Selected Works: Remembering Ryan Timothy McCardle (1989-2024)

Ryan McCardle’s career as a graphic designer and visual artist was deeply informed by his love of music. In 2011, while also running his own tape label, Furious Hooves, Ryan joined the creative team at Captured Tracks. It was here that Ryan’s joy of working with musicians “hand-in-hand to create something that connects the audible to the visual” came to full fruition. Ryan’s artistic legacy will endure, forever entwined with the sounds he helped so many of us to see. Below, we fondly revisit a selection of his work with Captured Tracks.

Wild Nothing – Nocturne

Ryan’s devotion to deconstructing the imaginary barrier that separates sound from vision is arguably best represented by his collaboration with Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum. Described by Ryan as “nostalgia in motion,” the die-cut packaging for Nocturne features six interchangeable covers, made from marbled paper, intended to transform the listener into an artistic collaborator. “My hope was that [listeners] could place a visual connection with their audible experiences,” Ryan explained, in an interview. “Especially since everyone will pull their own meanings and personal connections from Nocturne.”

Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987

For the inaugural release of Captured Tracks’ compilation series, Excavations, Ryan’s art direction manages to capture the spirit of the music collected, while also introducing a unique archival stamp for future releases. Working with an image of Chapel Hill’s One Plus Two, whose double Rickenbacker “strum and thrum” assault from a low-ceilinged club can practically be heard just by looking at it—it’s the splash of orange, wrapping around the double-record’s spine that speaks to anyone who obsessively organizes collections. Ryan, himself, was an admitted reissue enthusiast and enjoyed the process of “resurrecting artifacts once forgotten over time.”

Widowspeak – All Yours

Working in collaboration with the band’s Molly Hamilton, Ryan’s layout for All Yours was inspired by a toy. “[We] spent a lot of time playing around with a plastic horse and photoshop before we found the photo that we ended up using,” shared Hamilton, one half of the duo Widowspeak (along with Robert Earl Thomas). What, at first glance, might appear to be a snowy peak against a pre-dusk blue sky, in actuality, is a white horse’s mane. Influenced by the band’s move from Brooklyn to a cottage in upstate New York, near the Catskills, the photograph conjures the immovable stillness of a mountain range along with the freedom of a horseback ride. It’s a perfect image for a collection of songs that manages to both gallop and graze in equal measure. 

Mac DeMarco – Rock and Roll Night Club  + 2

Ryan’s work on Mac DeMarco’s first two releases for Captured Tracks reveals the designer’s unique ability to find the central spirit of even the most eclectic work by a songwriter whose music strains against easy summation. For the EP, Rock and Roll Night Club, the entire album package evokes a borrowed memory of a blackout evening in a basement club. From the front cover’s jagged mirror image to the photobooth portraiture on its flipside, the lipstick-inspired cursive, and pull-out poster—Ryan’s mood-setting art direction draws you deep into the record’s nighthawk milieu. 

For his first LP, simply titled 2, DeMarco has said the inspiration for its cover comes from Japanese pop superstar Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 debut Hosono’s House. Some sharp-eyed fans have also noticed its resemblance to the artwork for Bruce Springsteen’s The River. It’s an aesthetic choice accompanied by a possible coincidence (or, accident) that is itself emblematic of DeMarco’s music—homemade, handmade, and deliberately unclassifiable. The album’s insert includes a Ryan-designed dorm-room-ready photo collage, featuring handwritten notes of gratitude to fans from DeMarco.

The Cleaners From Venus –Volumes 1-3

Met with the unique challenge of translating a wildly DIY career—featuring cassette-only releases and a bevy of “lost” lo-fi recordings dating back to 1980—Ryan’s package design for The Cleaners From Venus anthologies manage to translate the eclecticism of songwriter Martin Newell’s pop sensibility into a visually cohesive, definitive archive. Working with an old T-shirt design that featured the band’s original logo, the three volumes also include elegant LP covers that reimagine handmade cassettes, framing vintage sketches like fine art for the remastered album covers. 

Medicine –Shot Forth Self Living / The Buried Life

When multi-instrumentalist Brad Laner was approached by Captured Tracks to reissue his band’s first two albums, he had no intention of ever working under the Medicine moniker again. Once a partnership was formed, Laner credits his time working with Ryan on the package design for inspiring him to reform his pioneering shoegaze trio. “[When] the reissues became a reality, we all got happy with the idea. A total surprise for all involved. I feel very lucky to have been able to oversee those reissues.” Using the original still-life photographs and Medicine’s original wide-font logo, Ryan and Brad worked together to create a much-coveted box set, as much for the music inside as for the object itself.