by jonathan altschuler and colleen macisaac

music comics is a project wherein jon creates a piece of music and colleen creates a comic. at this point we give the music and comic to each other and create another piece of music and comic, this time based off of  each other's work. we display the final result of these collaborations on the internet, allowing the music to play while the comics are being read. please enjoy. contact: jon: sarlakk2 @ aol.com colleen: littlefoible.net completed projects: #1 jon says: On one of the pianos in the basement of my dorm, there's one A note that has a completely different timbre than all the other notes. It sounds much more metallic for some reason. (I should mention that all the pianos are incredibly beat up.) This note became the basis for this improvisation, and everything that I played revolves around it. I began placing that A note into different chords to see if I could still hear it. I think there's one chord that doesn't have the A in it, to see if its absence would be noticeable. Also, the strings of the lowest octave and a half or so are so incredibly dead that they're almost entirely muted, which I started playing around with towards the end. Unfortunately, due to the way this was recorded (and my lacking the means to properly record a piano), you can only barely hear the metallic timbre I was trying to play around with so much. Regardless of all that, I can't imagine this piece existing without Colleen's comic anymore. I think the staircase visual is the perfect accompaniment to the busier parts of the music. colleen says: Since this piece of music was so abstract with such an experimental feel, I pondered for a while at first as to how I would approach creating visuals for it. I wasn't sure at first whether I just wanted to play with something completely abstracted or go for a bit more of a sense of narrative, but I eventually went with the latter. I initially just listened to the music over and over and wrote down all of the images that came into my head while it played -- I then used those as a resourse pool from which I drew and distilled until I arrived at my final script. Since #1 was a new kind of thing for Jon (ie, playing the piano, experimenting with these different chords), I wanted to try some new things with my art. This was the first comic that I've done using only a brush and ink as opposed to a pen of some kind, and also my first time trying out drybrush techniques. In terms of the narrative, I wanted to capture the frantic, nightmarish sort of feel that I got from the music without making it too much of an overt "dream sequence", which I think I have been fairly successful in doing. fifteen minutes on the downtown bus colleen says: I initally made this comic for the spring 2005 ashcan "Euphonious Coffeepot* (*zombie coffeepot)", intending it initially for print. I had wanted to do an 'unrelated-yet-related chain of events' kind of comic for a few years, and this was me dipping into that somewhat. Though it can be seen clearly here that it was made for print, I think it works really well in this new form, and Jon is the master of timing with the amazing music he made for it. jon says: The first thought I had about this was that I didn't want the music to get in the way of the comic. With that intent, I tried to approach this like a film score, or other incidental music. Something that enhances the viewing experience without drawing obvious attention to itself. I decided on the steady fingerpicked rhythm because I wanted to convey a sense of forward motion throughout, to try and stay with the whole "bus" image. The music fading out at the end was directly inspired by the end of the comic, but the timing worked out better than I could've hoped for. I was originally worried that the music would be too short, but it seems to fit nicely.