Unidentified Network is a monthly podcast dedicated to artists working at the edges of experimental music. Each episode invites a musician, producer, sound artist, or coder whose work and creative approach I find distinctive to contribute an exclusive mix or live recording that reflects their listening habits, influences, or current interests.
Accompanying each session is a short interview exploring the ideas behind their practice—from the ways they think about sound and composition to the broader cultural, technological, and personal influences that inform their work. Rather than focusing solely on production techniques, the conversations aim to uncover the curiosity, philosophies, and questions that continue to shape each artist’s evolving practice.
Unidentified Network 01 - Hexalyne
Hexalyne is the experimental IDM project of Romanian producer Sorin Paun, who has also released music under aliases such as Datacrashrobot, Wirewound, and Randomform.
There is a dreamlike quality to his recordings, though not the dream of the unconscious. Rather, they evoke the strange oneiric states generated by contemporary networks: databases dreaming of themselves, algorithms generating systems of association and interference. Sound behaves as though it possesses its own agency. Events do not seem composed so much as discovered, excavated from a hidden architecture of possibilities.
At times the music feels almost topographical. One moves through it as through a landscape composed of synthetic matter: crystalline growths of tone, eroded valleys of static, sudden eruptions of rhythmic pressure. The listener becomes less a recipient than an explorer, navigating an acoustic terrain whose dimensions continually shift.
The effect is neither cold nor clinical. Beneath the elaborate signal processing lies a peculiar lyricism—a fragile humanity encoded within the circuitry. Moments of beauty surface unexpectedly from the turbulence, like bioluminescent organisms glimpsed in deep water. These flashes do not resolve the music’s mysteries; they intensify them. Hexalyne’s work suggests that in an age saturated with information, the most compelling artistic gesture may be not communication but the cultivation of productive opacity: sound as a field of possibilities, endlessly unfolding beyond interpretation.
What distinguishes Hexalyne from much contemporary experimental electronica is the sense that the music is not interested in nostalgia for the machine. There is little of the retro-futurist fetishism that has come to haunt electronic music culture. Instead, his music inhabits a space after the collapse of technological utopianism, where digital processes have become so ubiquitous that they no longer announce themselves as technology at all. The glitches, fractures, and micro-rhythmic instabilities do not signify malfunction; they are the texture of a world whose underlying operations are permanently in flux.
Your music often suggests the existence of hidden systems operating beneath the surface of everyday reality. What kinds of experiences—musical or otherwise—first made you aware of those invisible layers?
I studied art and I think that made me aware that reality isn’t a fixed thing. I realized that every person experiences the world through a different lens. Two people can look at the same object, hear the same sound or live through the same event and give them completely different meanings.
What currently excites your imagination outside of music? Are there books, films, scientific ideas, landscapes, technologies, or encounters that have found their way into your work, even indirectly?
I like to see art exhibitions, visit museums, watch movies, and documentaries. I think that every experience finds its way into my work, whether directly or indirectly, consciously and subconsciously.
Many artists begin with a sound they want to make. Do you begin with sounds, emotions, questions, images, or something more difficult to define?
The start can be a sound, a sample, an idea, or just sit down with the intention of creating something. If I don’t have a clear starting point, the first step is finding a spark that can lead the process somewhere interesting, that might come from a new VST, a processed field recording or a generative patch that leads me in an unexpected direction.
Listening to your records can feel like entering an unfamiliar environment rather than hearing a series of compositions. When you create a piece, are you building a world for the listener to inhabit, or are you documenting one you’ve already discovered?
Most definitely a world for the listener to enter and inhabit for the duration of the album. That’s usually how I approach it from the beginning. When I’m working on an album, I often have a clear idea how many tracks it should contain, what the opening track will sound like, how certain moments in the middle should feel like and how the album should end.
At the same time there are always unknown elements and ideas that reveal themselves during the process. I like to have a plan, a direction and a concept, but I also leave room for discovery and unexpected developments along the way.
What kind of listening do you value most? Are there sounds in everyday life that remain as inspiring to you as music itself?
