Landland on the (illustrated) art of music
As the creative forces behind Landland, Dan Black and Jessica Seamans hand-draw prints that are warm yet bleak, but overall, spellbinding. You can ogle at each one for hours.
The two artists frequently draw inspiration from their Midwestern home base to create immersive illustrations for notable artists, such as Bon Iver, Kishi Bashi, and the Dave Matthews Band.
We spoke with Black and Seamans about how the studio got started, how they work with bands for their music posters, why they created their small record label, and what’s next for the studio.
How did the two of you meet?
DB: We had a kind of funny thing happen, where I made my first actual tour poster for this band Sweep the Leg Johnny, and they took them out to sell on tour. Jes was living in Seattle at the time and bought one of these posters at their show, and emailed the contact info on the back to see if I could give her a job or an internship. She was moving back to Minneapolis soon, and I’d faked like I was a big company doing real work. She’d called my bluff, because actually, I was just a kid making posters in my living room and breaking into the printshop at the college I’d dropped out of (before I went back). I told her “no,” but then when she ended up moving back, she got asked by a mutual friend to join a band that I was in, and then we started hanging out a bunch after that. And later, we found out that years before all of that, our old bands actually played an out-of-town show together up in St. Cloud. I don’t think we met that day, but essentially what I’m saying is that it was pre-determined that we’d end up friends, and now we’re stuck this way.
Black and Seamans in the Landland studio.
Before you created Landland in 2007, what were your day jobs?
DB: I was doing branding work at Target and hating it. I was trying to do illustration and design work on the side, and there wasn’t ever enough time to do everything. I was working there with a friend named Matt Zaun, who I’d worked with at a copy shop before we both got Target jobs. We both sorta made a blood pact to save up enough money to start a screenprinting studio together and figure out how to make posters. It took a while to fully transition to doing Landland full-time.
JS: I didn’t go to college and had been working service industry jobs since I was 13. Dan and I have actually been designing and screen-printing posters together since probably ’02 or ’03, working out of apartments and basements and wherever we could get someone to let us set up our weird, makeshift shop. During the time that we’ve worked together, including pre-Landland, I’ve worked in restaurants and grocery stores and places like that. In 2007, when Dan and Matt got serious and found a real, dedicated studio and came up with the name Landland, I was actually sort of drifting around, not totally sure what I wanted to do with myself.
What drove you two to leave your jobs for Landland?
DB: We started getting asked to do design and printing work on a more regular basis, and it was interfering with my day job. It started to feel like we could do enough of this without having to worry about losing the steady paycheck. It didn’t take a whole lot of money to live in Minneapolis, and both Matt and I had spent a couple years at Target putting a decent amount aside to build our studio and operate for about six months without any clients if we had to. It seemed like the time to jump out and do our own thing, and when a studio space opened up in a building we had friends in, we took it as a perfect sign.
“It was pre-determined that we’d end up friends, and now we’re stuck this way.”
JS: My main passion at that time was my band, but I had temporarily moved to San Francisco to feel out whether I wanted to relocate when Matt died unexpectedly. Dan asked me to be part of Landland full-time. I didn’t feel ready to take the plunge and stop working a side job until 2010 or so. Until then, I was a house cleaner by day and would then go work into the wee hours at the studio, probably shaving years off of my life.
How do you typically start working with artists? Who approaches whom?
DB: Most of the time, we end up getting an email from a band’s management. Sometimes I’ll reach out to someone if they’re about to go on tour and it’s a band that I’m dying to work with, but usually, work just shows up in our inbox (at least for now). They ask if we’re available, and we ask them a bunch of questions about what they need. If we’re totally unfamiliar with the band, we’ll do some research to figure out what their deal is.
JS: We both started doing posters for our own bands and for our friends’ bands, more or less for free and the pure pleasure of it. I think that sort of naturally evolved into us working for ever-so-slightly bigger local bands, which helped us build a portfolio, which we put online, which led to national bands hiring us. We’ve both approached bands that are personal favorites, but honestly, a lot of the work we’ve done started with management approaching us.
How do you come up with each poster’s concept? Do you work extensively with each band?
