adrift
A collection of album artwork and visuals for an Ambient album by James McAulay
James McAulay, Scott Adams
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An album of sleep
James wrote the album with the experience of falling asleep in mind. As the album progresses we move through drowsy wakefulness into hypnagogia and finally into a dream. Reflecting this in the visuals was important to me, playing with the boundaries of figurative and abstract and surreal and real.
One of the particularly special moments of this project was listening to raw recordings of the tracks early on with James. Without too much prescribed context, we lay down to listen to each track, noting down the visuals that were brought to mind. There was surprising commonality in what we wrote, with calm slow moving water being one of the key visuals for us both.
We allowed mental imagery to guide the process
An album of sleep
James wrote the album with the experience of falling asleep in mind. As the album progresses we move through drowsy wakefulness into hypnagogia and finally into a dream. Reflecting this in the visuals was important to me, playing with the boundaries of figurative and abstract and surreal and real.
We allowed mental imagery to guide the process
One of the particularly special moments of this project was listening to raw recordings of the tracks early on with James. Without too much prescribed context, we lay down to listen to each track, noting down the visuals that were brought to mind. There was surprising commonality in what we wrote, with calm slow moving water being one of the key visuals for us both.
Process
After a few listening sessions, I had a fairly good idea of the themes behind each track and how the flow would feel from one to the next. Water became the guiding principal, with the stillness of the water becoming a metaphor for the mental state we hoped or thought the listener might embody at a given moment. I sketched out some vague ideas, but realised that the outputs would predominantly be generated using stable diffusion. Sketching only goes so far here, and I've found it always important with generative AI not to be too prescriptive but let the unexpected delights of the process guide the way. I ultimately used a variety of generative processes within comfyui to guide each individual music video, whether animatediff, controlnet, SVD or IPadapters just to name a few. Below is a sample workflow used for the fifth track 'Here' to give a sense of the iterative process. I would find or create images that help evoke the mood or aesthetic I'm looking for, which are fed into the generation through the IPadapter. The Animatediff nodes help to keep consecutive frames similar to one another so that they're legible together as an animation, and controlnet helps to guide the composition. Engineering a text prompt is as important as ever, as it's still usually the most effective form of guidance.
I created the Album cover after the entire process of making the music videos, when I had a more hollistic sense of the visual language. It came together through a similar process, using various inspirations from each of the tracks.
The visuals have been displayed twice at live performances of the Album in London at October Gallery and the Clocktower of St Pancras.