything substantial so long as it go your mind off of that anxiety. You can make whatever. It doesn't really matter.

We wanted places that were obviously visible to other people. We chose the Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago for our first [visuals]. There are train lines there and it's a very busy area with different people. I think the idea with this is to reach as many people as possible and try to insert that positive message in as many people's lives everyday.

After 14 years in Chicago, we didn't realize the phenomenon of ice cream until coming and moving to New York. There are these little ice cream shops that make homemade ice cream. I think a lot of the inspiration came from wandering around Manhattan and trying all the ice cream, and just seeing how obsessed everyone is. People are willing to wait in line 20 or 30 minutes. Everyone sits there checking their Instagram photos of their ice cream. You take a bunch of adults make them 13 years old again.

For the ice cream one, there's a spot called Jeni's Ice Cream (in Chicago), so we put the art on a building right around the corner from the shop so people getting ice cream can see this brighten up their day. Ice cream is kind of weird. For some reason, universally, everyone can think of ice cream positively. [Our project] was a play on that. It's about the nostalgia for childhood, before we had these worries and problems and responsibilities from adult life. The ice cream one in particular seemed to touch a lot of people over the summer through our social media.

We have more that are still in the studio. We want to keep getting them up. We're making a bunch of those. They're going to be little woodcuts. We're trying to get other people in different cities involved in the project and find places where [those other people] want to inspire people around them and put [the woodcuts] up themselves.

How can people leave their impact in a very positive way? I don't think you have to go out and live your life like Mother Theresa. I think it's just being conscious of [positivity] and doing any small act that may be perceived as positive.