Studio Playlist: Music Focused Illustrations

A collection of music focused illustrations paying homage to the artists I have on heavy rotation while I work in the studio. I have a broad and varied taste in music spanning electronic, desert blues, classic rock and beyond. The music I listen to ultimately has an influence on the illustrations I make and this is a celebration of that.

Above: Bombino. Hailing from Agadez, Niger, Bombino is a Tuareg guitarist and desert blues star. Like many other Tuareg musicians, he spent time learning and creating music in exile as an act of resistance during political unrest in the region. Guitars were seen as a symbol of rebellion and were banned by governments across the Sahara in an effort to stop the Tuareg rebellion. In Her Tenere, simply meaning ‘The Desert’ in Tamasheq, Bombino sings of the Sahara desert and the problems facing it and its people. 

Above: Women In Electronic Music

Delia Derbyshire was an English mathematician who carried out groundbreaking work at the BBC radiophonics workshop in the 1960s. Attracted to abstract sounds, Delia recorded real world noises on reels of magnetic tape before splicing, layering and manipulating them to create new sounds. Her work was entirely analogue, and she had a penchant for the beautiful ringing notes created by the BBC studio metal lampshades. 

Pauline Oliveros was a pioneer of early electronic music in the US who coined the term ‘Deep Listening’. She famously started out with a tape recorder collecting and abstracting the ambient sounds of the world around her. She developed her sonic meditations as a reaction to the post-war political environment, where ‘Deep Listening’ explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. Her seminal album of the same name was recorded 14 feet below ground in a cistern where sounds reverberated for up to 45 seconds. 

“The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time”, Pauline Oliveros.