Art Drop #15: The A to B to C of an Idea

Charting an unlikely path from 90s UK rave culture to New Jersey road maintenance in 2024.

Sometimes an idea can sprout from the most improbable source. In a well-known and widely shared conversation with Paul Holdengräber, David Lynch responded to the question of where his ideas come from. It’s two minutes of essential viewing here:

I bring this up because the idea for this month’s art drop (ie the ‘little fish’ I caught) dates back to my teenage self watching Glastonbury Festival on TV in 1994. I was an absolute music fiend back then (still am), and until I was old enough to attend the famous festival that sprawled over the rolling hills and fields in South West England like a temporary city, watching it on TV each year and wishing I was there was all I had.

And so late one night in Northumberland I found myself watching Orbital. This was the height of rave culture in the UK, a music scene that I didn’t really have access to at the time and was too young to appreciate (grunge was mostly my thing then), but one which I was very aware of and curious about. That is, until I saw Orbital performing to tens of thousands of people on a sweaty summer night at Glastonbury ’94, at which point it all made sense. I may have been 300 miles away, but the energy and atmosphere (and their signature illuminated plumbers’ eyewear) came through the TV and transfixed me.

Orbital live at Glastonbury Festival, 1994.

That initial exposure to Orbital put them on my radar, and their album Snivilisation that was released soon afterwards got glowing reviews in all the music press that I devoured at the time.

Orbital’s Snivilisation (London Records / FFRR, 1994), album art by John Greenwood.

I don’t think I added any Orbital to my music collection until some years later, but the Snivilisation album art by John Greenwood was seared into my mind from seeing it all over the press. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but album covers had a huge influence on me and I would definitely become curious about a band or album purely based on how good their cover art was.

PAST TO PRESENT

I’m sure I am not alone here but I find that out of all the music I listen to today, 90% of it is probably from those formative years, my teens and early twenties. There’s a familiarity there that allows me to progress through monotonous tasks, yet I also find music from that era often stirs my creative juices. It’s also just better. Mostly.

I had been on a Snivilisation binge recently when I was on a walk around our old neighborhood back in New Jersey. I found myself on one of those streets where all the cracks in the asphalt had been sealed, creating a sketchbook of charcoal drawings and doodles. The street had been turned into an artist’s canvas, and the crew that did it probably had no awareness of the creativity they were leaving behind.

The street in New Jersey where the connection was made.

I’ve walked this street and others like it so many times, but it took Orbital’s Snivilisation album art being present in a certain cortex of my brain for me to really take notice of what is known in the road maintenance world as ‘crack sealing’. It almost felt like a physical connection had been made, two magnets snapping together. Although the likenesses may not be immediately obvious, there are some clear synergies between these asphalt anomalies and John Greenwood’s artwork: the fluid movement, dancing lines and forms that emerge on the road surface, the playfulness, the monochrome color palette. Now I look out for sealed cracks everywhere and am the strange guy in the parking lot looking down with a camera, getting in everybody’s way.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Much like problematic time travel in a movie, the question remains: would my eye have been drawn to this improbable subject of road surfaces without John Greenwood’s artwork for Orbital? Would C have happened without A then B happening thirty years earlier? Probably not. And making that connection is quite satisfying – to acknowledge that something you made or an idea you had was directly inspired by something else, but involuntarily, with the awareness coming afterwards in such a way that it didn’t hinder the creation.

And so that is the story of how two brothers performing electronic music in a field in 1994 and the subsequent album art created by an artist in London provided the prompt for me to notice the potential for some interesting photographs thirty years later. It’s an unlikely thread that connects a moment in nineties UK rave culture with a man and his camera walking the streets of suburban New Jersey in 2024. It’s also an ode to album art and the power of those images imprinted into our minds – in collaboration with the music – to inspire and influence even decades later.

ART DROP #15

For this month’s art drop we are unveiling one photograph from my new series – a figure walking with purpose through the asphalt.

Walking
Tenafly, New Jersey, USA
by Tom Bland

Prints of this photograph are only available until August 7, 2024, with no further production of this work for at least a year. To learn more about the paper, sizes, and pricing click the button below to visit the art drop page on our website.

Thank you for reading. In our next newsletter we’ll share a few more of my crack sealing photographs and a brief Q&A with John Greenwood.

---

---

Support

If you enjoy what we do here, it would mean a lot if you can support our newsletter in some way. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or perhaps make a one-off tip via Buy Me A Coffee, or better yet, add some art to your space with a print from our permanent collection or an art drop. Even just recommending our newsletter to others, or liking this post, commenting, forwarding it on – it all helps and we appreciate it. Thank you for supporting our work as independent artists!