I enjoy doing field recordings, capturing sounds from both nature and city environments. I’ve recorded extensively over the years, and many of those recordings still serve as valuable starting points for pads, percussion elements and sometimes even rhythmic elements.
Experimental electronic music is often discussed in terms of innovation and complexity. What qualities in music still surprise you as a listener, regardless of how advanced the techniques might be?
The sense of unfamiliarity is what draws me in the most, hearing sounds I’ve never encountered before and discovering new subgenres that branch off from existing ones. I’m interested in artists who create their own distinct sonic worlds. Some artists can build a self-contained habitat, yet still manage to keep it engaging without becoming repetitive and I like that.
Your work seems to inhabit a space between precision and unpredictability. Do you enjoy maintaining control over a piece, or are you more interested in creating conditions where unexpected things can happen?
Both, actually. I like to maintain a certain level of control over each track, but working with generative patches can lead to unexpected and inspiring results. Sometimes I use those generative elements as they are and build around them, other times I make edits and reshape them to fit the direction I have in mind. I do a lot of track sketches and I choose the ones that inspire me the most and I focus on developing them further.
When I work on an album I usually have the track order in place and a sense of how each piece relates to the ones before and after it. However, in this part of the process unpredictable things can happen for sure, new ideas emerge and tracks can evolve in unexpected ways.
When you look back at your earlier releases, what do you hear now that you couldn’t hear at the time? Do you see a continuous thread running through your work, or a series of transformations?
I don’t listen to my earlier releases very often, but there are elements that I appreciate more now than I did at the time. There are also aspects that I would probably approach differently today, but they felt like the right decisions when I made them, and I think that’s an important part of the creative process.
There is a continuous thread running through the Hexalyne releases. I try to maintain a sense of consistency, but each release also brings its own transformations as I move from one album to the next. Sometimes those changes are subtle, and sometimes they are more significant and I like to think they are part of an ongoing evolution.
We live in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, automation, and information systems. Do these developments inspire optimism, anxiety, curiosity—or some combination of all three for you?
A combination of all three, although I think curiosity and anxiety play a bigger role than optimism. New possibilities are exciting, but they also come with uncertainty. It’s all part of accepting change and learning to navigate it.
What occupies your attention creatively right now, and are there sounds, ideas, or experiences that continue to hover at the edge of your practice—things you haven’t yet found a way to bring into the music?
I like to keep myself busy and engaged with creative projects, whether that’s music, art, or design. Listening to electronic music has always been a big part of my life, and I enjoyed exploring a wide range of genres, including electro, drum’n’bass, techno, ambient, minimal and glitch.
I still have unreleased tracks and even complete albums sitting on external drives. Some of those projects were tied to a particular phase in my life and gradually faded away, while others continue to interest me. Every now and then I revisit old sessions and unfinished tracks to see if there’s still something worth exploring.
PODCAST - Hexalyne - Unidentified Network 01
01 - Decomposure - Headphones
02 - Grischa Lichtenberger - 1011_27_#5b
03 - FZV - Clatr2
04 - Ayrtbh - Bufre
05 - Vaag - Concrete
06 - Qebo - New Sh!t
07 - RD - Cherpa
08 - Elín - Fable
09 - Matmos - Metallic Life Review
10 - Oliver Dodd - LGRTHMC BLM
11 - HSXCHCXCXHS - EHM
12 - William Fields - Ute
13 - The Both And - Field 3
14 - Second Woman - ////\\\\
15 - Vcam - Cholendryl Sift
16 - Russell Haswell - Exit Downwards
17 - Tom Hall - Zero-Point Recursion
18 - Xlorite - 01110110011011110110110001100011011011100111010101100101
19 - SSTROM - Förflyttning Av Massa
20 - Gabor Lazar - Rush
21 - Celine Arnauld - {data ∩ Control}
22 - MODUL - t3 Singular
23 - Current Value - Procedure
24 - Qebrµs - Abyme
25 - Pent - Track 2
26 - Lain - So Warm I Wish I Could Stay Here Forever
27 - Shimura - Moonlite
28 - Freeform - A.T. (Autechre Remix)
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