Hainbach - Assertion (2020)

In early 2020, as the first global pandemic of this century hit, I found myself in a dusty room in an old theatre, sitting next to the ventilation system, cutting tape loops. While the rest of the production staff and actors were depressedly drinking downstairs in the set of the cancelled play, I was splicing meter after meter of music. These were meant to be spares for the production, should the ones I made for rehearsal break. The simple manual process of running sound through my fingers into the small hours gave me a feeling of control back, as pointless as it might have been.

After the cascade of cancellations in the previous days, I felt good for the first time. Returning home, I embarked on a mad dash of activity – a set of samples from my studio I called “Isolation Loops”, so everyone could jam with me in their confinement, a streamed live show from balcony to balcony with nearest neighbor Orca, a marathon of music and technology livestreams and finally this record.

My new album Assertion is my way out of the gloom of this situation, that sees a world becoming in many ways smaller and more closed-minded, while our most vulnerable waste away. It is an attempt at hope, a conscious choice of traveling joyously in music, while the body stays in isolation. It is a celebration of collaboration, as musicians Maysun and Andrew Raffo Dewar contribute to the sound of this album and Nani Gutierrez spins her fantastic visual world further, in the seventh year of our work together. It is an album I hope you can put on anytime you need something to underscore your happiness or take you out of the ever threatening darkness.