"This album is about sound exploration, playfulness, surprises and discoveries. It is a product of improvisation using modular synthesizers and an experimental approach to composition.

It all started with long hours of playing on my eurorack modular system, combining samples and electronic sounds. The process was completely intuitive, where I avoided any guesswork and just went with the flow, in the spirit of free improvisation. When I later analyzed these recordings, I was surprised to find many inspiring passages and ideas that I would never have come up with deliberately. It seemed that there were sound worlds that spontaneously appeared out of nothing, and I was going to explore them. That's how the idea for the record came about, not from an overarching musical concept, but from the sound itself.

The next stage was a long and meticulous compositional process in which I combined all the parts of the live sessions together and created connecting sections, often by transforming the sound material. During this process, I pretended that I was not creating these pieces, but rather that I was a pioneer on some kind of exploratory expedition to unknown sound worlds. I let the sound lead me, looking for elements that could influence a new section, like hidden dimensions in sound that reveal themselves. My goal was to create interesting narratives for the listener, to make their imaginary journeys as engaging as my composing process.

When I was composing a new part, I often used modular synthesizers again to create sounds and then brought them back to the DAW for editing to keep the elements of playfulness and unpredictability. In fact, a lot of new material and even entire new compositions were created in this way, but I often returned to the original sessions for inspiration, especially when I had writer's block.

Sometimes, when I had doubts about certain sections and wanted to go a step further in this game of removing the composer's ego from the process, I would turn to my electroacoustic composition teacher, Yannis Patoukas, and ask him to make some suggestions. I am very grateful for his input and support during the creation of these tracks.

I invited Evan Crankshaw to collaborate on the album cover artwork. Interestingly, Evan initially chose a variety of elements for his cover idea, but the original images he cut them from fell into a pile that began to suggest a new composition that eventually became the cover. Thus, it brought another spontaneous dimension to the visual aspect of the album."-Taras Opanasiuk

"With much of the music on the pages, we find it on record labels, in which the label boss also acts as a musician. Until today, I didn't know this fact was true for Sublime Retreat, but Taras Opanasiuk now comes out of the woodwork as Innovative Landscapes Laboratory. It's interesting to see what he does as part of the overall sound for his label. Since he started the label, there has been an exciting string of atmospheric electronics releases, heavily processed field recordings, and somewhat dark ambient sounds. In his work, Opanasiuk uses recordings of many hours at the Eurorack modular system, feeding samples and electronic sounds to this. All in the spirit of free improvisation, but not as part of what he wanted on CD. Using the multi-track software Reaper, he combined his recordings and started composing the music. In that sense, his results are quite different from many of the other releases on his label. While by and large, one could say musique concrète is, for many of his artists, one point of reference (usually among many), it's the alpha and omega in these five pieces. Opanasiuk creates sound collages from whatever he extracted from his Eurorack machines. That modular feeling is the backbone of the music, but by layering, editing, mixing and removing, he creates his own sound world, and the compositions are particularly strong. Unlike the Reverse Image/Bailey CD reviewed elsewhere, this doesn't feel like 'live' collaging but moving big and small sounds around. It took me some turns in listening before I went over and was convinced by the music. Partly because it was different than what I expected from this label, but then later on, I realised it does fit, and it's a record that both fits the label and does something distinctly different."-Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly