Neo Alabastro – “Nowhere2go” by Earl Sweatshirt
“Nowhere2go” by Earl Sweatshirt is a song off of his 2018 album entitled Some Rap Songs. The song can be considered avant-garde, as the entire track is full of a repetitive, almost meditative vocal and guitar sample that loops through the song behind the percussion and drums, which comprise of a lean kick drum, a piercing snare, a fluttering tambourine, and simple hi-hats. Initially, the song sounds like a mess; there’s too much going on and the main singer’s vocals are almost incoherent amidst the instrumental. However as soon as I was on my fifth play through, my head started to sway left to right; I started to notice a rhythm to the song. The rhythm of the song is easygoing and organic, like a seance with a haunting, repetitive rhythm.
With the song aspects in mind, I decided that I wanted to create something that was digestible to the viewer of the sound visualization project. I wanted to create something that would simplify the song’s rhythm but convey it in the organic way it already does.
Initially, I had created a 2D design that had several flaws. The first flaw was that there was not enough movement, and the design itself was stagnant. A main feature of the piece was a pattern of lower case i’s in the Courier New font. This pattern ran from the top of the canvas to the bottom, and it created a stagnant feeling on the piece. The dominating presence of the pattern didn’t create enough rhythm expressed in the song. Another problem with the original piece was that there was a hint of color. This was fixed by undoing the distortion effect in illustrator.
The mid critique influenced my design by changing the way I saw the song. Professor Inmi suggested that I add more rhythm to the piece. Funnily enough, although noting the rhythm in my multiple listens of the track, I had never thought of conveying it through imagery. I was more so focused on the lyrics and the meaning of the instrumental than the movement of the track itself. Therefore, in order to create rhythm, I created an arc out of the pattern of i’s. I duplicated the pattern in place and distorted it such that the pattern of i’s unwind like a an musical waterfall. The i’s in the final version curve and sway back and forth from one side of the canvas to the other. In order to convey even more movement, I placed O’s along the arc of i’s, representing snare and percussive hits. These O’s were falling down off the waterfall of i’s in order to create a feeling of a freefall amongst the steadiness of the i’s. Similar to the song, the percussive hits of the snare only come once and are loud and impactful. To convey this, I distorted the O’s using the pucker and bloat distortion feature in illustrator, distorting the edges of the O’s just enough to make them still identifiable as O’s, but also enough to show an impactful percussive hit. I changed the background to black to create more contrast than just black on white. The black background also helps the movement to be seen more clearly.
In terms of Gestalt Theory, I believe that my design exemplifies the rules of similarity, continuity and proximity. For instance, the i’s are grouped through similarity, and follow a continuous path. The i’s are also grouped close together in proximity such that the figure of a winding wave-like structure appears.
If I had more time on this project, I’d want to figure out a way to make the O’s three dimensional. I feel like there isn’t enough depth to them and the project would look more complete with everything in a three dimensional space.