about short
I am Jon - born in south London, residing in East Devon, southwest England with my wife.
CURVEBALL is a moniker for my music and art compositions, borne from a serious life curveball.
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The idea to create a work of art for each published music work led me into designing digital artworks, multi-influenced by my passion for Seurat, Riley, Rothko, Richter and many others, as well as my geometric and colour-centric brain!
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CURVEBALL art is abstract, patterned, minimalistic, and at times optical, though not all at the same time and created using Actual Intelligence.​​
music
CURVEBALL music sits somewhere in the middle of electronic, classical, progressive and alternative music. The denomination 'Curveball' originated with my wife. She realised that the music I was composing was a reaction to a serious life trauma that we had experienced as a family.
In my early teens, the epiphany of 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' led to a plummet in any interest in pop music and to the purchase of a guitar. Years later, a need for solace and catharsis started a journey into composition and an album recorded in a local studio in Essex.
It wasn't very good. My musicianship was amateur, but the compositions were promising. It certainly helped me to establish my niche in music by being honest with myself - my abilities in composition, score writing and production were marginally better than performance.
Some time ago, on releasing music to BandCamp I tried to provide a genre or definition of the works, as above, but listed some notable influences in alphabetic order to help the potential listener know what to expect:​​
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Abba America Aphex Twin Bach Barber John Barry Beatles Bjork Dave Brubeck David Bowie Can Cinematic Orchestra Elgar Genesis Goldfrapp Gorecki Handel PJ Harvey Kraftwerk Lamb LCD Soundsystem Leftfield Massive Attack Mogwai John Murphy Gary Numan Pearl Jam Pink Floyd Radiohead Rodrigo Rush Saint-Saens Stereolab TalkTalk Underworld Who Vaughan Williams Yes Neil Young
art
​CURVEBALL art has been created using Actual Intelligence.​​
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It was borne from an obvious desire to have artwork for the albums and individual tracks. The main streaming platform I use is BandCamp which has thumbnails allowing for designs associated with the tracks.
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I started releasing EPs and they were named WON, TOO, FREE and FOR. You can probably see what I did there!
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The main artwork for WON, TOO and FOR was provided by my great photographer friend, James Aitken. Gratitude goes to D'Arcy Gue for permitting CURVEBALL to use her extraordinary artwork Garden of Eden: Reflection as the cover art for FREE.
The early works in the portfolio #1 - 22 correlate to all 22 tracks of the eponymous CURVEBALL album.
As the portfolio has grown, there has been a trend towards an abstract aesthetic. I'm not entirely sure why.
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Perhaps it's because I'm not entirely happy with my own reality, or that of mankind and the planet in general. Most of the works emanate from photography and experimentation. Photographs are abstracted, often beyond recognition, stylised or made surreal. Some people who have seen my art are fascinated with what it is. Does it mean something? How did he do it? Of course others are not fascinated!
This harmonises with my music and its 'sine voce' character. I love the Felix Mendelssohn quote:
"People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, that it leaves them in such doubt as to what they are supposed to think, whereas words can be understood by everyone. But to me it seems exactly the opposite."
I personally love immersive music and art that doesn't have a programmed meaning. It is unambiguous, allowing for self-interpretation. Perhaps that's why abstraction is important to me.
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