Recently I’ve found myself reflecting back on my hobbies, largely because I’ve been spending time with new people who are curious about how long I’ve been active in things like photography and music, and have been recounting these sections of my life to them as part of this fabric of knowing. And it’s quite scary to recall the gulf of time between now and then: HearFeel started in February 2012, more than a third of my life ago, and I really started getting interested in music a few years before that. Lusine’s A Certain Distance, the record that really kicked it all off for me in a big way, is coming on 15 years old in a few months, almost half my lifetime.

It’s humbling to do this: in a few cases I’ve been taking photos longer than some of my new photography friends have even been alive (which is a new enough comparison for me but I’m sure will get tiresome as the years go by). In particular though, it focuses the mind on those years, all the experiences grown and education developed that have expanded me into the adult I am today versus the immature teenager I once was. Two halves that don’t technically meet, yet exist in an unquestionable continuum against one another.

I raise this not because it has anything explicitly to do with the music here, only that the Dub Techno construction of Rod’s remix seems to take me out of time from 2024, back to the era of Loscil and The Sight Below (ok I know the former still exists but I meant my formative music years of yore). And although that particular genre aesthetic feels vaguely anachronistic nowadays, it’s juxtaposed right up against Gigi’s contemporaneous ambience, splitting the release right in two in the same way that I sometimes catch myself floating between past and present.

First half “Red Hair Girl At The Boat Shop” sees Rod (you probably know him better as DeepChord) remix Gigi’s piece. Lost at first to burbling aqueous field recordings it turns a corner to hook itself around an insistent Dub Techno rhythm, pushing along in cyclical loops that drum out a path, before it begins to shimmer out. The pulse is lost, that playful moment ending as its briefly intersecting parties dissolve back into their respective universes, lives still echoing with the hum of the crossing.

Then it’s Gigi’s turn to try her hand at reworking Rod’s “Summer Morning at Lighthouse Beach”, to opposite effect. Gigi removes all the electronic beating energies for something far more evaporitic and oneiric, synth tones crooning over floaty vocal coos and sublimating drones, reminiscent of something Malibu might produce. A few arpeggiations are permitted in right at the end as the pre-dawn mistiness lifts to bring the day’s frivolities, a sense of optimism hovering in the brightening air now.

That’s all there needs to be, the then and now. Some vague distant past that presses gently on the back of our mind, slightly darkling in the haze of memory, and the very real present which commands our attention in its optimism and instantaneity. Janus.