Ghosts Move Through

If you want to make packaging design for a black metal album, then you have goats, inverted crosses, capes, crows, degenerate gothic typography and the color black and gray to make use of. Should you however want to do the package design in the folkdrone genre, then it is not so obvious what you have to choose from.

Every field has it’s own set of established visual expressions that one as a graphic designer relates to in some way or another. You can decide to use these expressions in your design to signal that the piece you’re working on at the moment should be perceived to belong to that field. It’s no coincidence that many, say, black metal album covers, law firms, exclusive furniture dealer (etc.) have their visual similarities. You can of course also decide to break from these established expressions for strategic or aesthetic reasons.

In my project Nattavaara Rocks, I play guitar based instrumental folkdroneambient. In fact, I don’t know if there is such a genre, but it’s the best way I can describe the music. If it is unclear whether it is even a genre, it is reasonable to assume that there are no specific established notions of folkdrone imagery, which means that I as a designer do not have anything to relate to. In the visual world I have constructed around Nattavaara Rocks, I have chosen to avoid imagery and graphic elements that points to specific temporal and cultural contexts, but instead used nature and its variations as the basis and also as a metaphor for different emotional states.

With Ghosts Move Through my intention was to create an object that music lovers would want to own, but also a design that does not forces the listener into making specific emotional associations, but instead where the expression of the nature of the photographs can provide a sense of tranquility as well as emptiness.

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