DB: It can come from all sorts of things. Sometimes, bands have a really specific direction, or they point toward previous things that we’ve made, which usually determines whether it’s me or Jes doing the work, or both of us. Sometimes they’re really hands-on, but a lot of times they’ll ask us a few questions and then leave us to do our thing. We usually ask if there’s anything they don’t want us to do, because all bands have a list of things they’re sick of seeing. It’s usually ideas that are a literal read of their band name or lyrics. Once we know what they don’t want, that frees us up to figure out what we should be doing.
I usually try to grab subtle nods and come up with imagery that feels like it could exist within the same world as what they’re doing with their albums or other visuals. We’re also really conscious about working on our own body of work as well, so whatever we end up doing sorta has to hit both points.
What’s your creation process like? How much of your work is hand-drawn, and how much of it is done digitally?
DB: Generally, the process starts with us sketching up ideas, which we send to the band so we’ve got something to talk about. From there, we either make changes based on their feedback, or proceed with it as it is and just dive into the detailed final drawing. That part takes the longest, way longer than printing or anything else.
For my part, everything I do starts out as an analog drawing, and then once that’s done, I scan it in and do all of the color work digitally. With my stuff, everything that looks like a drawing is hand-drawn, and all of the digital work is done behind the scenes.
JS: We both do the vast majority of what would be considered the drawing by hand. I know I avoid having to draw digitally at all costs, although sometimes I make minor edits that way. I do use the computer to do a lot of the color though, and to prep the image for screen printing.
What inspired you to create Landland Is Not a Record Label?
JS: That’s all Dan, so I’m going to let him take that one :)
DB: I just like making things. The record label is more of an expensive hobby than anything else, but it’s fun for me to go through all of the steps of producing and releasing records. I’m fortunate to be surrounded by friends who make things that are exciting to put out into the world. There are a lot of parts to “running a label” that I’m not great at, or not as interested in, so I’m always upfront about what I can and can’t do for people before we get going on something.
Are there any upcoming projects you plan on working on in 2018 or beyond?
DB: We’re about to release a weird, limited edition of Field Notes that is a collaboration between us, Mondo, Aaron Draplin, and Burlesque of North America. We’re really excited about it.
We’re going to try to focus on doing more art prints this year, or just work in general, that isn’t tied to bands or anything else, and hopefully a few more movie posters for Mondo.
JS: I am diving back in to a project I started many years ago — a series of art prints based on folklore from around the world. It sort of covers all my favorite bases: research, depicting imaginary realms, nature stuff, weird animals.
DB: We had a really crazy year last year with making a ton of posters and doing pretty much every in-person booth event that came our way. I’m hoping our output is a little more chilled-out this year. Then again, I think I’ve said that every year for the past 7 or 8 years, so who really knows?
Ogle Landland’s work, and read on for Dan and Jessica’s 12 songs.
I have an older cousin who had always been my gateway to finding out about music, whether he knew it or not. I didn’t really grow up with a lot of music around as a kid, so most of what I got into came from digging through the pile of CDs he’d have spilling out of his backpack and studying the liner notes and thanks lists in between taking turns at playing Sega Genesis games. Just picking up whatever was around and being like, “What’s a Dinosaur Jr?” or “Is Arcwelder the name of the band or the album?”
I think Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary was the first time I ever got a sense that he might’ve been keeping track of his role in shaping my formative years. He’d just seen them play up in Minneapolis and bought a CD at the show. At some point, he ended up thrusting it at me to borrow for the weekend. “Seven” was the first song on the album, and the most lasting punch of hearing this thing for the first time. I clearly remember sitting in a friend’s carpeted basement, the three of us huddled around a boombox, just listening to this thing straight through — not in the background while doing homework or playing video games, but just avidly and directly listening to a thing that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before.
I don’t know if it was an over-saturation of hyper-didactic punk music leading up to this, or just perfect timing with puberty and the weird rush of emotions that comes with all of that, but from the very start, the abstract sincerity in the lyrics and all of the tender quiet-to-loud dynamics in this first song really hit me and my friends hard. I don’t think there’s any way to overstate how obsessed we became with this album.
