Erm, 'Drumming up Business'

I was recently interviewed for the Freelancing site PPH, here's a link to the article. It's been pretty good for my profile, and a few people have been in touch to say they've seen it, or they'd like my advice on starting up, it's really nice when people make the effort to appreciate your work.

I do regret sending that photo in though, to say I've got a Moon Face in it is a huge understatement. I know I was happy that day but it's no excuse. 

I'm a little more conscious of my 'Moon Face' these days since we took our 2 year old Archie to the Space Centre in Leicester at the weekend, and bought him a little Space Shuttle. I carried Archie out of the museum after lovely day, on my shoulders, and on the way out he kept trying to say (in his broken baby English) "Land, shuttle, on Daddy, Moon Face." I mean he's 2, so he can't lie. 

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes... Interview, yeah, it was good, have a read.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07764 898 010

Citizen Wiki page

I've just set up a Wikipedia page for Citizen Studios and complied a list of all my major label work, I'm pretty proud of it as it stands. Need to get something lined up for the rest of 2010 now.

Artist	Release	Label	Date
Medium 21	Acting Like a Mirror	Universal Records	2003
Medium 21	Daybreak Vs Pride	Universal Records	2003
Medium 21	Black and White Summer	Universal Records	2003
Medium 21	Killings From the Dial	Universal Records	2003
Maps	Start Something	Mute	2005
Maps	Lost My Soul	Mute	2005
Maps	Don't Fear the Sun	Mute	2005
Maps	International EP	Mute	2006
Kooky Records	Kooky is 10	Kooky Records	2006
Maps	It Will Find You	Mute	2007
Maps	We Can Create	Mute	2007
Maps	You Don't Know Her Name	Mute	2007
Maps	To The Sky	Mute	2007
Durutti Column	Sunlight To Blue... Blue To Blackness	Kooky Records	2008
Slipstream	Mantra	North Star Records	2008
White Belt Yellow Tag	Tell Your Friends (It All Worked Out)	Distiller Records	2009
White Belt Yellow Tag	Remains	Distiller Records	2009
White Belt Yellow Tag	Tell Your Friends (It All Worked Out)	Distiller Records	2009
White Belt Yellow Tag	Methods	Distiller Records	2010
White Belt Yellow Tag	Always and Echoes	Distiller Records	2010
The Moons	Torn Between Two	Acid Jazz	2010
The Moons	Nightmare Day	Acid Jazz	2010
The Moons	Life on Earth	Acid Jazz	2010
The Moons	Let It Go	Acid Jazz	2010

Maps Exhibition

At long last I have details of the exhibition of all my Maps artwork. It's this Saturday 24th from 12midday until 5pm at The Art Vinyl Gallery, 20 Broadway Market, London E8 4PH. The exhibition runs from January 24th - February 7th

I’ll be there and James chapman will be DJing at the opening which will be attended by most of the artists. It’s my first ever exhibition, so if anyone is in the area please drop by. More info here.

Thanks to the people at Mute and at the Art Vinyl Gallery for all their help.

To The Sun

I forgot to post this last month. It's the Maps artwork in the Sun, and it's on my favorite page, Victoria Newton's Bizarre.

There are no mountains left for me to conquer. Good night.

Mercury Music Prize Nominated...

So there is it, Maps are Shortlisted as one of the 12 artists nominated for the Mercury Music Award. This is great news for James and for everyone else involved with maps, including me.

This kind of attention for the album is going to push it deeper into the public consciousness, and that means more people are going to hold my artwork. I'm swelling up with pride, he really deserves it maybe I do too.

Here are the Nominess and the odds;

Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare - 4:1
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black - 4:1
The View - Hats Off to the Buskers - 8:1
Dizzee Rascal - Maths + English - 8:1
Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future - 8:1
Jamie T - Panic Prevention - 8:1
Bat for Lashes - Fur and Gold - 10:1
The Young Knives - Voices of Animals and Men - 10:1
Fionn Regan - The End of History - 10:1
Maps - We Can Create - 12:1
New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom - 12:1
Basquiat Strings - Basquiat Strings with Seb Rochford - 12:1

Sparks in the Snow

This is the next MAPS single on Mute, 'You Don't Know Her Name and, actually not Sparks in the Snow (another Maps song), I just called it that because my spark for the artwork came on a beautiful snowy day back in January. Snowed-in and inspired by my muse/sweetheart Karen Anthony Cuthbert Wilson-Brown I finally found a way to create what I was looking for.

I needed to build something from the strand of the ALBUM RENDERS, but it needed to have it’s own defining look to differentiate from all the other releases.

I’m really happy with it, I was adamant that the covers should be black and white but Paul A. Taylor at Mute help to convince me I was wrong, I have a lot of love invested in this project and Mute love it, but more importantly Maps love it.

You Don’t Know Her Name will be released on June 07 and you can see a full sized version of the artwork HERE

We Have Created

When you've looked at a piece of work on the screen for as long as we did for the Maps album WE CAN CREATE you get to a point where you never want to see it again. Then it goes off to print and you forget about it for a couple of weeks, until one day (when Mute remembers to send you a copy) there it is, sitting in your postbox.

There's nothing quite so terrifying as the first look at the finished piece. You're oddly desperate to find something wrong with it, and if you don’t, you find yourself falling in love with it all over again. Luckily for us, we're in love today. Sadly, this feeling only lasts about an hour. There are easier ways to experience such highs. Drinking meths, for example.

A New Region

The Region series go out on tour with Maps to give away as free CDs. The idea behind the series it to take a simple image of the planets and moons as you move away from Earth, so I started with the Moon and the most recent one was based around Jupiter. You can see the full artwork here HERE also to get an idea of the series see REGION ONE and REGION TWO

The Crusade Begins...

Maps are launching their debut album at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton and I've been asked to design the invite. I wanted to do something that looked like the church had designed and printed themselves (no offence), and that carried the theme of the Crusades that the church is famous for.

It should be a good night, it's pretty limited to about 200 people and it is invite only. If you manage to get your hands on a copy of the invite have a look at the journey of maps on the inside, or you can see the full artwork HERE

Maps artwork finished

It seems a long time ago I explained to Mute Records how I wanted to create the Maps album artwork purely and mathamatically from the music. Actually, it was a long time ago that’s why, and this week finally sees the record’s release.

The idea was we wanted to make the artwork for the album create itself, so if one day we fired it into space and it landed on the moon then someone could pick it up, decipher it and remake the album. Simple really. The first thing we needed to do was to find away to take data from the music and turn that into something that looked organic, interesting and beautiful.

After about 2 weeks we found a programme called Walrus that allowed us to do exactly that. So, we stripped data from the album fed it into Walrus and converted it into huge decision tree diagrams.

Once we had created the Walrus model we then rebuilt it in 3DStudio Max on a hired Supercomputer, then we rendered and lit the huge structure that was around 5 million faces. This part of the project took about 3 months as each tiny tweak of the camera meant the computer re-rendering everything.

When we have great looking shots of each song's structure we took those renders into Photoshop for some final work on the lighting and atmosphere.

8 months later it was done and Maps release 'We Can Create' on Mute Records, May 14th. The limited Gatefold is out a couple of weeks after, and you should try and get your hands on one, as long as you promise to wear gloves.

See all of the artwork HERE