my label suggested kelly adams and i document a conversation about our friendship and her artwork for the 'grapefruit' album, and pitch it as an article to an art-and-music magazine the name of which i forget. this is likely from 2016. convo happened over soulseek instant messenger. the magazine did not bite

kiran: so we met in 2009, i think?

kelly: sure

on last.fm, through our mutual friend john (rest in peace), who was an important bridge for a lot of reasons, not only because of the vastness of his taste but also because he was a musician as well as a painter. i can't remember when i first saw any of your drawings or when i showed you any of my music but i would assume that he was the common element.

john ended up being a major influence on me too, and even now when i recall him i think of his intense creativity... it was infectious, even

i joined last.fm when i was 12 or so, because i'd started listening to loads of records my elder brother had given me, and also i suppose i was feeling a bit isolated at school... what were you listening to in 2009?

i remember in 2009 i had just started jumping from music i listened to in middle school to stuff like the residents, captain beefheart, frank zappa, and 'doom metal' or other 'psychedelic' things. i really was a bit fixated on such labels. i loved angel'in heavy syrup if that name even rings a bell. sheesh, i'm only just remembering that phase now! i'm looking at a week's worth of listens from january 2009 on my old charts and i have dna, afrirampo, the residents, skinny puppy and beherit.

the residents were a big one for me as well! and zappa. also the mars volta.

anyway, i guess we did bond over our 'outsider' tendencies... i remember you and i talking a while ago about feeling like the weird kid in school, but also being very self-aware of that fact and wanting to resist that label altogether lol

before we started this conversation i did a tally of all the releases of mine that have art by you as their covers, and it's [redacted]!, but as far as i'm aware only three of those can be considered the result of a collaborative process; the other five are just drawings of yours i thought were rad and used for records you hadn't heard beforehand.

yeah i remember you asked me to do a cover for 'the big fish'

for how long had you been drawing at that point? or is that a weird, arbitrary question (as it is for me with regards to doing music stuff)?

i remember telling one of my friends that the only difference between me and him was that we all drew as children, it's just that i never stopped. all throughout my childhood i drew my own sanrio animals (like hello kitty and friends). they developed from doodles, so all my drawings were on notebook paper; i still struggle to stick to using a sketchbook. i was very shy and my confidence was pretty bad -- i was the type that never took their jacket off -- so when you asked me i was scared to death! and i didn't know you that well either. but i do remember listening to your demo and being really impressed you made that... you were like 14?

i finished 'the big fish' in july 2011, so i was 15. if i remember rightly it was the same process as it was for 'grapefruit': i send you the demo recordings or the unmixed album (not that 'the big fish' was properly mixed...) and you do the artwork while i make the proper recordings or polish the ones i sent to you.

yeah, first i draw a black and white version, and you tell me what you think, and then i add color

i'm looking at 'the big fish' cover now for the first time in ages. i still remember seeing it for the first time! and how much of a vast improvement it was over my shitty microsoft paint efforts. it was like, 'this is a proper album now!'

that cover was created from a pre-existing sheet of stained paper. i was trying to figure out what the heck to do for you, and i found this piece of paper with blotches all over it, possibly stamping play doh on it. and i just listened to the album and everything came out. at the time i was really into drawing these flat clouds on everything, or these three-dimensional wastelands with cliffs and plateaus that had no features whatsoever. in particular i think i was trying to emulate those oblong clouds you see on old kimonos

i'd say they're all main features of your work -- it certainly is in the covers and gatefold artwork you've done for my records, but it's also present in other pieces of seen of yours.

i have the same process for all your covers; i have the album name and the song titles already, and i work with them. i like them a lot: just being given one word or a theme, it's the easiest starting point for me. i hear a word such as 'grapefruit' and things come to mind. as far as the influences for that record go, i was really into hokusai's 'big wave' print at the time. i thought that its energy was perfect for your sounds. there's roger dean, the guy who did all the album covers for yes. i was also thinking recently about the huge influence the books i read as a child have had on me. one came to me in a dream last week: 'ghost train' by stpehen wyllie and brian lee. my all-time favorite is 'rainbow goblins' by ul de rico; i believe it's composed entirely of oil paintings he did, they're absolutely stunning. like beksinski for kids (without the death imagery i mean). also, gennady spirin, and the adventures of abdi, by madonna.

madonna??

illustrated by olga dugina and andrej dugin. they remind me of remedios varo... the colors are similar, lots of browns. but i consider places and certain objects to be influences too. your whole life is an influence, it's never as simple as your heroes.

but while we're on the subject, i should coax you into talking about moebius, just because whenever we talk about visual art his name comes up the most and you talk about him the most passionately.