Jes made fun of me when I brought up Jawbreaker — and whatever, she’s got a point — but this is a song that I think about a ton in terms of structure, and how it’s essentially just a constant beautiful build for ten minutes that stretches out into a perfectly noisy and dissonant payoff, without necessarily resolving anything, until it ends like the whole thing just fell apart and they left the mess wherever it happened to fall. The whole thing feels like a slow march all the way through, and it’s easy to kind of get lost in that build until you’re about eight minutes in and the documentary samples have kicked in and it hits you that they’re still just going, but now it’s loosened up and unstructured and a bit unhinged, and it only vaguely resembles the way in which it started.
I’m also going to sound like I’m 100 years old now, but I should mention that this is also a song that I think of whenever I remember how patient and diligent people used to be when it came to finding out about music. I knew of this band because of their 24 Hour Revenge Therapy album, and when that came out I loved it to the point where it only naturally made sense to move back through their catalog, find out about the rest of it, and just devour whatever else was there.
This song “Bivouac,” with all of its space and fairly linear structure, hit me as a bit of breathing room at the end of an album I didn’t really understand right away and worked as an entry point of sorts to endearing myself to the rest of it.
I’d never really heard much Fugazi before this, but the same cousin that I mentioned before and I spent a chunk of a summer painting a rental house that our grandpa owned, and Red Medicine was one of a handful of CDs that we’d play on repeat all day long. I remember being way up on a ladder, sunburnt and exhausted, and hearing the CD start over again for the eighth or ninth time that day, perfectly transitioning from the last notes of the last song decaying right into this chunky and disjointed garbage introduction before the song actually starts, launching into comparably crystal-clear production.
I hadn’t really thought much about production value up to that point, and hadn’t really considered the way that virtually everything about how an album sounds is (or could be) a deliberate decision. This transition between what I’m guessing is an excerpt from a demo into the rest of the studio recording works to give a pretty clear heads-up for how to dissect and process the rest of the album. It was probably exactly the right kind of exaggerated gesture I needed to start looking at everything in terms of various deliberate considerations and layers. Also, this might be one of the first albums where I pored over the physical packaging and the weird way that the CD insert opens up. It really clicked how much the graphic design of a record could give meaningful context or complement how an album sounds.
As you can tell from the rest of this list, a lot of my first formative music experience started in the 90s, after I moved to Minnesota. Before that, we lived in a really weird small town in Southeastern Utah without access to much of anything, but I clearly remember being on a road trip through somewhere with my family, sitting in the back of the car with this song in heavy rotation on the radio. It must have just come out, because it was playing constantly, and I was honestly and sincerely terrified of it.
I was raised kind of weird out there in the canyons, where there was an omnipresent understanding that the world was on the verge of ending really soon. For some reason, this song really hit my tiny, young brain in the place that held a lot of those fears. Maybe it’s because she just sounds so scared the entire time she’s singing, or maybe it’s because I knew that a total eclipse was an astronomical event that I didn’t really understand at that age, I don’t really know. The slow crawl of this whole song mixed with the increasingly frenzied desperation in how she keeps saying “forever’s gonna start tonight” must have somehow crossed some serious wires, and I’d hear it and just get legitimately freaked out.
Listening back to it now, it sounds silly and I can’t rationally explain any bit of this, of course, but this song felt like it was telling me that we’re all going to die soon and the absolute best thing that we can hope for is that we’re all together when it happens. Total apocalypse music. A hymn for a little kid’s death march.
Speaking of apocalypse music, this song was my entry point to Lungfish, by way of a cover that Ted Leo put on a 7" and my pursuit to know more about it. I was instantly drawn to Daniel Higgs’ shamanistic and sorta-unsettling snarl (the first time I made Jes listen to this band was driving through Yellowstone and she was fairly convinced that the devil was singing to us). I think I ended up getting pulled in by the lull of its repetition. Sometimes it feels really good to disabuse yourself of the urge to have a reason and explanation for everything.
They opened for Mineral and The Promise Ring at a totally emo basement show during a time in my life where I’d childishly renounced pretty much everything that wasn’t emotional teenager music. My friends and I really weren’t having it with whatever this Lifter Puller band was putting us through for the half-hour, not realizing that this band was actually hitting that same thematic nail squarely on the head, just with more drugs and a broken curfew.
