The members of Wilmington, Del.’s Spinto Band have been playing together since the mid-1990s, when they were still in high school. A decade and a half later finds Nick Krill (vocals/guitar), Thomas Hughes (bass/vocals), Jeffrey Hobson (drums), Sam Hughes (keyboards), Joey Hobson (guitar) perfecting pop sounds on the recent full-length, Shy Pursuit, in their newly built recording studio, scoring films, starting a record label and searching for the perfect cup of coffee. They will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Krill.
Nick Krill interviews printer Bryan Christopher Baker.
Krill: What led you to use dice in the printing process? Do you have to modify the printing press or the dice in order to use them?
Baker: I have been doing traditional letterpress printing for quite a long time, by that I mean making prints using handset type and hand-carved blocks, and I had begun working heavily patterned backgrounds into the compositions a bunch of my poster work. One day I was struck with the idea of handling dice as if they were just Iike lead or wood type. With a little finesse I was able to boost an array of the them up to the right height for inking and printing directly off their surface. What followed was a whole body of work that explored various notions about luck, order, disorder, control, organic/inorganic structures—all brought forth from the astronomically high number for possibilities found when tumbling around a large field these simple units.
What other foreign objects have you used to make prints?
I played around with a whole lot of stuff, but it truly got exciting when I ran a class over at the Center for Book Arts, over in Manhattan, called Alternatives to Type. We were making prints with everything from candy, piano keys and record albums to band aids and bunion-relief pads. The dice prints are still my favorite though because of their inherent connotations.
I saw some of your earlier prints using blocks of wood. I noticed that in those prints there was a sense of pattern and repetition made by the wood grain, and there is certainly a good deal of pattern and repetition in the dice prints. Is this something you are drawn to? If so, what makes it interesting for you to explore?
Yes, just before the dice prints I was cutting a lot of wood blocks into geometric forms, and their growth rings were purposefully being countered with very straight lines and snug angles. I really enjoy finding ways to express microscopic forces of nature that interacting or colliding with one another.
Last year you moved your whole print shop from New York to Detroit. How has that transition been? What is it like living and working in Detroit at this moment? Has the city inspired any new work? Did you lose any letterpress letters during the move?
Detroit has been great; there are loads of people over here to work with who are excited about the printshop I have just set up. The new studio has a very open and collaborative aspect to it which has folks coming in to work directly beside me on the presses. I luckily didn’t lose track of much type in the move, but my new friends are definitely “finding” new ways of putting things away. It’ll all get sorted back out. I am having a blast.
See some of Baker’s prints after the jump.
