Ambiens

Ambiens Vol. I–III consolidates my favorite moments from over 100 recorded tracks (eight hours of music!). It served as a forcing function to learn and explore ambient music—working mostly with Eurorack modules, synths, and a bit of guitar—prioritizing improvisation and capturing raw, live performances in both video and audio. The name Ambiens came from Latin, which is a language that I gravitate toward when defining names or terminology. I appreciate how it often offers short, easy-to-grasp words.

The key challenge was to create an eye-catching, simple-to-execute visual that would scale across a series of albums. During the exploratory phase of defining a visual concept, one of the ideas was reusing the image from my work on the No(i)se poster. I printed a few options and did the ‘wife test,’ asking my wife which one she would prefer, without giving a lot of context. She picked the No(i)se option, without hesitation, as she always does with visual decisions (she is also a designer).

With the visual direction decided, I iterated on spacing and rotation, wondering what the best way was to scale it across three covers. Rotation took away the universality of the “strokes on the wall” visual. It ended up with enough space not to appear visually cramped at small sizes, an important consideration, given that music-streaming platforms display a wide range of sizes of album cover art.