Music Mosaic: Untitled

The assignment:

"Each student will create a series of 8 - 12 images that visually complement a piece of instrumental music (‘instrumental’ means without lyrics. Also, no film scores. Sorry folks). Images may be drawn, painted, photographed or created digitally, but must be the creation of the student (not thieved from Google Images). Artist statements should include a discussion of how both the form (line, color, composition, etc.) and content (representation, narrative, etc.) of their creations correlate with their chosen piece of music. (Students will also include a link to their chosen piece of music in their blog post.)"

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What strikes me most about Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Untitled” is its unique tone. I tried to capture at least part of the tone in the form I used to visually convey my interpretation of this song. My images are all line drawings made on notebook paper, which I came up with based on inspiration from Napoleon Dynamite. Like “Untitled,” this style of drawing feels very teenage to me—it’s rebellious, cheap, and knowingly faulty. I’m not a great illustrator, so this faultiness is especially prevalent. The song comes across as teenage because it is loud and pushes its sounds and production to the limits, which I also tried to do with my drawing abilities.

Of course, the song has many other facets than this one element of its tone. Like Annie Dillard’s experiences in her “Seeing” essay, I was caught up by inspiration at various points in this song as I listened to it. Most of them were not very profound, but they felt meaningful to me because they momentarily gave me new ways of looking at this song. This song is bizarre, but it’s always been emotionally powerful to me, and these moments helped me realize a few specific ways it does so. Drawings 1-3 deal with the song as a whole, while drawings 4-8 deal with individual segments of the song.

1. One of the most obvious aspects of this song is how overdriven the sound of each instrument is. Each sound feels like it’s trying to compete for the listener’s attention, and in the end, feels a bit overwhelming. I depicted this by writing the words that came to my mind as I listened to this song on top of each other, so that no word is completely readable in the end.

2. This song uses a lot of counterpoint. The result is a holistic, if nonetheless messy piece that feels somehow centralized. I tried to show this centralization in the ball of line in the center of this image, and the various melodies as the forces coming toward it from the sides.

3. Although the rebelliousness of this song is tonally important, it clearly also takes inspiration from other sources. To me, based on the raw, overdriven sound of the song, it seems that it takes inspiration from grunge music. I tried to show this conflicting blend of sound by hand drawing the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

4. The beginning of this song sounds warm, like a sunset, but it is thrown off by the vertical pulse of the organ, which I tried to convey in this image.

5. Although rock organ has been around forever, this song uniquely blends its sound with the sound of the electric bass, which I tried to depict by showing Axl Rose greeting churchgoers.

6. The use of bagpipes in this song is jarring, and in some ways it feels like a perversion. I tried to show this with a bear tearing down its own home—jarring, yet still somehow pleasant.

7. This image is supposed to depict a few small cottages breaking up a city skyline. This relates to the part of the song when the bagpipes come in the second time, which feels like a nice break of acoustic sound amid the clutter of the rest of the song.

8. Finally, the song ends on a sustained note an octave above where it started. It’s not totally comfortable, but it feels successful, which I tried to depict here.