Purelink: Maintaining The Bliss
“Most of the time, we’re just searching for a loop that we can listen to forever,” explains Akeem Asani, one-third of ambient techno luminaries Purelink. He’s sitting in the corner of the band’s small studio in Ridgewood, Queens, perched on a stool between three guitars and the desk where they do most of their work. “Sometimes we’ll hone in on a loop that feels like infinity, and I think chasing that feeling is what we’re going for.”
A few times during our interview, Ben Paulson opens an Ableton session to show me a plug-in or demonstrate some automation. One of the band’s sublime, silvery pieces wafts into the room like mist from an oil diffuser, slowing our conversation from excited, nerdy chatter to a more measured, deliberate pace. When I ask for a specific example of a loop they felt they could live inside, all three immediately smile and, almost in unison, say “Maintain The Bliss.” It’s the first cut on their 2021 digital-only EP “Bliss / Swivel,” and they point to it as the song that brought the Purelink project fully into focus.
“Maintain The Bliss” is a deceptively dense piece, its wispy pads and echoing accent notes held in place by a shuddering, phase-shifting line of shakers and hi-hats. It takes repeated listens to notice when the underlying drones billow through delay feedback a few minutes in, and a few more to notice when they dissipate. The track feels much greater than its seven minutes, concurrently expanding and contracting time like a dolly zoom. Paslaski recalls the instant that it clicked: “We had two computers up and a couple of loops that we thought were cool. I suggested we add something intentional, like a piano chord, and it worked.” Once all the elements fell into place, the band hit record and sat back, letting it wash over them. “The original recording was an hour long,” says Asani. “It was playing for a lot longer, too,” adds Paulson. “We were in the studio for like 10 hours, like, ‘Yeah, this is sick.’”
Three dudes and a desk – Purelink’s minimalist setup
Aside from the guitars next to Asani, the Purelink studio is remarkably sparse. There’s a little bit of soundproofing, a large flatscreen monitor, an Arturia Keystep MIDI controller, and two small Genelec speakers. Paulson sits in a rolling office chair, and both Asani and Paslaski have their laptops open on the desk in front of them. There are three computers connected and running, which is Purelink’s go-to mode. “Everything starts with three computers,” says Asani, “and then we’ll put it into one file, which is where the song structure comes out.” The room has the feeling of an antechamber, somewhere between a bedroom and a closet. It’s narrow, but big by New York standards, and when they pull up the session for “Circle of Dust,” the closer of their new record, Faith, the room seems to expand to feel like three-dimensional space you can stroll around in.
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The name Purelink comes from Ableton’s Link feature, which uses a local wireless network to sync tempo and phase across multiple apps and devices. According to the band, it’s the key to their synergy, enabling each member to simultaneously work independently and as part of the collective. When the three first started making music together in their hometown of Chicago, their sessions tended towards layering beatless, overlapping drones into gentle ambient washes. Eventually, they sought a more immediate, collaborative feeling. “Over time, we started to wonder how we could make our different voices speak together,” says Paslaski. The first time they jammed as a unit, they used Link to connect their laptops and were surprised at how natural it felt. Now, it’s the most integral part of their structure, the first step in composing new music or planning a live set. And although they plan transitions for their shows, performances are largely improvisational. They keep a MIDI interface as a backup for performances, but, as they can attest from a bullet-sweating gig that ran off a phone hotspot, Link has worked with even the weakest signal.
Sampling and live dubbing play a huge part in any Purelink composition, and over the years, they’ve discovered unintuitive ways to coax new sounds from plug-ins. Virtual DJ, a lightweight but powerful DJ software, has become a mainstay in their arsenal. It features Ableton Link capability, allowing it to sync with the session BPM and record into a separate track without needing to load it as a VST manually. “You can stem split or easily remove drums from a song,” Paulson explains. “It’s fun to isolate the vocals on a track that doesn’t have any vocals,” adds Paslaski, “so you get these tiny, indistinguishable fragments.” Over time, they’ve developed a deep familiarity of their own process, and thus an almost telepathic way of slipping into various roles. Asani, who has been a drummer since high school, naturally gravitates to programming Purelink’s percussive elements, and Paulson might play a string patch on a MIDI keyboard, but all three dabble in every component of their sound – pads, samples, bass.
