The Rubber Duck Massacre EP

In the early 2000s I was active on techhouse.ee, a site and forum where people—mainly from Russia and the former USSR—shared music, particularly techno and house. The site has long been offline, but a few snapshots of it remain in the Wayback Machine.

That is where I met Ilya, a guy who had a very similar taste in records as well as similar views on life and art. We exchanged music and talked a lot over ICQ about music, art, and life. At some point we decided to meet in person. I was living in Leipzig, and he came to Germany; we spent about three weeks hanging out, enjoying some beers, and producing music in Ableton.

I still remember that we made a MySpace page for our project, Two Unknown Guys, added some of these tracks to its player, and sent Dan Curtin a message asking what he thought about our music. He actually answered. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but we were happy simply because he had apparently listened to our tracks.

Around that same period we also met Christoph Schindling online, on the techhouse forums too, if I remember correctly. The funny thing is that we only got in touch after Ilya had already visited Germany, so we had to wait another year to meet Christoph in person. But that is another story…