Kulture Galerie: When Music Meet Visual Arts

Kulture Galerie started as a mix series from London-based duo Metropolitan Soul Museum. The show’s concept is to invite guest artists to play home listening music sharing a variety of influences, cultures, and different dichotomies with the same form of expression. The various artists releases that will follow each year, will include 6 original tracks from the 6 artists involved in the shows.

« Kulture Galerie Year 1 » includes 6 tracks from the first guests of the series: HRZL (Herzel, from Hivern Discs, Uncanny Valley), Deeprhythms, Aspetuck, Adam Stromstedt, K-Dallas under his Exo Ghost moniker and finally an original track from Metropolitan Soul Museum.

In order to present this release, and given the name of the project, we asked to all artists from the compilation to chose one work of visual art that would visually reflects or translate what they have in mind when creating their music. It can be a photograph, a painting, an illustration, a digital creation, a sculpture or even an art installation.

The result is quite diverse and surprising, featuring architecture photography, impressionism and surrealism paintings, and more. Discover the selection below.

« The New Industrial Parks is part of a monographic series developed in the 1970s wherein the artist Lewis Baltz deals with wide-ranging cultural and philosophical questions about industrial zones in the urban landscape. By focusing his attention on the familiar, Baltz created a powerful work in his critical photographic approach to the built environment.

This concept of building surfaces and textures into composition is a huge inspiration and a guideline in my abstract synthesis works. That tension between the subject and the formal beauty of the composition gives the true power to the sound itself. » – HRZL

« I chose a photo instead of a painting because I’m a photographer and therefore my music is very intertwined with photography. I’ve found that the two creative outlets really complement each other nicely. I often use my own photos as artwork & I tend to kind of daydream visually when I’m making music. Listening to / thinking about music also tends to inspire my photography.

I stumbled upon this photo a few months ago from an artist named Eduard Sánchez Ribot who I wasn’t familiar with before I stumbled upon this one particular shot on instagram. It really stood out to me because it looks like something very abstract, like a painting. It’s the kind of photo you see quickly and are not really sure how it was captured, which is one of the things I love so much about photography. I think it’s just his hand in front of the lens creating that big orange blob but the tone of the color and the motion / depth of field turns something obvious into something a lot more interesting which I really love.

This is something I try to achieve with my music – abstract moods, textures, feelings, worlds to kind of get lost in – which is something I think at least for me happened with Where’s My Waterbottle. It has a lot of wacky, spaced-out sounds and you don’t really know where the song is going to take you. When I listen to it, it takes me to this sublime, meditative place in my head which is a similar feeling this photo gives me. » – Aspetuck

« Pretty self explanatory. » – Adam Stromstedt

« If my track was a painting, it would be this one, by Mary Hayes. It’s a cute ghost and so is my track. In my opinion the ghost in the painting is not a hunting ghost but a ghost that would be teasing you at home… like turning on and off lights or hide your car keys when you are in a hurry. The ghost sound is made from my Roland Alpha Juno, and it prettt much looks as faded as that ghost in the painting. » – Exo man

« There is something so nostalgic about the Haystacks series painted by Monet and that same feeling is reflected in some of the melodies of the track. We felt deeply inspired by the calming atmospheres of the painting. » – Metropolitan Soul Museum