Artists and musicians often take inspiration from one another’s work but rarely is the connection as direct as between the misty, textured electronica of Devin Abrams and the crisp avian illustrations of Matthew Eales. When the two Wellingtonians sat down over a beer to discuss graphic artist Eales creating the artwork for Abrams’ new Pacific Heights album, The Stillness, neither realised how influential they would be on each other throughout the project. “The relationship just flourished,” Abrams tells The Creators Project. “Before we knew it Matthew was doing pieces for every song and sending them to me.”
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At first the art was a response to the music, but being involved in the album so early on meant Eales’ drawings fed into Abrams’ own creative process. “I’d look at the lines of the beak of the bird and think about my music constructively and visually from his work,” says Abrams. “There were a few songs where his artwork totally changed how I looked at my composition.”What started as an album cover has turned into Eales creating one digital illustration for each track on The Stillness. All 12 works will be shown in an exhibition also titled TheStillness, in Wellington and Auckland. The opening night in Auckland doubles as The Stillness release show.
It’s been eight years since Abrams, a founding member of New Zealand’s drum and bass heavyweights Shapeshifter, has released an album for his solo project Pacific Heights. At the time he started working on it, he already had two full albums worth of recordings sitting idle on his computer. “I felt like I didn’t have something to say musically so I shelved them and waited until I had something to say.”What finally emerged was a deep, brave dive into the most difficult and negative time in Abrams’ life. The songs thematically deal with death and purgatory, pain and past lives. “The album was the navigating star that kept my focus in the good direction,” Abrams explains. “At times, the only light was making the album.”Eales set himself some parameters when creating the art to accompany Abrams’ sound. He restricted his palette to black and white and chose to use birds as his subject matter. “I like the idea that you could create a story through all these pieces that have human emotion and feeling imprinted onto it but it wasn’t about people. That’s how his music feels to me,” says Eales.
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A nature lover and self-confessed documentary obsessive, Eales didn’t have any trouble finding the right bird to represent the sentiment in the music. “There is a piece that has a hummingbird in it and the whole story about hummingbirds forever being on the edge of death because of their high metabolism is kind of what Devin was doing with his music,” he tells us.
The heavy emotions behind the music led to some challenges for Eales. He picks the track ‘Zoos’ as the most difficult to illustrate, but also his favourite. “Devin had written it for a friend who lost his father through suicide; quite an intense subject matter,” says Eales. “I tried to look at it from the softer angle—the outlook rather than what happened. It’s of a dove, a bird of love. I like the idea that it was about love, showing the dove looking down into an abyss of vines and lilies.”Abrams was happy to let Eales dictate the aesthetic guidelines and says the lack of colour in the works fit with the moody dark undertones of his music. “The idea of The Stillness is being a moment captured, almost ghostly filmed. It’s not being trapped necessarily but a bit lifeless with a sense of pause,” says Abrams.Since graduating from design school four years ago, Eales has worked for a large commercial studio. He likes to scribble away on his original work to keep his sanity through big projects but when Abrams met him he’d never had an exhibition of his own work. “I’ve always loved Matthew’s work. He’s one of those guys who doesn’t finish stuff,” says Abrams. With this creative partnership, now he has.
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