Burst Synapse Identity

Burst Synapse is my main musical project, and has been my venue for musical and visual expression since I began it in 2019. The project, which takes its name from a song by Full of Hell (the first heavy song I ever heard), combines elements of grindcore, mathcore, brutal death metal, noise, industrial, breakcore, and dub. It’s an outlet for my personal struggles, political ideals, and desire to create uncompromisingly heavy music that synthesizes everything I listen to.

For its visual identity, I’ve tried to combine my love of rough, chaotic art with my design style, which emphasizes minimalism. I love classic metal aesthetics, unreadable logos, and album covers jam-packed with fantasy and body horror, but I felt that embracing something more abstract and minimal would help me stand out from the pack and nod toward my music’s unabashed artificiality.

The Burst Synapse logo is probably one of the first things I designed for the project because let’s be real: sometimes starting a band is just an excuse to pick a cool name and a cool logo. To keep it as minimal as possible, I drew it within a highly-structured set of self-imposed design rules. The forms were inspired by the philosophy of the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists, and the suprematist designer El Lissitzky.

The second iteration was the one that was used on the cover of all of my EPs so far. I originally used custom title lettering in the same style as the logo, but eventually decided that Futura was both much more readable and a better contrast. The first album cover also featured an ink drawing by me, which I’ve since used as an icon or avatar for the project. It’s part of a series of drawings that I created during an extremely difficult time in my life—before I’d even created Burst Synapse—and I included some of the others in the liner notes.

After using it for a while, I felt that the logo's thin-line divisions were inelegant and imbalanced, because they cut curves off, which was a compromise for readability (despite its abstraction) that violated my initial aesthetic rules. The next iteration widened the lines within letters while using two different colours to distinguish letters from one another. In another, later version, I used noisy transparent gradients to divide the letters, an effect inspired by the shading techniques of early graphic designers.

I used the multicoloured logo on an all-over print tessellated shirt, which I had one of my friends model, and I used the gradient logo on another simple logo print shirt (which I modelled with stock images). I’ve also used concert posters as a way to expand the Burst Synapse aesthetic by designing new typefaces and exploring different art styles.