Jeff Masamori.'s photostream

Been a bit quite around these parts lately.
Busy with a couple design internships, plus a few other projects on the side over the horizon.

But for now, this is an album cover design I just finished for the band Certain Rare Birds's upcoming debut EP entitled Languages.
I don't normally get the chance to do work like this very often so it was a pleasure to put this together for them. Great dudes, great tunes.

Check out an unmastered track on their FB page: Certain Rare Birds

Finally finished laying out my résumé.
Hire me!

jeffmasamori@gmail.com

First, listen to the song

For this project, we were tasked with translating a song in terms of both qualitative and quantitative. I chose a 7" vinyl single format, because I love album art, and I've never been given the chance to design music packaging for a school project, so I took the opportunity to do it this time.

From the list of songs I chose Tracy by Mogwai, because Mogwai is good.
I distinctively remember listening to Young Team while walking around downtown SF on a warm night, and I had a strong emotional connection to it, so I decided to photograph the area I had been to represent the qualitative aspects of the song. I arranged them to create a first person narrative of someone walking around in an eerily empty San Francisco.

For the quantitative data, I represented the prominent bass line by a beam of light that travels through the images and interacts with the scene. The glockenspiel is shown through lights in the scene that the bass line beam interacts with. These both undulate according to pitch, higher notes being higher up and vice-versa. The e-bowed ambient guitar is shown through the ambient light in each scene based on volume, brighter being louder, darker being quieter. Finally, the spoken word elements are represented through ghost-like figures.

The story in the booklet is meant to be semi-ambiguous, where you are unsure of whether or not the character you are seeing through is aware he is a ghost, or discovers it on the last page. I didn't feel like it was important to have a definite ending, and prefer to let people insert their own interpretation.

This is a mock-up for the second volume of the ATPR www.afterthepostrock.com mixtape, a collection of user submitted music to that is up for sale. This comp has the appropriate textual information. As there were two artists who submitted artwork to be voted on, we decided to use both, one on each side. The top portion of this image will be used.
If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the 2xCD, please get in touch with the curator of the project:
subparnoise@gmail.com

This is a mock-up for the second volume of the ATPR www.afterthepostrock.com mixtape, a collection of user submitted music to that is up for sale. This comp has the text for vol. I, as this idea never went into fruition.