The Kompakt newcomers break down their debut album.
Emmanuele Nicosia and Martino Bartola have been a part of Milan’s techno scene since starting their Just This parties in 2010. Now, after turning their party into a label, the pair will soon release their debut album as Hunter/Game on Kompakt.
Adaptation finds the band stretching themselves and incorporating live instrumentation, nature recordings, and their typically hypnotic analog synthesizers. The album is out this Friday, February 5, but you can stream it in full below and read along as Nicosia and Bartola break down what went into each track and how it related to their overall process.
01. ‘Intro (Walking Unobserved)’
The ambient is just a sample we recorded from a creek, expressing our communication with nature. That’s always been a key of the Hunter/Game concept. The track name is part of that same story, walking through nature without disturbing its course.
When we finished this track, we thought it made sense to use it as an intro with it’s ambient, breaks atmosphere.
02. ‘Declino’
‘Declino’ is the first track we produced for the album. It’s also the track that gave us inspiration that evolves through The Path and Adaptation into the Hunter/Game sound landscape.
03. ‘The Path’
We can’t say we got inspired by a particular track or producer, but if you listen carefully you might feel a certain background as we’ve been enjoying Stephan Bodzin’s work a lot lately. Also, all of the synth lines were produced with the Moog Slim Phatty.
04. ‘Adaptation’
‘Adaptation’ really represents the evolution of our sound by working on this album. It matches our club oriented sound with our live analogue approach. We used so many techniques to make this track: Triggering outboard instruments, using Ableton arpeggiator, recording, sampling and mixing with Logic, playing instruments, approaching live drums with Nord drum pad etc. In the end we recorded this live jam session that came out as a strong dance floor track.
05. ‘Hexagon’
‘Hexagon’ has quite an interesting story. Actually we produced it 3 years ago and decided to throw it out it. Then a good friend of ours played it during WMC in Miami. First we couldn’t really place it but then recognized it was actually our bin-track. Hearing it on a big sound system while seeing a crazy dancefloor made us change our mind. So we re-opened the project which was really badly produced and mixed. We re-arranged and mixed it and then it ended up being one of our most charted tracks ever.
06. ‘Origins’
Well, this track is the origin of our actual musical approach. We made it straight when we got the Moog Slim Phatty in the studio, which shows how much you can actually do with it. So we added this track in the album for this particular reason.
07. ‘Radius’
‘Radius’ as well is a project we re-worked for the album. It’s a track to prepare listeners for ‘Silver’.
08. ‘Silver‘
‘Silver’ started as a remix for our Icelandic friends from Kúra. There were some really interesting ambient sounds to work with and that amazing vocal. So we mainly used some live drums percussions samples, processed by delays and effects. The arpeggiator we recorded in Copenhagen with the Kúra guys from a Nord lead 4x they have in their studio. The result sounds kind of crazy and it was to far from the band sound so we agreed to use it for our album.
09. ‘Ashes’
For this track we made a mash-up of samples and recordings we made ourselves. The vocal is a sample from our project Landside that we’ve stretched, pitched and processed to get to this weird and hypnotic noise.
10. ‘Hide’
We made ‘Hide’ because we were experimenting with new techniques and instruments. We wanted a new approach to produce the outro track of the album. Martino played the bass and the guitar live while we used a Nord Drum and some ambient samples on top. In the end it was like a test of what we could do instrumentally fully live and it definitely gave us inspiration — so possibly for forthcoming music too.
