About

TUAWKI’s Dual Mission

TUAWKI (The Universe As We Know It) is a recording company that takes cues from the music industry’s golden age in order to provide the steady soundtrack to our ever-evolving current era. Born of a fascination with vintage Muzak — the production-line style background music that first became widespread in the 1950s — as well as library music, new age, jazz fusion, and exotica, the label creates “functional music” designed for specific uses: meditation, yogic practice, study, holiday events, urban exploration, poker night, gaming, and more, with a future eye trained on growing from personal spaces into public places.

Embracing a playful spirit and acknowledging the complexity of life in the 21st century, no idea is too far-fetched (see Waltzes for Cacti), but the end product consistently reflects a devotion to sincere craftsmanship and quality recording. Working with an amorphous collective of composers and musicians under one name, TUAWKI is not out to discover the next pop giant or artist-turned-influencer, but is instead dedicated to providing the universal background hum for any activity you might undertake during your day.

The label has a second (but not secondary) mission as well. Harking back to a time when the record business kept ace studio musicians gainfully employed with score reproductions, radio interpretations, and various sets of soothing sounds, TUAWKI aspires to create a professional environment where music writers and players can make a living doing what they’re best at and most qualified for, without any pressure to promote or project a persona. With an emphasis on live instrumentation and in-person studio chemistry, the musicians are given a project’s general parameters and the freedom to take it from there. The result is often a first-thought-best-thought approach that lends a tangible feeling of momentum and joy to recordings that are essentially egoless — ready to blend into and subtly enhance the practical purposes for which they were designed. The end goal is to create the best music you could ever encounter in an incidental moment, unobtrusive but engaging, organic in both execution and application, with an easy feel that’s always welcome. TUAWKI: A simple and timeless solution for very varied modern lives.

The Art of TUAWKI

Just as TUAWKI’s music flows from envisioned experiences — the universal background hum for any activity that you might undertake throughout your day — each release’s cover art flows from the music and its intent. A Surf Exotica Christmas set gets midcentury colorblocks that give shape to a pine tree in a trumpet’s bell. A collection of aural gamma waves is accompanied by a pattern of amber shapes that suggests focus and productivity. Waltzes for Cacti features, well, a saguaro inside a lava lamp — a surprisingly effective pairing. Sonically and conceptually, there’s nothing that a TUAWKI project can’t be except incongruous, and it’s that bond between function and freedom that powers the creation of the artwork as well. No two designs are identical, but all are driven by the same spirit of tasteful experimentation and open-hearted searching, which results in an overarching label visual identity as vibrant and wide-ranging as the music itself.

Another binding element: All of the art is created by designer Ferry Gouw, perhaps best known by the colorful animated worlds he built for Major Lazer. He and TUAWKI founder Kevin Kusatsu envision the imagery as an essential part of the TUAWKI experience. Instead of tiny .jpegs that populate app panes and browser windows — mere markers — each cover is a way to expand the world of music that is otherwise meant to meld into our lives. They are easter eggs, in a way, that reinforce the idea that if you look (and listen) closely, there’s always more to discover. Gouw takes that to heart. For each single, EP, or album, he lets the songs and their guiding concepts drive him down research rabbit trails as he absorbs aesthetics, eras, musical movements, and prevailing vibes. It’s an expansive learning experience that ends in art, 3,000 pixels squared.

Beyond a predilection toward bold colors and playful visuals, what this means in practice and execution changes release to release. For those that reference video game music, like 2024’s Animal Crossings set, Gouw studied 8-bit video game screenshots to learn how to replicate the pixelated style and isometric perspective. For an album of Elvis covers, he learned the style of Sister Corita, a nun in the ’60s famed for a graphic style involving cut-outs of type and stamps. Sometimes Kusatsu and TUAWKI’s composers dream even bigger and weirder, which forces Gouw to do the same: “Kevin might tell me, ‘It’s an ambient soundscape sort of piece,’ and I’m already familiar with the touchpoints for that kind of music — what sort of design or typeface I might use. But then he says, ‘What I’m picturing is big four-wheeler trucks as rollerskates.’”

Hours of work go into developing the visual reference points for every single release before they’re translated into a style that feels true to the music and TUAWKI’s overall mission — a genuine labor of love that never fails to engage even the veteran designer at the heart of the work. Because the pathway is constantly changing, exploration is always encouraged, and the cultural flotsam and jetsam collected along the way is never the same, “every single cover is an outlier.” It’s a perfect accompaniment for the first-thought-best-thought ethos of the music.