Scattered Signals, Singular Vision: Remote Collaboration and Creative Surrender

In a way, the album couldn’t have happened without distance.

Drums were tracked in a studio in Los Angeles. Bass lines found their groove in a hotel room in Vienna. Vocals were captured in a basement in New York City, and I played my guitar parts among the shifting moods in Berlin. This wasn’t planned, it was necessity turned to design. We became a band without borders, a creative organism with limbs on four continents, sending files like nervous signals through the internet’s veins.

Technically, this forced a new level of precision. Communication had to be clear. Files had to be clean. But it also birthed a surprising kind of freedom. Every collaborator had space to interpret the sonic vision from their unique corner of the world. Layer by layer, the songs started forming organically, less like tracks being built and more like movie scenes being directed.

Another breakthrough came in the form of instrumentation. This is the first record where I recorded professional string players and piano. Until now, I had never engineered or mixed a violin or piano session. The learning curve was steep, but so rewarding. Their voices brought a human tension into the music that no plugin could replicate.

Creatively, the biggest shift was internal. I worked closely with several composition tutors, not to learn rules, but to unlearn them. The early versions of this album were highly structured, almost too much so. That rigidity, I realized, was counter to the album’s message. This is a protest against algorithmic predictability, so why make predictable music?

So, I started incorporating free forms like spoken word fragments, sonic experiments, glitchy interludes. These unstructured pieces became portals into the album’s characters: shadowy technocrats, manipulated users, quiet rebels. That choice infused the album with suspense and breath. It allowed moments of silence, of noise, of cinematic tension to co-exist with melody and rhythm.

In the end, both the process and the product mirrored the same theme: when you relinquish some control, you create space for freedom.