MUKESH AMARAN
ALBUM ARTicle
MADHAV
NAIR
Hello, a little bit about yourself and your background in arts and music?
My name is Madhav Nair and I publish comics, illustration
and other things under the pseudonym name of deadtheduck.
I grew up between Dubai and Trivandrum and went to
Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology (Bangalore)
to study graphic design and eventually public art,
illustration, film theory and publication design. Comics
were always a major part of my life, but so was the kind of
stuff I used to watch on TV, which I've realized has affected
a lot of the way I draw things, among other things.
At this point in your career, what role did music have
to play in you getting to where you are?
Music was a natural part of my work, some of my favorite
illustrations are album covers and I was always fascinated by
the relationship illustrations, graphic design and, obviously,
animation has historically with music. A lot of people I hung
out with in college were extremely talented musicians who have
become some of my favorite producers. I honestly suspect that
I just really wanted to be part of the music scene somehow and
Bangalore has a really tight, mature set of musicians, visual
artists and comic artists constantly collaborating, if not all
being one single person doing an assortment of things across the
board. I was lucky enough to have worked with some really sick
projects with people in Bombay as well. Once I moved here for
a fulltime job, working with them became a lot easier and I'm
lucky to have had a lot of different avenues within both these
cities, and more importantly, all kinds of collaborations and
experiments that I get to witness and hopefully collaborate with.
Tell us about your collaboration with Noni Mouse and Ankit
Dayal from conception to creation and the end product.
Radha is one of my favorite artists and working with her has
been a really fun process. She'd shown me recordings of a
live arrangement/performance of a couple of her tracks (that
eventually became the EP) in collaboration with the almighty
Ankit Dayal. She pretty much gave me free reign of what I could
do with the artwork and as we kept talking about the process
behind these tracks, we naturally came to the conclusion that I
should actively try and do a direction that broke me out of my
comfort zone, so that it talks about the lyrical content but also
reflected some of the journey behind the music as well, being a
live translation of what Radha's production. I was also seeing
46
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
a lot of the Jumbo/Rambo circus posters that were around
Malad and it really fit the tracks energy for me and we came
up with the idea of having two characters represent Ankit and
Radha (with a obligatory mention of her egg-shaped shaker)
as circus animal characters, with some heavy influences
from those circus posters and Max Fleischer cartoons.
Tell us a little bit about the process that is involved
in making a piece by deadtheduck.
Depends on what I'm making, I guess. All roads begin with
my journal, a lot of the drawings in those eventually become
more fleshed out ideas for comics, illustration and, sometimes,
paintings. I spend a lot of time with those, they're easy to carry
and it's often why a lot of the artwork I do for posters and
covers are drawn by hand and then colored digitally. Recently,
thanks to my friend and hero, Yash Chandak (Cursorama)
helped me make a setup where I was doing live visuals for
an electronic music set by the abominable Lacuna, with a
webcam pointed at my journal and the images going through
a bunch of crazy filters and becoming projections. I've wanted
to do visuals for a while and this experiment was such a joy
because of how minimal the setup was and how much I could
do with some wrist-twisting and parameter-switching.
How is creating an album art different from creating other art?
One of my favorites parts of doing album art is getting to listen
to rough cuts by some insane producers and musicians and get a
sneak peek into their process and philosophy and absorb as much
as I can. That's usually where the process begins and I've always
seen it as a collaborative process with some really nice moments
of the rough cuts and sketches affect each other. With comics and
illustrations that I do as standalone pieces are usually things I try
and finish within a couple of days so that I can still work on other
projects. They're a lot faster and usually the main motivation
behind them is trying out a new pen, brush or surface (even
scale in some cases) There's also a massive difference between
the work I used to in Bangalore and in Bombay. Bangalore had
given me a lot more spaces to work on murals, self-published
zines and even workshops/events around these. Bombay, on the
other hand, has offered projects that are lot more collaborative,
either with design for events, festivals to album artwork and
visuals. But these lines blur with every passing season.