Hiroshi

Long into the era of pandemic, our lives are getting increasingly repetitive. With so much less freedom to travel and meet people, we often have no choice but to spend a long time with the same scenery, thinking about the fact that, while millions of people are suffering from this endless waves of virus, we still don’t know when (or if) it’ll end. These persistent uncertainties sometimes shift our attention to something more predictable—perhaps good old films we enjoyed in the past, or unobtrusive music that keeps going on without requiring our active listening. For this reason, many of us go to YouTube and spend hours playing videos featuring all sorts of calming background music.

IDRA and Hiroshi Ebina, sound artists from Italy and Japan, made their first collaborative album “Circle” exactly in this context. The entire album is arranged in such a way that one track seamlessly flows to the other, so that listeners can set it in loop and listen to it from track to track, even from side to side, without noticing a clear beginning or end. The album is made to accompany your time at home—it gives you something more than silence, yet the sound is soft enough to keep the atmosphere in your room as comfortable as itis now.

A wide variety of synths, eurorack and acoustic instruments were used to create this album. Since there was no way for the two artists to get together in the same room, IDRA and Hiroshi spent nearly a year exchanging Ableton projects back and forth to slowly build up the album. They were both committed to keep the instrumentation minimum and make it sound as if the whole album was created by one person - with two brains.

credits

Released July 5, 2022

Music by IDRA & Hiroshi Ebina.
Mastered by Joseph Branciforte
josephbranciforte.com
Artwork by Almanac