One of the big reasons I ended up going with the word Nonagon was the potential for interesting imagery. To save you the trouble of looking it up, a Nonagon is a 9-sided polygon, either regular (all equal angles and side lengths) or irregular (nine sides connected end-to-end to enclose a space, but with no angle or side length requirements). More technical details can be found here. A nine-sided polygon by itself isn't a particularly compelling visual construction to me, but I think some interesting things could be done with it. Also of note: a regular nonagon can be represented by the symbol {9}, which is simple yet enigmatic enough to really appeal to me as a shorthand representation for the band name. So I've got a couple of starting points for this next stage of development.
If you didn't see it coming, this is the part where I ask the few readers of this blog if they'd care to pitch in ideas and designs for Nonagon's logo and visual "eco-system". I have a lot of very talented friends, and the help would be greatly appreciated. No need to worry about pitches- just send me your sketches, photoshops, found images, thoughts, or anything else you'd like to contribute. It'd be great if you feel comfortable posting in comments here, but email's also just fine with me. To kick things off, here are a few images that I find really "speak" to me and the feel I'm trying to go for:
Right now I'm not too concerned with what the images we come up with will be used for: album art, "song" art, band logo, inspirational content- it's all good to me, I just want to start developing some visual ideas to go along with the aural ones I've already got.
As far as the sound-to-image relationship: for the most part I don't feel that I've achieved the sound I'm going for with this project yet. I've explored a lot of territory, and I feel that I'm getting closer to what I want, but there's still a ways to go. Of the current library of tracks, the two that are "closest" to what I think I'm moving towards are Process of Illumination and South Without A Candle, so if you decide to pitch in and help, those might be the best tracks to play ideas off of. I'm working on something new that I think will trump both of those in terms of edit-distance to my "goal" sound, but it could be a couple of weeks before it's ready, so we should start with what we've got and go from there! Having a name has definitely helped me to focus myself and move towards homing in on a style that I can consider my own. Hopefully the sound and the visual representations we come up with here can evolve in synchrony towards something a little more cohesive than what I've produced up to this point... I guess we'll see how it goes.
P.S. It should be stated that I haven't received permission to officially use any of the above images, so anything you come up with that uses them directly will have to be considered unofficial for now. Other artists have rights too (I guess).
