I thought that it would be fun to design some postcards for the different cities that my band, JP & the Gilberts, visited on our tour in the Summer of 2011.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website had not had a redesign since 2000. The home page inevitably became stale and dated in a society where online presence is becoming essential. The site featured a splash page requiring additional clicks from the user to reach content. It also had small static images, namely special exhibition posters originally designed for print that were then re-sized to smaller web versions and icons. To the web visitor, these adapted versions lacked clear meaning. Also, small text placed against a dark background caused poor readability. Since the museum is currently involved in a complete redesign of their website, a new home page was needed to ease the transition from the old design to the new design, for both museum employees and visitors.

With the removal of the splash page, this interim home page is the first thing people see when they come to the site. Now, large banner images featuring a current special exhibition rotate in an unobtrusive slideshow. Simple, logical controls allow the user to pause on and page through different banners. Dynamic content from the Museum’s online publication, Now at the Met, is displayed beneath the banner. Since new articles are published on a regular basis, a frequent visitor will be able to see what’s new at the Museum since the last time they visited. Visiting hours and information are clearly displayed, eliminating the unnecessary search for basic content. Four large promotional boxes with photographs replace the former iconography. These photographs draw the visitor’s eye and a mouse-over box further informs them about where a click will take them. The overall coloring of the page is lighter and the text is black on white. This allows the user to focus on the content of the page instead of the bold colors of the former page.

The new home page is much more visually interesting and improves the communication of pertinent information while remaining true to the rest of the website.

Note: As of September 26, 2011, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched a newer website.

Abacus released it’s debut self-titled album in April, 2010. I based the album cover design on the columns of beads on an actual abacus. The blind impressions on the front cover on bright white paper give a sense of sterility that fits with the music and the lab coats worn by the band at live performances.

The cover was letterpressed by Mark Herschede at Haven Press Studios in Brooklyn, NY. Albums are for sale for $15. Send us an email at abacus@abacusabacus.com and we’ll send one your way. You may also purchase a digital version of the album at abacus.bandcamp.com for $5.

Launch site »

I created this site for guitarist JP Gilbert’s “country” band, JP & the Gilberts. The aesthetic concept is based on 19th-century newspaper mastheads set with wood type or engraved blocks. Using this as the anchoring thematic element, the rest of the site is clean and simple. Typefaces used include League Gothic (The League of Moveable Type) for the headlines, Museo Slab for the main body text, and Museo Sans for sub-headers (both by Jos Buivenga).

I built the site on WordPress and used both TypeKit and @font-face for font rendering. The audio player is a customized version of Opentape.

Launch site »

Abacus’s music is harsh, mathematical, and in-your-face. The website design reflects these characteristics on two levels: Aesthetically, the site is stripped-down, but pushy, using bold text and oversized images. Structurally, all of the information is presented upfront on one page. The single page design also allows visitors to stream the band’s music without interruption as they browse the site. The design’s sterility reflects the band’s precise compositions and plays with its laboratory-inspired wardrobe during performances.

This design is coordinated with the album cover for Abacus’s upcoming LP.

Abacusabacus.com was built on WordPress and features a Franklin Gothic Medium, Helvetica, Arial font-stack. The audio player is a customized version of Opentape.

Launch site »

Now at the Met is The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online publication that features articles by curators, educators, and conservators. I tried to keep the design clean, so that the user would focus on the content, while maintaining consistency with the overall look and feel of the Museum’s site.

I currently design and deploy email newsletters for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Below are a few of the templates that I’ve created.

The last thing you’d expect to come out of Brooklyn in these modern times is a country band more comfortable in overalls than in skinny jeans.

But wander into a crowded listening room on the banks of the East River and this is exactly what you get–JP & the Gilberts, modern storytellers in a timeless setting, road-worthy and with chops to beat the band.

Not content to re-imagine the past, songwriting duo J.P. Gilbert and Trevor Williams have embraced their disparate backgrounds as North Jersey crooners and South Texas honky-tonkers as a means of looking to the future.

Part accordion-laden string band from the western plains, part sea of achingly intimate guitars, and developing a reputation as the ‘youngest old-timers east of the Mississippi,’ JP & the Gilberts will release their much-anticipated debut album, Introducing…, in late 2011.

