Two nascent producers meet in the middle.

Kilbourne and FXWRK first met at Wesleyan, and while they had bonded over music, the idea of collaboration didn’t come up until a fateful day (night?) last April. “I stumbled into her room drunk at 5am the day my second EP was due for release, and she lovingly mastered the whole thing in one sitting,” FXWRK explains. “From there we somehow got to talking about a collaboration” which would take about a year to come together.

That slow-but-steady process resulted in Bang / I Can’t Escape, an EP that is a hybrid of their styles: Kilbourne’s club-laced beatcraft and FXWRK’s delicate minimalism. Still, their contributions to the songs are distinct — by design.

“I’m interested in how a collaboration that is based on a clear division still reaches some kind of meaningful unity and pairing,” Kilbourne explains. “I’m wary of collaborative projects where artists’ work is diffused throughout the song to the point where one wonders who made what. Too often in dance music, the result is a collapse of the difference and specificity that might make the collaboration profoundly interesting.”

“We ended up with two songs that are dripping with feels and emotional resonance, yet are totally club ready at the same time,” writes FXWRK. “To me, this was more about the process of two friends pouring their hearts into sounds than about the outcome.”

Stream Bang / I Can’t Escape below.