Behind the ‘Blong: LoopFest

21st October, 2011

We’re pleased as punch to unveil this fun branding project we’ve been working on with the Judith Wright Centre—LoopFest! LoopFest, a festival of live looping performances and workshops, will be held at the Judy on 4–5 November. Live looping is a performance art where multi-instrumentalists take sounds and loop them to create bold musical performances that will blow your mind.

Inspired by the creative layering techniques used by live looping artists, we created an identity that plays with the relationships between sound, time and depth. The logotype itself has been created from a single looping line, and can be read from either direction. We fed this logo into an ‘acoustic picture transmitter’ to create a number of Loop spectrograms. (For the uninitiated: spectrograms show how the spectral density of a sound varies with time.)

To get the idea of layering and complexity across, we printed three of these colourful spectrograms onto acetate. Then, with the help of the lovely Aj Moller and our very own version of smoke (blu-tac) and mirrors (coat-hangers), we photographed these sheets from different angles, playing with the lighting and placement of the spectrograms. The result, as you can see on the left, is an interesting and colourful image that could never have been achieved by just using the computer.