Our Double Shot series includes an interview question and a song feature from an independent band or musician near you. The goal is to allow you to learn more about the bands we feature in smaller, more digestible amounts of content.
Grab your cup of coffee, click play, and allow us to continue getting to know Richard of Niacin Library.
Today’s Double Shot features Singapore In The Rain from The Vulture and The Sun. Be sure and check out our previous Double Shot with Richard.
I really dig the artwork for this album and for each of its singles. Did you create it? What inspired these visuals and the use of basic geometric shapes to form larger images? It’s cool how the image for each single somehow symbolizes what each song is about.
Thanks man! Yep. I created all of the artwork for the album. Actually, I take that back. My friend created the Niacin Library logo but all of the individual track art is mine.
The inspiration actually comes from these things called tangrams.
For my day job, I work at a small community library. It’s actually a really great place to work haha! I think I’m one of the few musicians I know who really likes their day job.
Anyway, for one of our programs we had all of these tangrams set up for the neighborhood kids to experiment with. The kids could use the basic geometric shapes to create things like rabbits, birds, all kinds of things. As I was setting them up, I started wondering if I could create some album artwork with tangrams as well.
Traditionally, there are seven basic tangram shapes. I essentially tried to recreate those shapes in GIMP (a great free piece of software by the way) and to organize them just like I would if they were physical plastic pieces. However, after a while I started messing with things a bit and the shapes started to get a little out of the bounds of the traditional seven shapes.
I wanted an image to go with each of the songs. Plus, I felt that the black and white visuals combined with basic geometric shapes really gelled well with the minimalist style of the music. Also, just like the music, while it’s “simple” it was also quite a bit of work haha!
But yeah, it was really fun!
