Drawing Music: Mayo Bous

Mayo Bous
20.12.2023
5 minutes reading

Music is as much a part of my existence as oxygen or water; I simply can't live without it. I'm always looking for a chance to try my hand at making music, whether it's playing guitar in blackouts or doing (incipient) sound design for a project.

As a consumer I feel that I am very non-conformist, I try to listen to something new all the time. I treasure the songs that I have already discovered and that have been an important part of my life, but I can't always listen to the same thing. I have an imperious need to discover new music, from unexpected places, or old music, from eras that I revisit because I overlooked certain artists.

I was fortunate to grow up in a very musical family. My father and brother are both musicians, and from a very early age I had a very consistent musical education. I think my first relationship that resembled something professional was "designing" (and I put it in quotes because at that time I had no idea what designing was) the posters for their presentations. Eventually I joined his band, although I didn't last long there, because among other things I started a career in design and chose to be more of a designer than a musician.

However, everything I learned during that time I constantly apply to my work as an illustrator. The environment undergroundthe instruments and clothing, the feeling of being on stage, are things that I love to translate into illustrations. This has naturally led me to collaborate with dissimilar music projects, from recording studios like BandEra Studio, to bands and artists like Ruy Adrián López-Nussa and Thomas Laffont, to magazines like Magazine AM:PM. For these works I find inspiration almost everywhere, but mostly in the music that the project in question is about. Depending on the genre I usually look for similar records and try to guess why the people who designed them translated their songs into those images so capriciously, and so I find ways that make sense to me. If the project is not to design a record and has more to do with some historical or social reference, I take on the task of investigating all that context and put together a reference board and try to mix it with music figures. I don't know, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure I have a particular source of inspiration. I think it has to do a lot with the relationship of the music with the project itself and the images that can be gestated in that sense.

Two of the three permanent jobs I currently have are directly related to music. One would think that, of course, since I have to deal with it on a daily basis, I have no choice but to have it present all the time, everywhere. But it's the other way around, I got to those places precisely because I look for music in everything, it's something I can't avoid. Almost all my personal projects also have to do with music. Even when I'm doodling in my (very few) free time I imagine a soundtrack for those doodles. Even when the lights go out and it's night and I can't see (and therefore, I can't draw), for my mental health I have to grab the guitar or the ukulele and start doodling with their notes.

I'm not going to say that I listen to everything, but my playlist is quite eclectic and is constantly growing, I'm always discovering new songs that are worth gold for me. I think my favorite band is Dream Theater but, to tell you the truth, video game music is a must. They have it all: from classical music, through jazz and rock and all its subgenres. But in addition, they are so well done (even the ones from chiptune) that from their own designs have been meticulously and scientifically composed to stick in your head. Definitely my favorite artists are Yasunori Mitsuda, Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo. Obviously, I have many more favorite artists, but the list would be devilishly long and, in the end, the ones I mentioned here have a (very strong) influence from all of them -like Kansas and Friendship, for example.

What record would I take with me to a desert island? That would be Octavarium, by Dream Theater. Besides the fact that it's an album that reminds me of Jennifer Ancizar, every single song is a masterpiece, in my opinion. What artist or band that I haven't worked with yet would I like to design/illustrate for? Also Dream Theater, definitely.