Melissa Guion is a musician, graphic designer, radio DJ, and multidisciplinary artist from New Orleans, LA. She makes music under the moniker MJ Guider, performing nationally and internationally, and releasing music on Kranky, Constellation Tatsu, and most recently modemain - an imprint she launched to serve as a conduit for future collaboration and collective contribution as well as her own music releases through multimedia editions. She founded the experimental radio program Night Gallery on WTUL and produces visual work across a variety of mediums.

This past week I’ve mainly been working on a couple of design projects. One is for a forthcoming collaboration between a musician and a photographer. I love doing artwork for music releases in any format, and this one involves multiple releases in multiple formats. For all its many parts, the goal is primarily to feature the work of the collaborating artists in ways that accentuate what makes it interesting and unique in the context of each individual piece. The materials are all there, and I’m shaping them into sheets, shells, sleeves, and circles so they can be brought into the physical world in a way that serves the work best. A less splashy way of saying that is that it’s mostly a layout project.

I’ve been thinking a lot about source materials and their significance. Sourcing images that resonate with whatever or whoever I’m designing for is usually how things start. For my first LP Precious Systems (released 5 years ago this week!) I was designing for myself, so I created the cover image with two family photos - one my uncle took of Bayou Boeuf that my dad used to have tacked up on his apartment wall in his 20’s, and another of my mother in a park in El Salvador. Both photos were taken around 1970, and both translated to something personal and prescient that helped me say something about what was behind the LP sleeve.

In more recent work, I’ve designed the first artist tee release for Southern Heat Exchange! To illustrate self-expression, collaboration, and the cyclical nature of making art, the design is my version of The World tarot card. For this, I used photos of a Marcel Boucher brooch, a “blue whirl flame,” and the other 3 classical elements: air, earth, and water. I love how the human form looks when cast in metal, the details smoothed over in a way that makes for a good canvas. The brooch of a hand holding a torch made an ideal stand-in for the batons held aloft on the tarot card. I swiped the image of it from Etsy if you have a spare $2k and would like to own the real thing. The torches in the design are connected by a single blue whirl flame, a type of fire that combines multiple distinct flames into one. The result, like a good collaboration, is particularly striking. Editor’s note: We’re very excited about this! Visit our Shop/Support link to view the tee and matches from Melissa’s design.

1942 Marcel Boucher liberty torch fur clip

Most often I use images found in books, online, or that I’ve snapped in the world as source materials. They get printed, sliced up, drawn on, scanned, re-colored, or otherwise modified while building something new with them. I take a similar approach with sounds when writing music, though besides field recordings I never sample anyone but myself (not yet, anyway). I’m always on the search for new sources…eyes and ears open, bookshelves and storage drives full.