I moved up to Minneapolis soon after, and spent the next few years skipping a lot of really good shows solely because they were on the bill, until they finally broke up. By the time I finally got to be a loudmouth about it to my new friend Jes — who I barely knew at the time — I don’t think I even remembered what they sounded like. Just that they apparently ruined my night almost a decade prior. Dumb.
Because by the time I’d cast my weird dumb issues aside enough try to listen to this band again, I fell for it hard, and diligently studied Craig Finn’s dark romanticism of the Minneapolis nightlife like I was about to have to pull these characters out of a lineup. “Mission Viejo” is a perfect song that came out on the perfect album they released the year I saw them, and they probably played it that night, but I was too busy grumping out to notice.
This song in particular I wish I didn’t have to include, but if I’m being honest, it really was an important one. It’s the first song I heard by the Smashing Pumpkins, who were the first band I really loved — and I mean LOVED — with an intensity that I know had my parents pretty concerned.
I grew up in a fiercely music-loving household. My nights as a kid were spent looking in awe at the beautiful covers in my dad’s LP collection while he dissected the lyrics in his usual verbose way, sometimes playing the same track what seemed like 10 times in a row. When my lonely and misfit 12-year-old self heard “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” on the alternative radio station broadcast out of far-away, utopian-seeming Minneapolis, I was totally blown away. It felt like a true revelation.
Looking back, I’m sure a lot of it had to do with hormones, but I really remember feeling like, This is it. This is what I want my life to be. And so my BFF and I started a Smashing Pumpkins cover band, which sort of set the stage for what the next 15 years of my life looked like.
When I was 15, I was in a band with my best friend and two 20-year-old guys we’d met at an open mic in a nearby town. (Somehow, this situation was never as weird as it sounds like it should have been, I promise.) We heavily emulated bands like Modest Mouse, June of 44, and Sonic Youth, all of whom were more or less unknown in our remote corner of Minnesota, and for this we felt very cool.
When we came across a flier posted by someone looking to start a band and listing their influences as Modest Mouse, June of 44, and Sonic Youth, instead of being happy that we’d finally found others like us, we became extremely territorial. We instructed our drummer to call the number on the flier and say, “This is (insert our terrible band name here) and you’re on our turf!!” and then hang up. I’m not joking.
A few minutes later, I started to feel really bad about this idiotic prank, and so I called the number back to apologize. The guy on the other end and I wound up hitting it off and we talked for a while, which led to fairly regular phone calls. We never actually met, but we talked a lot, and it was something of a lifeline for me as I was very lonely as a weirdo in my small town, which was the same small town in which he had also been a teenaged weirdo. As an adult, he offered some perspective on my situation.
He occasionally dropped dubbed tapes in my mailbox, one of which was Arise Therefore by Palace Music. It was totally unlike anything I’d ever heard, and I was thrilled by it. It felt subversive in a totally new way. In particular, “You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick is Hanging Out,” the dirty-sounding title of which had me poring over the lyrics in hopes of revealing something new regarding sex or men.
Until this point, most of the music I loved was either super macho in it’s approach to romance, or kind of lugubriously pathetic, but this was totally different. It was cocky and funny and genuinely sad feeling, my first real exposure to anything that felt like poetry. It hinted cryptically at grown-up emotions, and complicated and enticing things that might be in store once I finally reached adulthood.
I was never able to square the title with the actual song, which I still think is quite beautiful, but I sure spent a lot of time thinking about it — what kind of clues he might be giving me about life outside my small town, a life where you could make music without aspiring to stardom, a life where you were making music because of some kind of internal need and not having much to do with the expectations of others. At least, that’s how I heard it. And it was revelatory.
Until I heard Liz Phair, sometime around age 15, I thought that women couldn’t write good music (I am ashamed to admit that). My same friend (also female) and I would have long conversations where we imagined how, if we were only born male, we would have “interesting” things to talk about in our lyrics and we’d be “naturally” better at our instruments. I really truly believed this at the time, and remnants of this internalized misogyny persisted into my 20’s. I can see now that a lot of this had to do with the fact that something 98% of the music I grew up with, heard on the radio, and saw on TV was made by men. The few women in the bands I knew seemed like tokens or trophies.
