Both Peter Brod­er­ick and Machine­fab­riek have appeared on this blog before, espe­cially the lat­ter, so my pre­dis­po­si­tion to this col­lab­o­ra­tion was already fairly estab­lished. How­ever, I must admit I wasn’t quite ready to be as taken with this project as I am. Just before it was released I remem­ber read­ing a quote from Brod­er­ick say­ing it was prob­a­bly the release he was most proud of and that it felt like a true col­lab­o­ra­tion. Lis­ten­ing to it, you are able to tell where Brod­er­ick ends and Machine­fab­riek begins based their pre­vi­ous out­put, but the two sounds are so tightly wrapped around each other and inte­grated that this lines blurs some­times, form­ing an entirely new artist in its wake. Opener “Depar­ture” unfurls like an over­ture, with a qui­etly esca­lat­ing bed of drone strug­gling to over­take the momen­tous piano. In many ways, I’m reminded of the Wag­ner over­ture “Thus, We Begin In The Green­ish Twi­light Of The Rhine,” with it’s sim­i­larly pen­sive build-up. The long “Kites” stretches out over eight min­utes with a con­tem­pla­tive piano melody, strings, and undu­lat­ing gui­tar drone hold­ing it all together. The drones have the effect of sub­merg­ing the strings so they heard as if from the next room and float in an out of your field of hear­ing. It’s easy to pic­ture your­self watch­ing kites weave through the wind when lis­ten­ing to this musi­cal con­coc­tion. “Rain” is strik­ing for how dif­fer­ent it is to the rest of the album. After the low-key gui­tar drone and strum­ming of the first half, vocals and a tra­di­tional gui­tar melody take cen­ter stage on this track. It jolts you a lit­tle bit, but fits in won­der­fully, com­ing mid-way through the album like this. Eas­ily one of the best col­lab­o­ra­tive albums to come along in recent years, this is a fan­tas­tic addi­tion to both Peter Brod­er­ick and Machinefabriek’s cat­a­logs. I can only hope there will be more releases in the future.