Matt Hettich and I met for the first time in 2006, likely as part of the CalArts Balinese Gamelan ensemble. If memory serves, he was playing the higher-pitched gangsa, while I was playing something on the lower end (having relatively simplistic tendencies, the slower pace of the lower-pitched instruments worked for me). I remember noticing him tinkering with something in Renoise on his laptop during a break in rehearsals, and asked him what that was all about, having just recently gotten interested in Max/MSP and this still-foreign notion of “making music with computers” (having only used a Tascam Portastudio to record demos and ideas up until that point).
Matt and I became fast friends, bonding over a shared love of IDM, with him taking on the role of the educator, providing me with a plethora of albums and artists to investigate during our late-night AIM chats. We’ve remained close over the years, though we haven’t lived in the same city since 2008, and just last year we formed our new label, ELEXVE, together.
This album was made via file exchange during the winter of 2012 - if I remember correctly, the first track was begun by me, with some drones off of my modular synth and field recordings from a graveyard made several years previous, then passed to Matt who added the second section of the track.
The second track was started by Matt, the idea being that we’d flip the script of the first track and have him make something on his MFB synths, then pass it over to me to add my string drones. There’re some gamelan riffs in there, sequenced from samples by me, as a subtle nod to the context of our early musical friendship.
We sat on the results for a few years, finally releasing it in 2015. The cover art is a photo taken by my dad, somewhere in the Brandenburg, Germany, countryside.
Matt and I became fast friends, bonding over a shared love of IDM, with him taking on the role of the educator, providing me with a plethora of albums and artists to investigate during our late-night AIM chats. We’ve remained close over the years, though we haven’t lived in the same city since 2008, and just last year we formed our new label, ELEXVE, together.
This album was made via file exchange during the winter of 2012 - if I remember correctly, the first track was begun by me, with some drones off of my modular synth and field recordings from a graveyard made several years previous, then passed to Matt who added the second section of the track.
The second track was started by Matt, the idea being that we’d flip the script of the first track and have him make something on his MFB synths, then pass it over to me to add my string drones. There’re some gamelan riffs in there, sequenced from samples by me, as a subtle nod to the context of our early musical friendship.
We sat on the results for a few years, finally releasing it in 2015. The cover art is a photo taken by my dad, somewhere in the Brandenburg, Germany, countryside.