Anyway! I randomly ordered Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville from one of those services where you sign up and get 30 CDs for 99 cents or whatever it was at the time. I clearly remember putting it into my player and hearing “6'1”,” the first track, for the first time and getting chills. I still get chills when I listen to it, remembering how it felt like to be a sheltered, self-loathing, uptight teen and to identify with music in a way I’d never identified before. I don’t think I’d ever heard female sexuality expressed in a way that didn’t seem like it was for men’s ears. When I learned that she wrote all her songs and did all of her early recording herself in some kind of closet studio, it put the first tiny but important crack in this stupid idea I had about gender’s role in artistic talent.
So, I love Prince. Prince remains my all-time favorite artist, and also the one I’ve loved the most consistently for the longest time. If you asked me for a list of my 12 favorite songs, ten of them would probably be Prince. But back in my 16th year, when I found 1999 and Purple Rain at a thrift store, I bought them sort of as a joke. I think because I thought photos were funny or something.
I thought I was a pretty progressive kid, but in reality I still had a lot of homophobia and misogyny to work through, and I definitely thought of Prince as some kind of hokey 80’s guy with funny clothes and a high voice. The records sat around my bedroom for a few years until my senior year at high school, when three of my friends and I decided we wanted to choreograph a dance for a school talent show. None of us were dancers and although two of us were in bands, we both tended to hide as much as possible on stage. I don’t know why we picked “I Would Die 4 U,” but we did, and after hours of designing and practicing our routine, the song transcended its former joke status in my brain and I was able to recognize it for the work of genius that it is.
I also realized how much I absolutely loved dressing in a weird outfit and doing strange, synchronized moves in front of people. It was terrifying and delightful in a totally new way, and I credit that song with the epiphany that lead to the forming of the very performative band that I would be in all throughout my 20s.
Listening to this song was the first time I ever really appreciated a saxophone, and seeing them live was totally mind-blowing. But the real reason they’re on this list is because when I saw them play in a basement in Seattle after high school, I wound up buying a $5 screen-printed poster at their merch table. When I got home and looked at the back, I saw that it was stamped with “2222 Screenprint Facility, Minneapolis, MN.” Because I was planning on moving back to Minneapolis and was interested in screen printing, I emailed this 2222 Screenprint Facility thinking that maybe I could talk them into giving me some kind of apprenticeship. I got an email back from Dan Black, and he admitted that although his operation sounds big (“Facility!”), he was actually just a college student working out of his apartment, but he was nice enough to engage some of my questions.
We didn’t finally meet because of this — we actually wound up in a short-lived band together when I was back in MN — but when we figured out that I was the same person who had emailed about the Sweep poster and then discovered that we had actually played a show together when I was 15, we felt as though Fate was trying to make a point. It was remarkable because we lived in totally different parts of the state and are five years apart in age. If I had never fallen in love with “The Blizzard of 1999,” who knows where I’d be now!
When I saw The Blow for the first time, I was completely knocked off my feet. I was in my early 20s, just starting to play shows in my new band and trying to figure out what kind of performer I wanted to be.
She was totally, unapologetically, weird. We had no idea what we were watching, and my best friend/bandmate loved it. At first we thought we were seeing something kind of boring. She seemed like a shy, awkward teenager playing an acoustic guitar and singing about boys, which I was not super into Then suddenly, there were paper dolls on a clothesline, and she was talking to the sky, and then she had a different singing voice, and then she had the audience doing a back-and-forth call thing, and then everyone was playing some kind of game, and then we realized that she was in character and actually controlling the entire experience, and it was bizarre and kind of magical.
We bought all of her CDs and tapes, and went home and listened to this song on repeat for days and weeks and years. Not only did she have a huge influence on me as a performer, but I loved the intimacy of her songs, and this one in particular is a good example of her use of details that feel both really specific to a particular situation but also kind of flirtatiously invitational.
Listen to Dan Black and Jessica Seamans’ curated 12 Songs playlist below.