Inspiration: Matt Irvine Brown

Sometimes, when your feeling like your in a bit of a creative rut, you find things which totally change the way you think about design. This morning Matt Irvine Brown has managed to do this for me, courtesy of this article on It's Nice That


Here's a brief synopsis of what his project is about:


Entirely composed using the “shuffle mode”, Matt creates engaging and random compositional experiments that play mutually with sound and visuals and tech-know-how. He makes “sketches” of tracks that will play in continuous and harmonious sequence – audibly and visually – the gif-like graphics, which are delightfully simple, fitting effortlessly with the digital aspect of the sound. Though immediately engaging, it wasn’t something we could quite bend our brains about so we thought it best to speak to the man himself… 


Hi Matt, could you firstly give us a layman’s explanation of what Music for Shuffle is… 


Normally, shuffle mode is a way of playing songs in a random order but here, I’m trying to use it to make one piece of music. Instead of recording a whole tune that lasts three to four minutes, and saving it as an MP3, I record individual phrases– each only a few seconds long – and save those as individual MP3s. Then, when I play them one after the other (on shuffle, of course), I get a complete piece of music that sounds different every time I play it. And making one song out of several little MP3s means that the ‘sleeve art’ essentially becomes a (very slow) random stop-frame animation. 


So along with these loops and beats he puts together, which work in whatever order shuffle puts them in, he creates little graphic sketches made on Illustrator to go along with each 'track', so as you play the 'sketches' as he calls them, there is an accompanying animation which deals with different themes such as space and depth of field, the images remind me a lot of of Kazimir Malevich's work, but using more circles instead of squares. As little pieces of art, I like these just as much as the sounds he's put together. I just found this work incredibly inspiring, and because it's a tuesday morning, I can't quite get my head around what's inspired me the most about it, but i'll keep looking through his work, and hopefully I might be able to take some of these ideas into my future projects.





www.musicforshuffle.com