In this post I will be answering questions I've gotten about Tarot Tapes 0 and I. A big thank you to everyone who has taken time to listen to the two volumes so far. I am simultaneously flattered and humbled by everyone who takes the time to listen and shares their thoughts and questions. Probing for answers and meaning in it all is a bit part of what makes this project continuously motivating for me. And additional viewpoints and questions help deepen my own understanding of what I'm making.
So with that all said, thank you to everyone who has so far taken time to listen to my projects and giving me questions to answer
Why Tarot Cards?
Music, at its core, is arcane and ceremonial. It's a blend of ritual, mystery, and personal reflections. It weaves together mathematical and personal concepts that are spiritual and unknowable. Music requires both knowledge and intuition to create. Like language, music can conjure vivid imagery, moods, memories, and emotions, acting as a form of magic in its own right. As a musician, I’m particularly drawn to instrumental music’s ability to craft immersive settings and evoke deep feelings without relying on lyrics.
The archetypes within Tarot offer a rich and nuanced framework for musical exploration. Each card serves as a complex creative prompt, inviting introspection and interpretation far beyond what is often found in typical writing exercises, such as “write about a time you were sad” or “write about a moment of bravery.” Tarot’s archetypes—like The Fool, The Tower, or The Star—carry layers of universal and personal meaning, demanding a deeper engagement with emotion, symbolism, and narrative.
By structuring a larger project around these archetypes, I'm trying to push my ability to communicate complex concepts through instrumental music. The constraints of each card’s symbolism provide a unique challenge: to translate their essence into soundscapes that resonate with listeners on an intuitive level. Committing to so such a wide array of musical vibes has already repeatedly pushed me outside my creative comfort zone and I think I've been made stronger by that experience.
While other projects may be defined by a narrative goal, explorations in genre or tonality; the Tarot Tapes are one part instrumental autobiographical explorations. When writing about complex archetypal subjects, it inherently becomes a personal meditation as well. I can only understand and interpret these symbols through the lens of my own lived experience. The process becomes not just composition, but reflective.
Why AI 'Art'?
There are a few reasons that I decided to go with AI assisted imagery for my cover art on this project. First, while I know that to some this is a hot topic, I genuinely find it fun and interesting to experiment with. A big part of my day job in digital media is understanding the changing landscape of technology around web and media development. So for a long time before image diffusion, large language models and even chatbots ever existed, it was something of a professional expectation that I view emergent tech in the space as something to stay excited for. Digital Media is filled with talented, polymath people, and I think more than a lot of other industries we tend to look at new tools that make things easier and faster for more people as opportunities to include more people in more mediums. So it's my perspective that generative imagery is a thing that allows a whole new group of people to tap into exploring and imagining visual imagery without the need of years of experience or the cost restrictive nature of commissioning an actual designer or artist. This doesn't mean that I am blind to the upset that this causes to real, traditional artists and their industry. But it's my view that generative imagery makes true art and the people who are talented and committed enough to create it more valuable, not less.
I don't think that generative images are right for every project. But for a project that has a planned 26 parts that I don't expect to make a bunch of money from, it is right for this project. Though, moving forward with other releases, I will be committing to other medium for their covers. I have 3 more projects planned for the rest of 2025 - the next Tartot tape, which will use a similar illustrated look, an EP that will use a piece of graphic design that I have made with Marmocet Hexels, and an LP with a photo I took. Generative images are a tool, not the tool.
My Process for Cover Images
All that said, the covers I've so far used for Tarot Tape 0 and 1 both took a lot of time and effort to get to a place I was happy with. I create these images locally using Comfy UI and the Flux.1 model. I start with hundred of iterations of a finalized prompt that I build up over time. There are then hundreds more iterations utilizing inpainting techniques to regenerate small portions of the image one at a time. The Magician cover took about 600 iterations of a seed-based randomized image from the prompt, followed by another 350 iterations of inpainting small sections that I masked off by hand and iterated one at a time. When all was said and done, I was approaching version 1000. It was then that I got started hand painting fixes and details on an upscaled 4096x4096 version.
Here is the delta layer of what I painted by hand
Its my goal to interact with the tool and use it in a way to create something new and visually interesting. I'm not hung up on the idea of thinking of this as 'my art'. If anything, it's AI assisted graphic design. But my main goal here is to communicate that I don't simply prompt and post - this is work that I spend time on and try to develop my own skills with, and that is what I enjoy about the tools. For this project, I've had a lot of fun learning about the tools and figuring out interesting ways of working with them - not using them to plop out a finished product.
With all of that said, I am trying my best moving forward to tap into other tools and creative workflows for other projects. The specific things that I'm trying to accomplish with the covers for the Tarot Tapes make generative imagery a good fit. But I've also had a lot of fun creating the art for other upcoming projects using other tools, and don't plan to utilize generative imagery for everything that I make.
Other Projects
Tarot Tape I will most likely be the last chapter of this project for 2025. It was my goal this year to finish a few of my entries from Jamnuary 2025 and turn them into complete songs. As of now, my goal is to complete 2 more unrelated project in 2025 - An ambient EP and an LP that will be something different in my own style. This will allow me time to study and reflect on the next few cards and their meanings, and use the cards as weekly prompts during the month of January while I'm creating every day for Jamnuary 2026 with Seed to Stage. Moving forward, I plan on doing a consistent rotation of a Tarot Tape release followed by an unrelated release for something else I'd like to work on and explore.
On a related note, I've gotten a lot of good feedback about putting out patch banks and other resources along with my releases, and I think that I will continue to do this with future releases moving forward. Tarot Tape 0 and I's patch banks for Arturia Pigments are available for download with their Bandcamp releases OR as standalone versions on the Spooqs Gumroad as pay-what-you-want. Check em out!
Thanks for reading! I'm excited to share my next release, 'Biomes' with you soon!
