Jon Humphreys

Jon is co founder and creative director of creative agency The Neighbourhood, working across branding, moving image, interactive design and visualisation. Jon started his career as an architect but quickly moved into interactive design in the early days of the industry in the mid 90s. Jon has a passion for telling stories through design, animation and moving image, and believes that when you wrap a compelling visual and sonic world around a story there is nothing more creatively potent.

What influence does music have in your life as a creative?:

Music has played a massive part in my life ever since I picked up the guitar at the age of 9. I used to be able to listen to music incessantly in any situation but as I’ve got older I find that I need to find a special time and place for listening outside of working to get the most out of it. Music is very contextual, and unless the music is deliberately ambient I find I’ll get too drawn into the music for me to focus on other tasks. That said, the power of music to influence creativity is infinite. It can trigger strong memories, place you in other worlds and make a powerful emotional connection- internally and with other people. I have always been interested in the spatial aspect of music, the way it sparks the imagination by putting you in a place in time- the past, the future, outerspace, underground. From ambient, electronic to dub reggae, exotica to I have always been drawn to music that has these qualities.

Tell us about your playlist:

After an amount of ‘high fidelity’ style procrastination about a theme- eg. Important tracks of my life, genre, tempo etc I decided to opt for a slice through some recent soundcloud playlists over the past year and see what that sounded like.It’s more representative of how I listen to music these days, on shuffle, constantly looking to stockpile interesting bits and bobs that I might come back to in the future. There’s an eclectic mix of new and old here with a focus on music that has an interesting textural quality. Tracks range from a lo-fi homespun sound like the Marly Luske and The Transgressors tune to hi fi of Burial and Fourtet. On reflection I was surprised how much interesting vocal music there is there as I listen to a lot of instrumental- possibly because the tracks have an interesting vocal textures- the otherworldly sound of Nora Dean to school choirs (Noel Gallagher remix) and hypnotic French harmonies  (Catherine Hershey) to full orchestral choir sounds (a sound awareness- Introit) A major recent find is the Hamilton Bohannon track- an absolute belter that combines haunting gospel vocals with a ‘Payback’ era JB slow funk groove. Masterful use of space and a slow build groove. Spectacular.