One

At first glance, One probably looks like a fairly straightforward techno track: a driving bassline, a pile of percussion, evolving textures and a relentless 140 BPM pulse. But from the outset I was interested in pushing against one of the genre's most familiar conventions. Instead of building everything around a standard four-to-the-floor kick, I ended up with a pattern that feels a little less predictable and, to my ears at least, a lot more interesting. The groove still drives hard, but there's a tension running through it that never quite settles.

What makes the kick pattern work is that it never completely abandons the listener. There is enough repetition to create a solid sense of momentum, but the placement of individual hits keeps shifting the perceived centre of gravity. At 140 BPM, those changes happen quickly enough to be felt rather than analysed. You can lock into it, but there's always a slight sense that the floor is shifting underneath you. That's exactly what I was after.

Against this sits a bassline that performs almost the opposite function. The bass is there to do one thing: keep the pressure on. Harmonic movement is minimal, rhythmic variation is scarce, and the pattern persists for almost the entire duration of the track. On paper it's almost stubbornly repetitive. In practice, though, there are dozens of tiny changes happening over the course of the track. Most listeners won't consciously notice them, but that's kind of the point. Small shifts in filtering, saturation, movement and texture stop repetition becoming stagnation. The bass remains the same idea throughout, but it never quite stays still.

This tension between repetition and gradual transformation became a guiding principle throughout the production process. By the time the arrangement was complete, the relationship between kick and bass felt resolved both rhythmically and spectrally. The groove was working, the low end felt balanced, and the two elements occupied clearly differentiated territory. As a result, a huge amount of the production time ended up being spent in the mids.

That's where most of the personality of the track lives.

There isn't any secret sauce here. Just a lot of listening, adjusting and then listening again. Sound selection, saturation, EQ and stereo placement did most of the heavy lifting. The difficult part was getting all of those things working together without drawing attention to any one of them. Every sound occupying the midrange needed a reason to exist, and every decision had consequences elsewhere in the mix.

Saturation was particularly important, not simply as a way of adding weight or aggression, but as a tool for creating harmonic complexity. Often it was those additional harmonics that allowed sounds to remain present without needing to be pushed louder. EQ was less about boosting frequencies and more about carving space. Small cuts in the right places often achieved more than dramatic enhancements. Much of the process involved reducing masking and creating complementary relationships between sounds rather than trying to make individual elements stand out.

The stereo field became another layer of the composition. Sounds were constantly evaluated not only according to their frequency content but also according to where they existed in the image. Width, movement and positioning all became ways of creating separation and interest. Much of the track's development actually happens here. The arrangement itself is relatively restrained, but the sonic landscape is continually shifting through subtle changes in timbre, harmonic content and spatial perception.

All of the percussion was built from foley and field recordings. Partly because I enjoy that process, but also because it helps create a sense of continuity across the track. When every sound starts life in roughly the same world, it's much easier to make the finished piece feel coherent, even after heavy processing. Individual sounds may end up heavily transformed, but they still seem to belong together.

That same idea informed the way transitions were handled. One thing I've never particularly liked in electronic music is when transitions feel imported from somewhere else just to announce that a new section is about to begin. I wanted the opposite. Most of the transitions in One come from material that's already there. Existing modulation gets pushed further, sounds get resampled and recycled, and ideas gradually morph into something new. Rather than stitching sections together with effects, I tried to let one section naturally evolve into the next.

Looking back, that's probably what connects every decision made during the production of One. The unusual kick pattern, the obsessive midrange work, the custom percussion and the approach to transitions all came from the same place. Rather than introducing new elements to create movement, I was more interested in seeing how far I could take a relatively small set of ideas. Almost everything in the track is related to something else that's already there.

For a piece of music built from machines, samples and software, the result feels surprisingly organic to me. Not organic in the sense of sounding natural or acoustic, but organic in the sense that everything grows from the same source. The track keeps changing, but it's always the same organism underneath.