Highest Hopelessness may have overtaken Paneye as my main musical focus now, and I feel it is time to talk about how it came to be.
For years, I held a vast trove of unreleased songs and sketches — many of these sketches were electronic, house, trance, and techno tunes that never quite fit the minimalist, psych-folk direction of Paneye. Although I’d planned to release them one day, they sat in the background of my work.
My earliest influences came from home. My mother often played Massive Attack and later Weekend Players around the house. That sound world — chill-out, trip hop, house, trance — seeped into me, even while I was primarily developing as a psych-folk guitarist.
In 2022, my friend Kim invited me to perform at one of his Nude Life Drawing events as a background musician for the models. That night opened doors I hadn’t expected. Most importantly, it brought me close to Fire Rabbit — a music producer who prefers to remain anonymous.
Fire Rabbit and I began jamming. They breathed new life into my old sketches while adding vast amounts of their own material. Soon we decided to form a group, with Fire Rabbit as primary producer and mixer. Together, we brought hundreds of song ideas into the fold.
We then teamed up with Earth Snake, a beat master who transformed our placeholder rhythms and quickly joined full-time on drums and beat programming.
Val, a bass head, came in to round us out at the low end, as both Fire Rabbit and I typically don’t make bass-heavy music. Earth Snake and Val became the engine room for the band. Val also provided many of the distant and reverb- drenched “barely-there” vocals. Many of her bass contributions are original additions to our songs, and she also contributes occasional ambient synths and guitar effects. Pegg and later Kenny expanded the vocal dimension further, creating a trio of female voices.
Things kept moving, and old mate Hex caught wind of the band and turned up with a giant synth and loads of other indescribably weird devices. Starting as a guest artist, Hex joined as a full-time member on lead-synths once the synergy was established. He has since become a key contributor of music and ideas, and a key producer and mixer with Fire Rabbit and Earth Snake. Without them, Highest Hopelessness would lean far more lo-fi.
Today, Highest Hopelessness has grown into something more like a fraternity — a collective of artists and musicians. I’m the unofficial spokesperson, since the others wish to remain behind the curtain, but I can’t claim the credit alone. This is a shared creation.
So here is our backstory — and also the reason my planned releases of old electronic material never surfaced, and why Paneye’s Incantations from 2022 hasn’t been put on Spotify yet. Those things will come in time, but right now the focus is Highest Hopelessness.
What started as 2 friends jamming and sending files to each other has evolved into a space where old sketches became reborn songs, and 7 artists fused into something larger than any one of us.