None of them expected Signs, their 2023 debut album, to land with such a seismic impact. They’d recently decamped to New York, where the scene for their gossamer brand of minimalist techno was much more expansive than those of the Midwest. Released by Peak Oil, the small but deeply influential Los Angeles label run by Brian Foote and Brion Brionson, Signs quickly garnered massive critical praise and raised the band’s profile from niche dub techno acolytes to ambassadors of the tasteful rave. Purelink immediately graduated from basement DIY shows and small room DJ sets to festival appearances and international tours, opening for the likes of Astrid Sonne, Tirzah, and Loraine James. It was headspinning and thrilling, and inspired them to think hard about where to take the project next. “Touring helped us consider what the scope of this music could be beyond the underground world that we’re a part of,” Paulson muses.
“Sometimes we’ll hone in on a loop that feels like infinity, and I think chasing that feeling is what we’re going for.”
When it came time to work on a follow-up, “We asked ourselves, ‘What’s the next step?’ We could’ve easily made a record that sounded similar to Signs,” says Asani. “We had a lot of stuff that we ended up scrapping.” For Faith, the group wanted to challenge themselves, to peer into the unexplored corners of the signature they’d developed. They thought back on the different kinds of venues they’d played—rock clubs, outside in the woods, giant warehouses. “For In The Open in Upstate New York, we played beside a creek,” Paslaski recalls. “I wanted to fuck with people on drugs by playing these granulated rock sounds,” Paulson interjects with a laugh. At a show at Brooklyn’s Market Hotel, a myriad of technical difficulties—a wavering WiFi connection, bad grounding—resulted in the harshest Purelink set to date, a combination of embracing failing technology and competing with the more upbeat DJs who rounded out the bill. These elements don’t necessarily show up on Faith, but they helped expand the band’s ideas about what the Purelink sound could be.
Faith is just as dreamy as any of Purelink’s previous work, with perhaps a heavier emphasis on marrying the organic with the technological. “We were sampling a lot of acoustic textures,” says Paulson, “whereas before what we were working with was more digital.” There are recognizable guitars on the record, even if they’re filtered and EQ’d for a slightly alien sheen. On “First Iota,” for example, there’s an intermittent strum that seems to assemble and disassemble itself like metal shavings guided by magnets. “We wanted to explore the idea of incorporating a folk song or a strong country twang into our world,” says Asani.
Opener “Looked Me Right In The Eye” has the kind of glassy, digitally flattened guitar that would color an ML Buch or Mk.gee album. And beneath all the clicks and cuts, the bits that Asani calls “fuzzy, artifacty,” there’s almost always a sustained note providing a harmonic center. “I like to think about practicing my cello and how it helps so much to have a drone playing underneath to get the intonation right,” says Paslaski. “It's really nice to have a steady tone, even if it's subtle, to give context to all the phrases and melodies.”
It’s also the first Purelink album to feature vocals. Some are barely recognizable as such, like the choral moans that come in during the last quarter of “Looked Me Right In The Eye,” but two songs, “Rookie” and “First Iota,” feature unaffected human voices sitting prominently in the mix. Loraine James sings sleepily on “Rookie,” her quiet voice barely kissed with reverb. Angelina Nonaj, an internet friend of Paulson’s, gives a disaffected spoken word performance about the mundanity of daily life, close-mic’d and left dry. Neither of them takes away from the record’s overall driftiness, adding a new wrinkle to the band’s sound.
When I ask about the album title, they’re initially a bit sheepish. “We aren’t the best at naming things, nor are we that conceptual,” Paulson says with a smile. Asani laughs and adds, “I would say the most conceptual thing about us is that we’re a three-piece.” But after a beat, they start to unspool the origin story. First, a friend had named his album Trust, which intrigued Paulson, who suggested Faith. The longer they sat with it, the more it began to accumulate layers of meaning. It’s a way to coax positivity out of dark times, a reminder to take risks, a companion to their previous, also ambiguous album title, Signs. But mostly, it’s a reminder of what the three of them have: “We have faith in music,” says Asani. “We have faith in ourselves.”
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Text and interview: Dashiell Lewis
Photos: Patrick Woodling