The Waves & Us

Things happen fast when the chemistry is just right. It took mere months for Maayan, Markus and Louis to leap from studio strangers to the shared parents of a glorious noise, captured on cassette and barreling out into the world beyond. The energy surges out of their creations, in every strained guitar string, every troubled synth drone, every cracked blues call; it feels like they've been doing this for a long time.

In their individual ways they were at this before they ever got together, carrying far and wide psychedelic yearnings and an addiction to the dirty underbelly of sound. Maayan's years of electronic research guide her hand as she channels rhythm and tone through a glorious chain of boxes, no link a link too far to get the sound just right. The stories fall out of Markus like an upended journal of human experience, his guitar following the pattern through a life spent cranking distortion pedals and octave shifters. Louis' searching bass contorts and mutates under the heat of improvisation, but never straying from the groove.

It took long nights staring sleeplessness in the face to reach these songs, and even then not one definitive version remains. In the rush of a take, as the reels spin round, a beat skipped here, a knob twisted there, at midday or midnight, it's different every time. While squalls of guitar and yelps of synths can be finally captured in a finished product, the energy will simply move outside. This is a sound for tacky floors and stickered walls, where the music will reanimate once again in the rare prism that is The Waves & Us.