Focus On Art: Geoff McFetridge

Geoff McFetridge is a graphic designer and visual artist based in Los Angeles. He was born in Calgary, Canada and received his BFA from the local Alberta College of Design. Geoff continued his education at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, receiving his MFA in 1995. In 1996, Geoff established Champion Gra.phics his own graphic design studio in Atwater, California.

The breadth of Geoff's work covers designs for magazines, posters, t-shirts, textiles, motion graphics and advertising as well as film production. In his most recent work for HP, Geoff created a motion graphics piece about nanotechnology that is embedded withamusing inside jokes that only nano-scientists will understand. For the restof us less nano-minded, we can delight in the visual pleasure of his graphics.

 

Focus On Music: French Synth Wave

Synth pop is a style of popular music in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. While it might be argued that most current popular and commercial music in the industrialized world is realized via electronic instruments, synth pop has its own stylistic tendencies which differentiate it from other music produced by the same means. These include: the exploitation of artificiality (the synthesizers are not used to imitate acoustic instruments), the use of mechanical rhythms and "feel", the use of vocal arrangements as a counterpoint to the artificiality of the instruments, and the use of ostinato patterns as an effect. Synth pop song forms are generally the same as in "regular" pop music. Lyrically, synth pop has an affection for science-fiction themes.

Synth pop is sometimes referred to as electropop although electropop is generally regarded to be a particular style of synth pop that flourished during the early 1980s most closely associated with the post-punk New Wave music scene.

Several of these bands in the 1980s were quite successful. None of the newer acts have had more than a modicum of commercial success in the United States, although some have done very well in Europe, South America, and/or Asia.

Synth pop is increasingly used in gothic and industrial circles to describe various dark electronic artists, particularly those in the electronic body music and futurepop genres. It is otherwise generally used in its more classic sense, referring to early 1980s synthesizer driven pop acts (e.g., Depeche Mode, Erasure) as well as a variety of New Romantic pop acts from the same era (e.g., Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet).

Below we focus on the French New Wave Movement
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