I’ve been enamoured with the mysterious German group Basic Channel for a couple years. To my chagrin, so little music dares to further explore their ultra-specific synaptic sound. My mission statement was to make a dub-techno record in the style of Basic Channel. Some further influences took Chain of Memories off-course, including the 2021 film Memoria, Mega Man Battle Network, and the potential for 100+ BPM percussive music to maintain functional ambience. I aimed to make something more brutalistically working-class and discontented than my last two albums, as that is a territory of rhythmic music I’ve yet to explore in earnest, but found a need to be more expressive, jovial, and fun (I.E. major chords/keys) as I continued to create.

I recall walking to find some secret basement computer lab where my friends were studying a few years ago. En route, I listened to Basic Channel’s Bcd-2 compilation for the first time on a really bassy set of Sony Headphones. The music was consummate to a desired pace and a brilliant electronic narcotic for amplified thinking. In the confusion of locating this hidden study spot the music changed from an ambient soundtrack to wandering thought to powerfully claustrophobic in its minimalism, like the soundtrack to a feverish, albeit mundane, thriller. Wearisome foot travel wherein the destination is vague, mysterious, muddled, lost, confused, even forgotten and the wish that you were still on the road in eternal commute, was the focal point of my 2nd album, the ambient Home, but has always been synonymous with my creative process.

I had a finished version of this album with ten tracks in late August, but chose to see how much more I could explore this specific style and theme. I wanted to make something bigger than previous albums, that welcomes shuffled play-throughs and re-listens while retaining a through-thread. I had a second version done in October that kept with the dub-techno/Chain Reaction motif. I gave it a final once-over before sending it off to Chris Stander (my creative partner) to touch up and master. However, in-spite of my mission statement, I realised an album of brooding Basic Channel homages was lacking a certain spiritedness, and began reinvigorating the project.

During the time of defibrillating Memories, my YouTube algorithm encouraged me to brush up on my Mega Man Battle Network lore. The grimy digital dust of these original tracks seemed to pair nicely with retro-futurism of Battle Network, but the record was not yet as colorful as Mega Man’s glistening cyber-neon anime aesthetic. Thus came the center-piece of Memories: “Dodge Rambox”. I put together “Dodge Rambox” after being shown a massive Dodge truck by my car-salesman brother, chuckling at its luxury Rambox that functions as a beer cooler. I made one last non-dub-techno track in an effort to include a direct sample from Mega Man on HackMii before calling the record done at fifteen tracks.

The album art is a snapshot from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s mesmerising film Memoria. The air-artefact is the exhaust from an alien spacecraft that lingers away in the climax of Memoria. In the film, Tilda Swinton seeks to locate and recreate the loud rumbling sound that awakes her in the middle of the night in the slow opening scene .I made most of this record in a state of neglecting the grieving process of the death of a family member and of the dissolution of a loving relationship. Much like Swinton's character, I was eschewing responsibility in order to chase a sound. The McGuffin ‘thud’ sound in Memoria appears throughout the album. The title is borrowed from the Kingdom Hearts franchise’s first handheld entry Chain of Memories which features a card-based battle mechanic comparable to Battle Network

Chain of Memories is the conclusion to my ‘kick-drum trilogy’ which began with the warped VHS tape that is Trip and the maniac blockbuster rave music of Dashcam Rodeo. I like trilogies; works in sets of threes. Perhaps that's my numerological biblical hardwiring. My first three albums were free, airy, natural and jazzy. The second set, concluding with CoM, are percussive, computer, dancey, and controlled works.