Vanishing Twin Reassemble Psychedelic Pop on ‘Archives’

Vanishing Twin’s new album Archives turns distance into part of the recording process. Released October 2, the project was assembled after founding member Cathy Lucas relocated to rural France while Valentina Magaletti and Susumu Mukai remained in London.

Rather than attempting to reproduce a conventional room-based session from afar, the trio exchanged songs, instrumental fragments and recordings through a virtual studio. Those pieces became material to be revisited, reorganized and transformed—a process that ultimately supplied the album with its title.

An archive as an instrument

Lucas describes the group’s method as gathering material, riffing on it, turning it around and searching for a story inside the accumulated fragments. That makes “archive” less a description of old material than a creative system. Daily sessions become raw material; memory and revision become compositional tools.

It also fits Vanishing Twin’s longstanding resistance to simple genre categories. The group’s work has moved through psychedelic pop, experimental electronics, percussion-heavy improvisation and collage. On Archives, those tendencies are tied together by the act of exchange itself.

Geography changes, the collaboration survives

Remote records can easily feel like compromises forced by circumstance. Vanishing Twin instead built the geographic separation into the identity of the project. Each member contributes across multiple instruments, and the album’s construction depends on material changing hands rather than remaining attached to the person who first recorded it.

The result is a useful example of what a “band” can mean when its members no longer occupy the same city. Archives is not simply a document of remote collaboration; its central idea is that fragments can acquire new meanings when somebody else receives them, alters them and sends them back.

Editorial image: Yvette de Wit / Unsplash, licensed via Unsplash. Image is illustrative and does not depict the artist unless otherwise stated.