Berlin electronic duo Driftmachine’s new release is called Eis Heauton – a Greek term for being in “a conversation with oneself”. This reference highlights the fact that Driftmachine is not composing music in a classical sense here, as they did on their debut album Nocturnes.
Instead, three of the four tracks have been developed from so-called self-generating patches: the duo of Florian Zimmer (Saroos) and Andreas Gerth (Tied & Tickled Trio) were only framing technical parameters and subsequently let their modular system talk in its very own musical language. The self-generating patches recorded here can be understood as a transcript of those machine-produced monologues, as well as artistic research By evoking a ghostly presence of modular synthesis, the duo find traces of individuality inside their machines. Eis Heauton exhibits a strange and haunting musical cosmos, a signature that is always present within Driftmachine’s live shows.