388 FUX

Twenty-five years ago, Ben Marcantel (sugar sk*-*lls) and Ryan Norris (Coupler) started making music together in a living room, improvising without a map. Norris reflects, “Our minds tend to move along parallel tracks, sometimes crossing, frequently converging, but generally moving in similar directions, two celestial objects careening through space while orbiting one another.”

The six tracks of New Impossible Object emerged from a modern "soft collaboration,” with the two passing work back and forth across sessions and across years. The process owes something to dub and to Miles Davis: the idea that removing foundational elements, or withholding information from a collaborator, can generate results that neither person could have arrived at alone.

Marcantel wrote the seed of “Yumeji's Dream” in 2015 and didn't hear it again until Norris returned it transformed years later. “536 AD Today” underwent a similar process, the initial sounds emerged from a process of analog synthesis experimentation in 2021 but didn’t congeal into its final form until Norris added his literal breaths in 2026. “Anima, Animal” was written in response to “A World of Stairs,” a collaboration through pure inspiration.

Discovery was less a goal than an inevitability, due in large part to the pair’s reflective deficiencies. Marcantel can start things but professes it’s a struggle to finish them. Norris is the inverse; hand him a shard of an idea and he'll make something of it, but starting from nothing is its own obstacle. Separately, these approaches dead-end. Together, they've sustained a collaboration across decades..

Norris also brought his voice to these contributions for the first time. A collaboration with Sonnenzimmer, years of teaching, voiceover work, and exhausting his own reasons to say no - so he didn’t. Marcantel, meanwhile, set a different constraint: write, record, and finish a track in a single day, something he describes as an extreme struggle. Strip away the familiar tools and the habitual moves and you're left navigating by feel, each corner making sense, the shape of the whole revealing itself only after you've already built it.

New Impossible Object is the result of celestial objects that never travel alone. These sounds simply weren't accessible any other way.