Vivid Rush
Breaking it down hardcore style like it’s 1989!
Summary
Vivid Rush is a love letter to the many genres of Old School (OS) EDM such as Jungle, DnB, House, Trance, Dub, Breakbeat, etc. The project was its own entity for several years with a YouTube channel that existed in the same vein of outlets such as Craig's Crates and Sub Bass Frenzy or other music promotion / music library channels. The idea was to create a space where people could explore the distinct sounds of the past and also find modern music that replicates that era of music. Originally it started out as just a mirror index for OS Jungle Music, but it eventually became a wide scale project that also involved me designing apparel graphics for the project as well. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Vivid Rush YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
The creation process for Vivid Rush largely revolved around brand design and graphics restoration. Sourcing the album art, vinyl art, and other graphics for various tracks was somewhat of a struggle since often many of the materials are out of print or not properly archived for historical viewing. This meant taking whatever visuals I could scavenge and manually remastering them via various processes such as vector tracing, Photoshop matching, and resolution upscaling. In addition to refreshing the graphics, I also was engaged in producing the branding elements for the project which naturally had overlap with experimentation in apparel graphics. Aside from graphic design, there was also some audio engineering involved for remastering the sound quality of the music tracks or mixing them together to create blended sets. Those sets largely contained tracks that had already been individually shared.
Reflection
Vivid Rush was one of the more involved projects that I have produced since it saw me working across both virtual and physical mediums, combining both print and digital in the design process. Bringing concepts from paper to computer to the fabric of a shirt or translating an over-compressed vinyl label into a high quality 4K vector image was incredibly satisfying and informative. This project is one of the older ones that really laid the ground work for future experiments and web projects.