IKENO, a new Hadamard album, out 20 November

IKENO is my new album as Hadamard. It comes out on Friday 20 November on Bandcamp, and a few weeks later on the streaming services.

It started with three fast electro tracks. The hard, repetitive snare made me think of a pulsar’s beam sweeping past every few seconds. First it was going to be two EPs, one fast and one atmospheric. It took years, and along the way it became one album with a story around it.

The story is about Enoka and Sethi, a crew of two on a research station six astronomical units from a magnetar called Chron. They send probes into the star’s field and keep the records. To me they are the real face of science. Far out and out there, and at the same time everyday, often boring, painstaking work.

The story is told in fragments around the music, and most of it lives on the album’s page:

• The room. Look around the station’s living module. Markers open moments from the mission: stills, loops, notes and sounds. The album’s page
• The records. Every track is an entry in the mission’s records, with the day it was logged. Four sheets from the mission come with the pre-order. The records
• The countdown. Short films from the station on Instagram, every other day until the release. On Instagram

I like it when things aren’t spelled out. The listener has to finish the story.

I wanted to see if I could make an electro album for 2026 as I see it. Classic electro beats, ambient synths, robot voices. I’m curious whether people think it worked.

Listen to Eleven Zero Nine and pre-order

When you pre-order, Eleven Zero Nine downloads straight away. If you listen, reply to this mail and tell me what you think.

Janko

Also this month

Ten Hadamard records went into the archive, with their masters and covers. Excerpts of eleven of them now play on the archive’s pages.

Looking for: a cassette copy of A1, made by Le Chocolat Noir for Transformer in Vienna, 2013. I don’t have one. If you know where one is, reply to this mail.