Purple cheese and the art of making records from scratch

I was digging through the archives and I found this ridiculous print I made many years ago.  It was my first attempt at creating a 5 color linocut and was an assignment for an elective "art materials class" in the Education program.

In order to make this I was taught how I needed to "cut out the negative" of what I wanted to see. Then ink and stamp it on the paper. So if you want to see a line, I would have to carve out all the negative space between the lines. You have to do it with every subsequent color layer and try to line up the stamp as accurately as possible so it stacks together correctly. 

The catch here was we were only allowed to use one linocut stamp for the assignment. So while we were doing this, we would be destroying the stamp along the way. 

In this case, the first stamp was just the full purple rectangle, then I carved out a line drawing of the cheese and printed yellow on that. making the background slightly green. 

But the cheese was not bright enough, so I cut out everything outside the perimeter of the cheese and then stamped the 3 visible yellow sides of the cheese. The second layer of yellow helped and allowed for it to "pop" more making the line more visible and started to give it that cartoon-y look I was intending.  

Then I carved out the flat parts leaving only the swiss cheese holes for the light green.

Then I cut out even more to do the dark green crescents.  Got it? LOL. 

The reason I'm doing this brain melter of a post is to tell you that I've been heavy into mixing the album these past months and I would say that mixing these tracks is kind of akin to doing a multi color linocut, but the audio version. That is, the album is made of layers upon layers of scratched audio.  Some are meant to be the bold, illustrative lines, and some are meant to be the shadows and crescents of the "audio swiss cheese holes" if you will. 

There have been many new studio experiments in getting the layers to balance, involving carving out sounds and frequencies so certain layers can pop and finding ways to make shadows and ghosts out of other sounds.

So it's been a lot of headphone time, multiple monitor speaker tests... It's been fun and educational and equally ridiculous as I try to balance the sound of robots checking into hotels to those of car chases and ballads for date montages.  

Some days I wish it was a one take, one microphone recording like they used to do in the olden days... but as you know by now, I'm a fan of the intricate and tedious arts.  Plus I felt like making a record completely from scratch so joke's on me I guess! 

Hopefully in the end it will all resemble something tasty for your ears!

Thank you for your patience!

E