In Spring/Summer 2017, I worked alongside the founders of Equinox and Nutridrip to name and brand their new project ‘cleanmarket’, a new multi-offering wellness destination in Midtown Manhattan.

Logo

Brand mood board

Clean, Good, Friendly, Trustworthy, Smart, Hip, Natural, Warm

website mockup

instagram mockup

before

after

before

after

‘Thermostat’ provides high-quality cryogenic and infrared treatment services on-site. Their first location is inside cleanmarket, so the buildups to launch were in parallel. Thermostat needed hot branding that was cool. I designed it alongside the cleanmarket branding.

Mood board

Menu

Postcard

website mockup

mobile website mockup

A short teaser promo video I made for the debut performance of ‘Polys’.

I had a concept for a music project, so I picked some of my favorite guys, we got together a few times to work out the tunes, and then we played an experimental set for about 50 people at 1am on a Friday night at Nublu in the East Village, NYC.

The idea was essentially to revisit and expand upon about a dozen of what I considered to be some of the most powerful ‘bass + drum + guitar/keyboard’ grooves from history- naturally from the genres of funk/soul, afrobeat, some jazz. By ‘grooves’, I mean short stretches of time in these given songs where the rhythmic patterns played by each musician layer together perfectly and the band locks into a loop, chugging along together like a train. I’d transpose my own melodies on the rhythms, trip the sound out a bit with some synths and atmosphere sounds, and most importantly- stretch the grooves out at length, with light improvisation, to see how they would evolve in a live setting and how the audience would respond. By the end, it was a magical late-night dance party.

Music is vibration, and what I learned from Polys is that it takes 5- 10- 15 minutes for the sonic-information-over-time of even a simple groove to be digested and processed by a live audience, and for the resultant movement of the room to occur. The result is nothing short of a divine rhythmic union of everyone in the moment. There is so much sonic information in even just one second of music. It takes longer than we think for us to process it deeply- to the point of uncontrollable dancing. Repetition is the key to getting us there.

This isn’t anything new- it’s why dance music is so repetitive. But dance music is usually electronic, made with perfect computer sounds. What does it take to recreate the transcendent hypnosis of electronic dance music using live instruments?

The lessons I learned with Polys will be foundational in forthcoming musical projects.

Brandon Revilla - Drums
Ian Bakerman - Guitar
Chris McClenney - Rhodes, Synth
Marco Gil - Percussion
Me - Bass

E-commerce website design and development for NJ-based interior decorating boutique Accents By Design. Built on Shopify.

Chris McClenney is a rising young Pop/R&B singer songwriter. At the end of 2016, I joined him (keys, vox), Ian Bakerman (guitar) and Dave Mendel (drums) to form Chris’s live band.