"well, the thing about moebius is that his work is instantly recognise as his, and very elegant, as elegant as philosophy can be, to really put him on a pedestal. his work is very mystical... he seems to tap into that part of your brain that makes you curious about things like optical phenomena or black holes or depths of the ocean -- stuff like that. he makes the landscape as a format its own type of creature. it's not just some plain aerial view of a pretty place, it's a dynamic ecosystem. there's lots going on, but everything is in tandem with each other.

i know moebius was prominent as a comic illustrator, and that you've experimented with animatics and narrative elements in your artwork. and, also, that the collected artwork for 'grapefruit' (front and back covers, as well as the gatefold) has some sort of chronology.

ah, lots of things are coming to mind. what i have in mind for my own work right now and what i was testing out with 'grapefruit' is this sort of narrative illustration, inspired by scientific diagrams and comic art -- the work of rube goldberg (which i discovered at university) i like, and the subtle storybook elements in reverend howard finster's art -- but also another recurring favorite is the work of 'art brut' artists. i could go on forever about them, but on the subject of sci-fi art, i love the work of philippe druillet... it's much darker than moebius, though. i have too many influences, it's creepy... i'm a product of the google generation, just like YOU. makes you look ridiculous citing so many names but you have to give credit where it's due.

i guess the artwork for 'grapefruit' is a narrative piece in the way a lot of the old triptych paintings are, like 'the garden of earthly delights' or that great/mortifying hans memling piece depicting the last judgement. could you talk about the narrative you had in mind?

while coming up with the 'grapefruit' cover i was at uc berkeley, and on the west side of campus there's this spherical sculpture. and it looked to be like the perfect spaceship, but it also happens to be round like a grapefruit! and so then i started drawing. i had some sketches depicting the grapefruit as some isolated rock formation in the desert; i have a thing for rock structures placed in huge fields of emptiness, like hoodoos. but at the time i was fascinated by da vinci's flying machines because i was learning about them in class. i thought they were beautiful! i originally went that route, but then decided why not make it a working space ship?

meilyr jones was telling me about this keyboard da vinci designed that they only made a proper version of a few years ago. it's called a 'viola organista', which is a keyboard that produces its notes with small bows instead of hammers like on a piano.

wow. imagine if you could make a song with that

it sounds crazy. like a mellotron, but a 15th century mellotron!

anyway, i decided to go the route of hokusai's 'giant wave', because as much as i loved the way a desert expanse makes you feel (like time is stretching out in front of you), the dynamism of heavy water works super well with your math-rocky title track

looking at it again now ... what's the relevance of all the amoeba around the sides of the cover?

i just love the idea of stuff growing around all that energy, you know? i imagine the whole picture in motion, like the massive grapefruit shell was slamming into the water and at the same moment the organisms and the waves and the beams of light sprang upward, and in the magma the little floaters wobbled about. the red arrows on the back cover show the ship growing its own batteries from eyeball grapefruit pods. once they ripen, they get plugged into the ship, and once they expire and turn into an amorphous jelly, they discard the hard shell through a dor. the hard shell gets dumped into the ocean of the planet below. but you can piece together what this all means: is the planet going to be invaded by the aliens on this ship? are the aliens protecting this planet?

so, the ship is the big spherical thing in the middle of the back cover?

no.

oh

the ship is huge, and those things are its power supply.

in various stages of usage?

yes

ok. i get it! cool!

the front cover is the discarding of the battery shell from the airborne ship onto the planet. and the gatefold depicts the view from inside the ship looking out at the ocean and islands below; you can see all the grapefruit batteries growing in the walls.

everything is falling into place! are you working on anything at the moment that also utilises these techniques within a single drawing or a series?

well i sound absolutely nuts in my description of this project so i plan on making something more understandable haha... i don't want to make something totally random... though i can do that quite well, given how spontaneous my process is. right now i'm working on a storyboard-style narrative of a tree that just crossed the ocean. the first tree ever to make such a trip! i'm debating whether i should look into historical accounts of tree extraction from the new world... i want it to be inspired by... i don't know who does the artwork for boredoms and ooioo, but they have the most amazing feel. that and the music video for björk's 'wanderlust'.

that's a great video. and i like the cover of the last ooioo album too

my eyes burn over that stuff... so awesome. but i also keep some of my own flavors, obviously. i still love my landscapes.

why are you drawn to landscapes more than individual figures? i know that's a daft dichotomy, but it is a thing...

i only recently started drawing figures; i was very afraid to draw people for a long time, and i'm not really into it even now. partly because of lack of confidence (like, i am not very good at it), but also because i'm just more into the mystery that landscapes have. but my confidence is improving and i'd love to draw people more. there's a different kind of mystery that can be found at the personal level that i haven't explored. i ruminate over preferences like this a lot. i was telling one of my professors that i wasn't into conceptual art and i loved illustrative type stuff, like miyazaki, artwork that's very story-driven. i still like conceptual stuff (and by that i still mean visual pieces you'd see in a gallery, like richard serra's big pieces, or even malevich)

i saw some of serra's sculptures in bilbao a couple of years ago, but i'm not sure i'd describe that as concept art. that term for me is more closely related to performance art or something. i guess concept is a big component of richard serra's work but what i took from the experience was 'these big sheets of metal are fuckin huge and brown and intimidating and empty and i quite like them'. concept isn't its be-all and end-all.

what i meant was art that communicates a single, specific idea. anyway, what i feel when looking at a portrait... is 'incompleteness'! it makes more sense to me to see a person in a landscape, and not cut off from everything by a frame or white walls. you can place yourself more easily in a landscape; whenever you turn your head you see one, it's a constant feeling. it looks more natural to see things in context, and when you see them in context it can be spooky, like de chirico spooky. landscapes carry a lot of intrigue.

Circa 2016-17