Packed with tales of heartbreak from start to finish, Introducing… is whiskey-drinking music for the new millennium. Highly intoxicating; not to be consumed alone.

The band features:

JP Gilbert, guitar, vocals
Trevor Williams, bass, vocals
Lily Maase, guitar
Tim Monaghan, drums
Alex Hills, accordion

Buy My Book is a sextet that performs Christopher Tordini and my original compositions. Pieces vary from simple to complex; some songs feature open sections for improvisation and others are through-composed. Peter Matthews of Feast of Music called our compositions “spatial” and “occasionally ecstatic.”

Jeff Davis, drums
Alex Hills, piano, accordion, compostions
Greg Ruggiero, guitar
Becca Stevens, voice
Christopher Tordini, bass, compostions
Masahiro Yamamoto, saxophone

Audio

Recording of our full show at the Bowery Poetry Club – 8.4.2009
(Tommy Crane, drums)

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Photographs

Brooklyn-based thrash/jazz/chamber/prog band Abacus independently released its debut album on April 29, 2010. Available on vinyl and as a digital download, the album includes ten songs composed by Michael Kammers and recorded by Trevor Williams (Datus, Pep Rally) at the Rad Pad in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“I formed Abacus to give voice to a music that is a confluence of certain paradigms, techniques and textures that are typically prohibitive, and that consists of as few compromises as possible for the performer and listener,” said Kammers.

As the band name suggests, the music is mathematical, employing serialism and overlaying complex polyrhythms. The band playfully extends this thematic influence in performance, donning lab coats and goggles and exuding a focus more common to a surgical theater than to a rock show.

Led by Kammers, who also plays saxophone and keyboards, Abacus features Greg Chudzik, bass (David Crowell Ensemble, Signal Ensemble), JP Gilbert, guitar (J.A.C.K., JP and the Gilberts), Alex Hills, keyboards (Buy My Book, JP and the Gilberts), and Tim Monaghan, drums (J.A.C.K., Golem).

Abacus is currently playing shows in support of the record release.

www.abacusabacus.com

Audio

Purple Stuff is a collaborative project with Christopher Tordini. Our aim was to take a step back from our more serious work and experiment with creating fun pop/rock tunes. We even sing.

Audio

Relative:

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Awkward Sculptures:

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You can purchase our tracks here.

This piece is based around the 60 minutes in an hour. 60 is a great number to work with since it’s divisible by so many integers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30). I chose to work with the prime numbers in the batch – except for 1 since using 1 for what I had in mind would lead to constant sixteenth-notes – since these prime numbers would in fact give me all of the other dividends through repetition. I wrote a baseline that had a note every 2, 3, and 5 sixteenth-notes. The rhythmic phrase repeats itself every 30 beats since 30 is the lowest common denominator for 2, 3, and 5. Treating every beat as a minute in an hour I repeated the rhythmic phrase twice to complete one statement of the whole baseline and to give me my 60 minutes/beats. The piece is split into three 60 beat sections. The first section is in 4/4, the second section is in 3/4, and the third section is in 5/4. The bass line is the same in each of these sections but the different feels paints it in a new light so that you don’t even notice that it’s unchanging. The melody and harmonic movement was determined by the implied harmony of the bass line, the harmony of which was really just based on what I was hearing–no crazy method here, just my subjective ear. The rhythms of the melodies were not tied to the the 2, 3, and 5 of the bass line but I instead chose to weave them around the fixed pattern and accentuate it when I felt it was necessary. The chordal harmonies change from section to section as the different meters change how the bass line is divided bar to bar.

This recording is from my senior recital at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City on April 10, 2006. Alto saxophonist, John Beaty takes a solo over the C section. See below for personnel and charts.

Audio:

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And a video of the same performance:

Takuya Kuroda, trumpet
Joe Beaty, trombone
Masahiro Yamamoto, soprano saxophone
John Beaty, alto saxophone
Colin Killalea, tenor saxophone
Meilana Gillard, bass clarinet
Kenny Grohowski, drums
Christopher Tordini, electric bass
Alex Hills, piano, compositions, arrangements

This piece was inspired by the vocal arrangements performed by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir.

Kelly Watson, alto flute
Masahiro Yamamoto, soprano saxophone
Curtis Macdonald, alto saxophone
Colin Killalea, tenor saxophone
Alex Hills, composition, arrangement

Audio

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Video