The Blow self-titled album release

Creative direction, design, copywriting

In 2013, my band The Blow released our self-titled and self-produced album, “The Blow.” I did the creative direction, graphic design, and copywriting for the album art and promotional cycle.

Melissa Dyne, the other half of the band, is a conceptual and installation artist working with the physics of sound and light. For a performance installation that we did in 2011 Melissa created an ambient light piece, which slowly transformed over the course of an hour. We used the above images taken of it for the album art. The process of making the album had felt like inventing something from thin air, and with the imagery we were aiming to convey the sense of being in it together, alone. I wrote in the promotional blurb, “Making this album was an odyssey of experimentation. These songs trace the arc of our somersault into the unknown, holding hands, going backward through the air, watching to see where we land.” We continued the visual theme into the live performances, touring with a freestanding light rig that our crew installed at every venue so that we could reproduce some of the visual moments from the artwork, keeping the production inside of the same emotional universe.

I wrote the press release and here are a few of my favorite segments of it:
“It’s funny, trying to find words to describe music, isn’t it, because the point of music is that it’s something other than words. Music, at its best, is something better, hanging out in a mystery dimension with its cool friends, sex and drugs, each of them outdoing each other with their refusal to be reduced into sentences. But we will try to describe it anyway.”

“We divided the tasks of making the album between us pretty much according to the differences in how we dream at night. Khaela dreams about people and conversations and juxtaposed feelings: she wrote the lyrics and melodies and many of the compositions. Melissa dreams of being a beam of light bouncing off a Ferrari: anything that gave the songs dimension (arrangement, engineering, synth programming, sample perfecting, half of the composing) was done by her.”
Full press release