Late last year my friend Robin McDonald and I were sitting at his and his wife’s house and for some reason, I suggested to him that we do a project together. One that combines music and photos. I had this idea in my head ever since my friend Meghan Quinn told me about color Synesthesia; something she experiences.

Grapheme-color synaesthesia or colored grapheme synesthesia is a form of synesthesia in which an individual's perception of numerals and letters is associated with the experience of colors. Like all forms of synesthesia, Grapheme-color synesthesia is involuntary, consistent, and memorable.[1][not in citation given] Grapheme-color synesthesia is one of the most common forms of synesthesia, and because of the extensive knowledge of the visual system, one of the most studied. - Wikipedia

I’d placed it somewhere in the far recesses of my mind and I think the reason it popped up again was that I didn’t have any booked work and I needed a project to work on.

We ended up using the seven primary colors, R (red), G (green), B (blue) and C, (cyan), M (magenta), Y (yellow), K (black) I emailed Meghan and asked her to explain to the best of her ability what she experiences. Which is a tricky thing to do, I think. How do you explain something that is “your normal”? She did a great job. So, with her recorded voice in hand, Robin produced the music using the voice note as a thematic guide to weave all the tracks together.

I then waited for him to finish the music before taking each individual track and then, during, the 5-minute playtime producing each image as the track played. I wanted to work within that time constraint. Forcing myself not to overthink it and work instinctually.

These are the images I produced on that day.

To listen to the tracks and download the album and artwork follow the link to Robin’s project, The Ozark Witch.

Like with most things in life. We make plans and then things happen and those plans shift and move and become something wholly different. The same has happened here. This was supposed to be what you see here and listen to at The Ozark Witch. I have foolishly agreed to play these songs live with Robin on October 13th.

They are reinterpretations of what you’ll hear in the recorded version and at this show what we aim to do is perform the songs and have a visual element along with it where we project each color of each song as we play and the audience sits/stands/lies down with the projections over them and us and just lose themselves for an hour.

Perhaps a bit of a meditation. Perhaps a maddening experience. October 13th will tell.

Thanks for reading