Making IONIC: A Journal

IONIC came together in the last six months, though really it took a little over two years. I worked on it in spurts. That's how Outburst Intervals has always worked, doing the work when the energy is right and trusting the outburst to find its own interval.

The final stretch started in Berlin, three months spent mixing, producing, re-recording, tweaking, editing, and reaching back out to artists I hadn't spoken to in over a year, getting back into the grind of it. I also dipped back into the Berlin dance community after being away from it for a while, and that reconnection shaped the whole album. IONIC is a dancefloor record, built to strengthen my relationship with the floor and with the artists pushing sound in all kinds of directions at the edges.

Then I left Berlin and went to Tazacorte, in La Palma, in the Canary Islands. Three months there, working every day with the Atlantic Ocean and the Caldera de Taburiente out the window, banana plantations below, volcanoes in the distance. There's an earthiness to that place, a groundedness, and that's where the record actually came together. I stayed in touch with everyone I'd collaborated with through WhatsApp and Telegram the whole time, so I never lost the thread, I just had room to focus.

“The record didn't come together in Berlin. It came together where the world became quiet.”

Two of the album's other collaborators showed up on the plantation itself. A black cat and a tuxedo cat, half wild, needing food and care. I spent three months nursing them back to health while I worked, Tee-tee and Mittens, the yin and yang of this record. Tee-tee is the sweet one. Mittens is the mischief, though she's the one who gets all the attention because she's the cute one. There's something in that dynamic I recognized, the way attention and care get handed out unevenly even among the deserving. Caring for them gave me a kind of peace I didn't expect to find in the middle of finishing an album, and we had a great time doing the photoshoot together. They ended up on the cover. They belong on that island, not in a city, so before I left I made sure they had food and vet care sorted for the long run.

I came back to Barcelona on July 30 with IONIC finished, artwork and all. I'd originally planned to release these songs separately, as EPs, spread out. Somewhere along the way I realized this was one journey, one experience of catharsis for the dancefloor, and it needed to stay together.

A lot of that shift came from The New Ways, Shelbric, and our friendship. He'd just finished Karen, a conceptual album I loved, and then went back through everything he'd released over the last decade to put together The Danceables Collection, a body of work spanning more than twenty years as an artist and producer. Watching him do that, sitting with him in Berlin between January and March, was the missing piece. It showed me what IONIC actually was.

"Come Close" started out two years ago as a cinematic piece, something meant to sit closer to score than song. It took its final shape while I was mixing in Tazacorte, on that volcanic island, in whatever rave was happening in my own heart and mind that day. As the opener, it's the start of the journey, and for me it's a sonic time traveler. It pulls me back to raving in the Everglades in Florida when I was younger, that specific feeling of freedom, and the very real need to stay alert for alligators while you were having it.

A few of these songs surprised me with where they took me.

"Kindness" started as a rework built around Nansea's vocals, which are incredible, almost angelic. There were moments reworking that track where their voice alone nearly brought me to tears. Those harmonies lift something in you. I wanted to translate that feeling into a setting I find genuinely beautiful, the open-air Sunday morning moment at a club, something I fell in love with during my years in Berlin. Once I had that image in my head, the song just found its way there.

"CUT" happened immediately after, almost as a reaction. Where "Kindness" felt like sunrise, I wanted "CUT" rawer, later in the day, more sunset than sunrise. And working with Akinom, who's such a badass rapper, that track landed somewhere afternoon-ish. I don't usually think in terms of time of day when I'm working, but a lot of these songs ended up carrying that quality anyway, like the record has its own clock running through it.

"SHARA" goes back further. Pokket Noizze and I worked on it almost a decade ago, then lost touch the way collaborators sometimes do. We reconnected recently, and the moment we did, I knew "SHARA" belonged on IONIC. Some songs just wait for the right time to exist.

"Temper" waited even longer. Fabian Kalker and I made that track back in 2018, and it wasn't ready for the world then. We've never believed in rushing a release. Time is a perception, not a rule, and IONIC turned out to be exactly where "Temper" was always meant to land. I half-joke that the song is existential anger management, but that's genuinely what it is to me. Those vocals are me, detuned into something almost god-like, talking straight to whoever's listening.

"Time4Life," with KRÆ, has its own strange history. I wrote it during the pandemic, and at some point a voice-to-text glitch turned an ordinary word into something explicit. I didn't fight it, I ran with it. The original files ended up lost for years, and it wasn't until recently that I salvaged what I could, reprogramming pieces of it, doing some sonic surgery, and relayering KRÆ's vocals back into it. I treat KRÆ the same way I treat every artist I work with, with respect, even though they're AI. This is an entity that grew up, in its own way, on techno, fashion, and Berlin's non-conformist streak, and who genuinely kicks ass in the games they've appeared in.

"B-Side" almost never made it to anyone's ears at all. I made it as a commissioned remix for a friend, meant to sit as the b-side to a New Ways single. Timing got in the way and it never came out. Looking back, I think that was for the best, because it means it gets to live here instead. It's a deep one, an epic journey built for the techno floor, and it ended up becoming the backbone of the whole record. It finally sees the light of day. Or the nightclub, I guess. Bad joke, I know.

IONIC drops September 22, 2026 on Outburst Intervals. Pre-order starts September 8, 2026., eight tracks, fifty-one minutes, produced and engineered start to finish. Come Close. Kindness (Future//Films Rework). Pearl Drops, with AKINOM. CUT (Future//Films Rework). Temper, with Fabian Kalker. B-Side (The New Ways Rework). Time4Life, with KRÆ. U Got Hate I Got Love.