Ein.garden Collaboration
(TI writes:)
1. Encounter — A Listener Beyond the Sound
The collaboration began with something simple — through a quiet intersection on the Kitchen.Label playlist one day.
Our music and Ein.garden’s visual works seemed to have crossed paths there, leading naturally to a small exchange.
I had already come across their videos — precise, constructed, and yet somehow breathing — and felt a quiet sense of resonance with their world.
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2. Observation — Between the Inorganic and the Organic
When I first looked at their videos, the immediate impression was that they felt inorganic yet alive. Everything in them was digitally constructed, yet each motion carried a rhythm that seemed to breathe.
They were, in many ways, even more enigmatic than we were. Nothing about their real name, nationality, or background was disclosed; only the clarity of their concept and the precision of their work were visible. That anonymity — and the discipline it implied — was compelling.
From their SoundCloud activity, I assumed they might be based somewhere on the U.S. West Coast. Within their visuals we noticed fragments of East Asian culture — kanji and various fictional writing systems they had borrowed from elsewhere.
That uncertainty, the blurred edge of cultural identity, felt distinctly contemporary. It was not absence but a kind of quiet presence — an aesthetic built from indeterminacy itself.
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3. Initiation — Contact and Response
Many of their projects operated at a distinctly professional level — large in scale, conceptually sophisticated, and technically exacting.
Their portfolio includes works credited on projects with Porter Robinson, Usher, Sabrina Carpenter, and Higround, which suggests that they are trusted by major artists and collaborators in music and multimedia.
The fact that such an artist had been repeatedly listening to our track felt like a quiet coincidence worth following.
I decided to reach out via Instagram.
Soon after, a message arrived:
“Hey! I really appreciate you reaching out. I've had thoughts about how nice it'd be to use some of your music — strangely enough, that thought seems to have come from both sides.
I would love to, particularly I've had my eye on La Rêve Restauré and Cube 6 from your latest album — if you meant working on top of existing tracks.”
I shared this exchange with Ricks Ang of Kitchen.Label.
He immediately supported the idea and gave us full discretion over how to proceed.
From that moment, the framework of collaboration — Ein.garden for visuals, FMT for context, Kitchen.Label for support — quietly began to form.
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4. Structure — MIDI as a Shared Language
Since we do not perform live or appear publicly, I’ve always looked for ways to connect through contexts beyond music itself. This collaboration fit that idea naturally.
Once the project began, I exchanged messages frequently. I left all artistic decisions to them, including which track to work with. Their proposal was to generate visuals using the MIDI data of our music.
All our works are constructed in notation software. Each composition exists as a collection of precise data: pitch, rhythm, and form. The MIDI file, in that sense, is the blueprint of sound.
I sent them the entire set of MIDI files from Le Cube Dans Mon Rêve, giving them full freedom of choice. Around the same time, they mentioned wanting to try Le Rêve Restauré as the source material. While they worked on visuals, I started building an alternate version of that piece, imagining how their sense of texture might interact with the sound.
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5. Divergence — A Slip and a Shift
Our music is completely controlled by MIDI — the structure remains constant even if the timbre changes. That allows us to create parallel versions with identical form but different tones. One of them, another Le Rêve Restauré, still remains unreleased.
After several weeks of quiet progress, a short preview arrived from them. It was beautifully realized, almost as if light itself were drawing the structure of the music. Yet the track they had used wasn’t Le Rêve Restauré — it was Cube 6: L’Avant et l’Arrière.
I laughed and wrote back:
“This looks absolutely amazing — I love it! ✨
Haha, by the way, it seems this one uses ‘Cube 6’ instead of ‘Dream Restored’ 😅🎶
I’ll drop you an email later.”
They replied almost immediately:
“I forgot!! 😅 I did switch songs when I started... but I lost track and got caught in the waves of calling it Dream Restored.”
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6. Reflection — Dream as Structure
That small mistake felt strangely symbolic. Dream and Cube — emotion and structure — had quietly merged in their process. Between coincidence and misrecognition, both sound and image began to shape a shared form: a dream rendered as structure.
From that point, our correspondence settled into a steady rhythm. The focus was no longer on how to “finish” a work, but on how to sustain a dialogue.
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7. Dialogue — Resonance in Anonymity
In one of our chats, I wrote:
“We both carry a strong sense of anonymity — I actually have no idea who you are in real life (and I’m sure it’s the same for you about me).
And we both create in ‘unreal’ realms — you without physical materials, and us without instruments.
Yet our methods and attitudes toward expression are completely different.
And still, somehow, we’re creating something together.”
That was, in essence, what this collaboration became. Two artists, both anonymous and working in immaterial media, intersecting through sound and light. It showed that resonance can be more concrete than recognition.
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8. Translation — From Sound to Light
This project was never meant to be a “music video.” What Ein.garden created could be described as an optical remix — a visual translation of our sound data.
Just as our compositions are generated from acoustic structures, their imagery translated those same structures into a language of light. Temporal form in sound became spatial form in vision. It was an experiment in shared geometry across different media.
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9. Continuation — A Work Still Moving
The production lasted for more than three months. Despite handling large-scale commissions, they devoted time to this purely personal project, and I remain deeply grateful for that.
Not long ago, they sent a short message:
“I will have a version prepared today!!”
It was only one line, but it felt like a small pulse traveling through distance — the sound and light beginning to move again.
At the time of writing, we were still waiting for the final version. I imagined that when it arrived, it would not appear as a finished piece, but as another structure emerging between music and image.
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10. Duration — Different Densities of Time
The final version has now arrived. It runs for about twenty seconds — much shorter than I had imagined.
Initially, I expected a full-length piece that covered the entire track. So the brevity came as a surprise. But it soon made sense.
I had once asked them about the length of their works, and they replied:
“I make a lot of short loops, most of the time I never arrange much.
Also for the ones I do arrange, 1–2 min is typical length for the sorts of SoundCloud users I interact with.
But I love having a way to publish more ‘unfinished’ works without intent to make progress on them.”
They seem more interested in holding time than extending it — in leaving a structure at the moment of contact rather than leading it toward closure.
Our music unfolds through duration; their visuals condense it into an instant. This collaboration revealed how each of us defines time differently — not as contradiction, but as separate coordinates of observation.
The video itself has no title, described simply as a visual made for the song.
For them, those twenty seconds were complete. And within that difference, perhaps, lies the clearest structure this collaboration produced.
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