Ryan Hicks

Friend-of-a-friend and Flash mastermind Erik Natzke creates staggeringly gorgeous artworks from generative Flash drawing scripts. The intricacy and detail is as impressive as the massive scale and color of the pieces.

Despite my current hand-drawn note-by-note midi processes, generative art's well-guided chaos of expressive tools and technology is an inspiration... The finished work is what I imagine as accompanying visuals for the music.

A selection of his prints are hanging in Adobe's San Francisco office.

Last in this series of spacious, melodic, minimal sketches. Goodbye is a rest, a place of peace and wonder in looking out forward from the end of a decade.

Continued minimal, subtle, piano-driven sketching. Treading on 80's soundtrack-ish-ness here, Vangelis comes to mind...

First in what has become a series of minimal, ambient, soundtrack-esque sketches. Abandoned percussion altogether and working wholly with textures and melodic fragments in space contrasted against raw piano.

A track escaping the complex gravity driving the orbits of Adrift, Away, Doppler. Working toward Lusine ICL and Shuttle358 with this piece.

Drawing inspiration from Carsten Nicolai's work as Alva Noto with Ryuichi Sakamoto as well as Shuttle358. Letting the clickies carry a more rhythmic role here. A lightly-treading track, spliced together from barely-there minimalism.

Super geeky art films made from visualizing otherwise invisible physical phenomena such as audio or magnetic fields, and go further by generating audio from their data. Natural forces become experienced as eerily supernatural and alien.

The organization have done a handful of amazing music videos (Mum's "Green Grass of Tunnel") and insightful documentary pieces but their more indulgent visualizations are truly mesmerizing:

Nice chillaxed piece a la Wolfgang Voigt's GAS project... working on pushing it toward a Yagya esque density.

First sketch... Chippy, melancholic short piece.

Locked in a groove, tied to a system.

Kinda groovy piece. Following on the outer-spacey, alien-ish vibe, distant shimmering fragments of a melody tumble into a good groove.

Every now and again something pops up which forms a strong point of inspiration for me. As a visual designer, and one who's done a shelf-ful of album covers, the problem of defining what my music looks like is a constant.

Stuff like this realizes the possibilities better than I could imagine:
Hall of Fragments

A weighty, dense, clicking alien piece... Broken bits and fragments hurdling through space, converging from far-away orbits into a mess of crackling noise.

Dark droner of a track which hatched on a scorching 100º + afternoon out in the Central Valley. First full piece I've done in a while; just letting this one be, letting it go where it wants.

It gathers itself into a rather cinematic piece... really needs a short film to go behind it. Lurking dangers and downfalls, a series of narrow misses while persuing glimmers of hope...

This one's got potential for some positive energy... Track feels too "nice" at this early stage. Something in me wants to make it my "Dayvan Cowboy"... needs that funky guitar riff to carry it through.

Got some really nice groaning droning textures to work with... they're like humming transformers. Long title for this one is "When a scorched angel fell from the sky" or something like that. Imagine broken glowing satellite debris hurling through space. (Didn't the International Space Station have a near collision with one of these birds recently?)