If you are a fan of dark, hard drum & bass then you’ve definitely seen one of his covers for Tech Itch Recordings. Adam is capable of creating realistic sci-fi themed works as well as bizarre, beautiful abstract images. Something many don’t know is that he also experiments with animations — the ones that are complemented with music are especially amazing.
27 questions, 1785 words about music, art and world-outlook. In this excerpt he gives some of the insights into how he got into design, how he started working with Tech Itch, and talks about his own audiovisual works. There are also three amazing images generated by AI, which Adam trained.
When was the first time you saw the close connection between visual art and music?
As I was DJing and organising events someone had to design posters. Later, my musician friends started asking me for music covers as well. I’ve designed book covers as well. It’s a bit similar job but you have to be more serious about it which might be boring sometimes.
When you started to draw regularly, what were your first serious works, first paid commissions?
I’ve started drawing at young age, first commissions might have been when I was 14/15 probably.
Since 2012 you have been regularly making artwork for Tech Itch Recordings. Mad to think this relationship has been lasting for ten years, how did it start?
Tech Itch was one of my most favourite producers in what I call golden era of dnb (around 2004).
I’ve found out in 2012 that he is still releasing tunes but without cover artworks so I’ve offered him help with that. I was beginning with 3D at the time, you can see me learning and failing if you go through them chronologically.
Your output is diverse, it also includes abstract art and face/body mutations. Can you name what inspired these?
I think it started in 2012 when I had an idea of human faces covered with various patterns. I knew it was possible on pc but was just starting with 3d graphics, so I took an analog way, printed patterns on foil and projected them with a slide projector on real humans. I just wanted to try it, and didn’t even plan to publish it, but friends told me to do so, and to my surprise, people liked it. Since then I publish my experiments on the web, well, most of them. Later I recreated those in 3D. I like to push forms into the boundaries of recognizability/beauty.
On your Instagram one can find a lot of posts of your abstract art complemented with similarly exciting electronics. I think it’s a great talent when you can create imagery and then compose your own sounds that you associate with it. However, some of these pieces are collaborations with other music producers — how did they happen? Were all these audiovisual works done purely for the sake of art, before NFT became a thing?
I’ve started with those in 2016, it’s my hobby and also training in 3D animation. At first they were just gifs on Tumblr and Facebook, later I started to make longer ones as videos (as gifs would be ridiculously big) and videos can hold sound, so I’ve asked some of my musician friends to come up with something, or I did it myself. Most of the sounds are made by my friend and long-time audio/visual collaborator Erik Osvald (Keosz).
NFTs became popular in 2020, I’ve minted some as well and sold some. But I’m not that famous to make a living of it.
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