Motor Manual: Daniel Blumberg

A few weeks back I spoke to Daniel Blumberg, former member of Indie grunge group Yuck, about his new trippy outfit Hebronix. Having only left the band weeks before, he informed me – dosed up to the eyeballs in a heady mix of prescription painkillers, soothing the pain of a motorcycle crash – about his new collection of drawings, released to accompany his new record Viral. The drawings are a sharp, two-wheeled turn away from the psychedelic sounds for which Blumberg is known.

The collection of grotesque, twisting figures – Daniel's latest addition to his artists' portfolio – was described as a "motorcycle manual". The book is a wonderland of images, surreal and expressive and partially inspired by Orkney Islands artist Brendan Covert. It's not much help in fixing a bike though. When I asked how he learnt to draw, he replied, “I didn’t. I just started to draw,” and it’s in this primitive lack of training that the magic of his child-like images lies. The book was released alongside the album Unreal, on the 8th of July via ATP Records, and according to Daniel, "frames the Hebronix record". They were sketched during the creation of the album – in fact, he explains how “some of them were even completed in the studio whilst recording". It seems that for Daniel, drawing and music go hand-in-hand. His nightmare-in-colour, Dali-like characters run parallel with the hallucinatory visions in the video to Viral. Both seem inspired by trippy experimentation and a sense of subconscious investigation.

Distributed by Motto, 'Motorcycle Manual' is available now.