The Breedling
Digital distortion meets eel based gloomcore
Chris Spalton is The Breedling, a gloomcore artist creating atmospheric digital soundscapes inspired the folklore of the Fens, and designed to install a sense of impending doom. Did we mention eels, there's lot's of eels.
We built a website for the launch of his second album Detritus. A web-based visualisation tool to match the album artwork. It programatically generates up to 10 thousand possible combinations of digital grunge, like an underworld version of Windows Media Player from the 90's.
The magic under the hood
The main visualisation is a heady mix of tech that ranges from video assets, Rive meshes, custom WebGL shaders and an experimental composition library by the BBC. The magic is in the optimisation, allowing for such a heavy stack while remaining performant and without crippling the browser.
Bringing the album artwork to life using Rive
We took the incredible cover art (illustrated by James Brindley) and turned it into a suite of animated assets that function as the hero focal points for the visualisation. We divided up the key art into smaller focal points to get the most value out of the main asset.
We cut up the raster artwork, adding elements where it was needed, and brought them to life using Rive; rigging, animating and boiling - all using State Machines. The result is complex series of overlapping loops without a bloated file size.
Rounding out the functionality
The UI requirements for a site like this were minimal. Our focus was to make sure we carried over the same approach we applied to the main visualisation. This meant crafting buttons that have a distorted boiling effect on hover.
Adding a loader was inevitable – the site pre-loads the visualisation assets meaning you can continue to watch it if your connection drops. But we made sure that the loading animation was technically accurate. No fake 2 second loading bars here. Those percentages reflect actual load times.
Finding the right fonts
The Breedling have been using our typeface Thorben for a few years now, and we think it's a fantastic pairing to match the mix of modernism and darkness of the music.
