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Music

Instrumenti Takes A Lo-Fi Approach To Sound Visualization

This band used their music to create the album artwork for their latest release—but not in the way you’d expect.

Latvian electro-pop band Instrumenti is known for their eccentric stage presence—the duo first turned heads for wearing oversized panda heads while performing at SXSW in 2010. Now Shipsi and Reynsi, the talents behind this outfit, are taking us behind the scenes to show they can be equally offbeat and experimental offstage.

While visually imagining their album TRU, which dropped last month, Instrumenti worked with design house Asketic to hatch a concept that would let their music speak for itself. Watch the video above to see the team pour paint onto speakers blasting their tracks. As the membranes pulsated, the paint splashed upward, and Instrumenti caught the patterns on paper to create the lo-fi sound visualizations that would comprise their album artwork.

The experience provided an organic display of the sound. “Every piece of the album artwork was created by the song itself…The real artist was the sound,” Instrumenti says in the video. “We were just instruments.”

Fitting for a band whose name means “tools” in their native Latvian, Instrumenti certainly seems to have made the most of the resources at their disposal.

The final product:

[via Laughing Squid]