“Tour Trippin” — This is the first Free Music-related digital flyer. There had been a handful of handmade / offline ones I'd done in the year or two leading up to this ... which is where the black border comes from. (I would lay stuff out on the copying machine at Kinko's - back when they were open 24 hours lol - and then use the black/unused space as a frame when trimming things down. The playing card for the Street Life cassette game; a mail-out art project from 2014; the visual scores for the Traffic Intersection / Madison Square Garden music in Seattle in 2014; and the hand-signal flyer for Thank You & Free Music at the Central Saloon are some examples of the hand-made ones.) Anyway, this is the first digital thing which was made with my homie, Patrick Sexton. Patrick co-designed and co-produced the album artwork and layout for Renaissance 2 (along with homie, Nick Shively) and we made this around that same time. We were sitting side-by-side at his computer in his bedroom at Shithaus in Othello (Seattle) working on this stuff, lol. I remember at one point he played “Expecting Rivers” from YMO’s “Naughty Boys” while we were working and, while I loved that CD and listened to it often in the van, I hadn’t yet gotten that deep into the tracklist. (Something I, honestly, love about the indexed nature of a CD runtime is it can kinda be choose-your-own-adventure regarding how you make your way through an album’s flow.) I was so taken by the first 7 tracks that I hadn’t yet gotten past them, despite having owned the disc for almost a year. Anyway, “Expecting Rivers” came on and the big toms and melody line … lol, I asked if it was new Dan Deacon and he was like (without pretense, bless my dawg), “No, this is YMO,” a little surprised. Lol … I always think of that when I hear that song. Anyway, this intro to digital design kinda blew my mind and opened up a whole wormhole … like I remember spending an obscenely long time rotating individual letters in the city names on this thing … which, fittingly, is still a huge part of my flyer-design to this day. I’ll do 7 or 8 drafts of things where I make supremely minute adjustments … like … “oh, the ‘Oct. 2’ in this should be like 6 pixels to the left.”
