'Loops' Is What Happens When A Musician & A Designer Combine Their Creative Practices

There is a moment of serendipity and synergy that you feel when you're bursting with an idea to make something. It's indescribable, and artists of all disciplines feel it — musicians, painters, writers. It's like that electric feeling that starts at your very toes, shooting up to your head, forcing you to create. And this feeling can come anywhere: the shower, an auto ride to the dentist's office, or even when you're mid-conversation with your mother while she drones on about the shade of yellow she needs the walls to be painted. In that moment, you have two choices: catch the moment, or let it go under the pretext that you'll make a note of the idea later. But I've learned, after letting go of many shower/auto/mid-Amma-conversation thoughts, that the idea will leave you as soon as you blink. The only way to capitalise on it is by acting on it instantly. This is the high of the creative pursuit that we all chase — and chasing that rush leads artists to the most unexpected, but artistically challenging and gratifying, places.

For musician Aayush Wykes and artist Mohammed Chiba, this came in the form of 'Loops', a collaborative album that brings together both their disciplines into an exploration of different artistic worlds. As Wykes puts it, "This came out of both of our journaling practices, in a way. Chiba has been journaling for years and has a vast collection, and I've always loved that work. We've been friends for a long time as well. I also started 'journaling' my music stuff lately, which was a fun little experiment, just to get in front of the recording booth more often. We'd collaborated a lot of times before as well, and it just so happened that there seemed to be a bunch of overlap between the two. So we sat down and tried to find parallels, both aesthetic and audio, between our two bodies of work."

They tried to curate the album so that each art piece resonated with the emotions and feelings induced by each song. In Chiba's words "If you look closely at the final album art for the singles, each track name is just a date, but there are drawings that echo the music — for example, one date has a horse-and-mouse drawing, and the song itself sounds like it's 'galloping' [a word one of us used while discussing it]. It wasn't deeply planned — it was a lot of small parallels that turned out to feel meaningful."

It started with one of Chiba's art pieces as the album cover for the project, then they wondered if each song on the album could have its own artwork. The most interesting part about the project is that both artists worked on their pieces independently and in parallel, coming together later to piece the album and its art together, almost like a mosaic — with Chiba making the art in Bilbao, Spain, and Wykes developing his music in Bengaluru, India. As they sat down over meetings held on video calls, they put their heads together, piecing it together one song at a time.

On an individual level, both the artists' creative process of making their independent works that came together for this album were quite different. For Wykes it was an attempt to take the pressure off making tracks and reach the very pith of his music making process. “A lot of this was heavily improvised, and I stripped my recording process way down. I'd produced multiple EPs before but never gone as far as a full album — that felt like a mental block. So I stayed away from any DAW; it was just a drum machine and my guitar." And after working at this for three months the exercise transformed into a practice.

Meanwhile for Chiba, it was a continuation of the rigorous drawing practice sustained over many years. Even though his work extends to multiple disciplines, he believes some of his most important work has emerged from his journals. Something about its tactility and ability to start anew with every page resonates with him. “Turning the page is an important act: every page turn is like a small switch flipping. It's a way to draw fresh each time — if I'm in a chaotic mood, or a very colorful one, turning the page is a literal (and mental) blank slate,” he says.  

Even though their work started separately, in different cities and with different disciplines, stitching it together afterward took real, deliberate effort — days of work, including an Excel sheet to track parallels between tracks and drawings. Since neither piece was made in response to the other, finding the overlaps meant closely listening to a track and then working through the drawings to find a matching one. It doubled as its own creative exercise: listening to the music and visually breaking down the artwork in tandem. And that is why this project stands out — we see a lot of intersectional collaborative works, but working together to make sense of each other's art, and putting together something so unique that honours both original works, is what makes it stand out.

I wrote this article while listening to the album, and before that spent half an hour going through its art, and started my workday by speaking with them about Loops. And I can say with utmost certainty that I very rarely quite come across a project this unique in its dedication and desire to capitalise not just on the moment of artistic eureka, but also on the friendships needed to create something beautiful. So yes, my takeaway from this was: make more art with your friends, and support independent artists.

Listen to the album on Bandcamp here, and you can also get stickers of the multiple album cover art pieces on their playable website here.

Follow Aayush Wykes and Mohammed Chiba on Instagram.

If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:

Shubhang Ojha's Artwork Turns Bengaluru's BMTC Bus Into A Living Portrait Of The City

Sakré & Galat Admi Sing The Blues For A World That Paid Them No Mind

Sunflower Tape Machine Talks White Boy Music & The Lost Art Of Being A Loser