Local Beat

by Andria Lisle October 10, 2003August 27, 2020

The secret is out — on Nocturnal Show

Print, that is. The fledgling poster company, whose work has

touted performances by The Reigning Sound,

The Bloodthirsty Lovers, Lucero,

and Cory Branan, is on the rise. The company’s

owners and sole employees, 25-year-old Michael

Carpenter and 21-year-old Sasha Barr,

recently took the show on the road, attending

Flatstock conventions at SXSW in Austin, Texas, last spring and at

the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle,

Washington, over Labor Day weekend.

“All these people we were already working for, like Lucero and

Cory Branan, were playing SXSW, so we packed up the car and went,” Barr

explains. “It was like a vacation, but it was

also very business-oriented,” he says, noting that his company landed one of its

biggest jobs — screen-printing posters and CD/DVD packaging for the Bonnaroo

Music Festival — while in Austin.

“We’ve gotten to meet all these other artists at Flatstock,” Carpenter notes,

citing a chance meeting with famed poster designer

Derek Hess. (“I was scrambling to get the booth open, and this guy

walked up and started talking to me. He said his name was Derek, but I didn’t realize it

was that Derek,” Carpenter says.) That

meeting led to work for such groups as Small Brown

Bike and Hope’s Fall, bands that the Nocturnal crew had never heard of.

“It all goes back to being 15 years old and

hanging out with friends who had bands,” Carpenter says. “I was into art, so I was

always drawing fliers for their shows.”

The two met at the University of Memphis; Carpenter was enrolled in

the design program and Barr was studying traditional printmaking. “We got

along really well, so we decided to see what we could do together,” Barr explains.

Carpenter adds, “We were coming from opposite directions. He’s more

loose-minded and focused on the actual printing,

while I’m more technical, and I had access to the computers [at the U of M]. We

had different clients and different friends, but we fit really well together.”

In late 2001, the duo printed their first project, a poster for a Lucero show

on New Year’s Eve. “It went on from

there,” Carpenter says modestly, nodding to

such bands as Loggia and Snowglobe and

local venue Young Avenue Deli, which hired Nocturnal Show Print to

create posters for national acts like indie stalwarts

Guided By Voices, breaking blues artist Robert

Randolph, and comedian David Cross.

They’ve also printed a CD package for Ben

Harper (“Hand-cut, hand-folded, and hand-assembled, with

full-color printing front and back,” Carpenter

remembers. “It took us about 30 hours to finish 500 of ’em”); a series of

snowboard designs for Ride snowboards; two

CD packages for Lucero; and posters for Tha

Movement and Precious Cargo’s Hip Hop

Overload. “We’ve just finished doing some stuff for

Beth Gibbons of Portishead,” Barr says. “I was

really stoked to get a job offer from someone I’ve listened to since I was 14 years old.”

So how do they hold down their day jobs? Carpenter, a designer at

Red Deluxe, a local ad agency, and Barr, a

full-time student at the U of M who also pulls down a waiter position at the Glass

Onion, both laugh. “We don’t really make much money on the posters,”

Carpenter says. “It’s hard, because a lot of our

clients are our friends, and we don’t want to price ourselves out of a job.

We’re working on this 40 hours a week now, in addition to our regular jobs.”

Hopefully, he explains, Nocturnal Show Print will eventually turn a serious profit.

“That’s the goal,” he says. “Anybody

would wanna own their own business. That’s the American way.”

“Each and every poster is a work of art,” Carpenter continues. “There’s

more to it than just monetary value; these posters will stand the test of time. A

paper flier is gonna come down, but these posters are taken down by people who

want to hang them in their houses. They become collector’s items.”

“As long as we can keep doing something different, we’re happy,” Barr

concludes. “One of the best parts of this job is creating a print for someone

whose music I enjoy. It’s a good feeling to know someone’s music and be able to

interpret it in a two-dimensional way.”