About Sound & Color
A new world hangs / Outside the window / Beautiful and strange
Have you ever just stared at a painting? Studied it? Envisioned the moment and purpose of the placement of each blob and stroke, discerned its story or developed your own personal canon around it? Imagined its provenance, the journey by which it came through time to arrive to you?
It’s a great meditative practice and a solid way to lose an afternoon. My story Margeaux Poppins: Monster Hunter at Sunday Morning Transport was a result of me doing exactly this.
Bonus: there’s no AI.
Alabama Shakes's 2015 sophomore album Sound & Color featured a track by the same name, in which lead singer Brittany Howard introduced us to the perspective of a wistful astronaut far from home, creating science-fiction in verse and having that story told through the track's music video.
Similarly, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of our collective memory is likely Mickey Mouse in Disney’s Fantasia (1940). In 1897, composer Paul Dukas wrote L'apprenti sorcier, a piece of music based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 poem Der Zauberlehrling. Here, we have poetry inspiring music inspiring artists inspiring animators… now inspiring a magazine. And for all the side-eyeing Disney deserves, these interpretations across mediums are the reason a 200+ year-old poem endures.
Sound & Color Magazine is my love letter to analog storytelling. Here we'll take a similar approach of using text-less storytelling artforms and interpreting them in prose. Each issue will center on a shared piece of music in any genre or art in a visual medium: paintings, photography. The stories selected for publication will have interpreted or used the piece to inspire an imaginative narrative work of speculative fiction using elements of science-fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, or any of their associated subgenres.
"A.I." has come for visual arts and music the same way it has for literature. The magazine seeks to be a love letter to human creativity, solidarity, and collaboration. As such, works created by generative "A.I." or LLM (large language model) services or applications such as ChatGPT or Claude will not find a home here.