Unidentified Network 02 - Lime68k
Lime68k’s music arrives through circuitry. Not melodies, not rhythms in any stable sense, but accumulations of pressure, fleeting currents, disturbances in the air. Listening becomes an act of orientation within a space that is constantly changing shape. Sounds emerge from the edges of perception, gather briefly into recognisable forms, then dissolve back into a mist of clicks, granular residue and electronic dust.
There is a peculiar intimacy to these sounds. They often feel microscopic, as though the ear has been lowered into an ecosystem normally hidden from human attention: colonies of digital insects communicating through bursts of static, particles rubbing against one another in darkness, distant electrical storms travelling through forgotten networks. The music encourages a different kind of listening, one that abandons the search for landmarks and instead follows texture, density and movement.
A crackle appears and multiplies. A low-frequency shadow drifts beneath the surface. Tiny shards of rhythm glint momentarily before vanishing. Throughout Lime68k’s work, events seem to exist in states of transition. Nothing settles for long. Sounds are continually becoming something else. What begins as noise reveals an inner architecture; what appears structured suddenly frays into abstraction. The listener is drawn into a process of perpetual adjustment, navigating by sensation rather than certainty.
Listening to Lime68k often feels like entering a dream in which the boundaries between organic and synthetic life have become uncertain. Sounds behave like living entities. They gather, scatter, mutate and disappear. Some seem curious, approaching the listener before retreating into the distance. Others move in dense formations, creating temporary architectures from noise and vibration. The music unfolds as an encounter with forms of life that exist only in sound.
What remains after listening is less a memory of specific compositions than an atmosphere. A sensation of having wandered through invisible environments. The ear carries away traces: a shimmer of interference, a cloud of granular particles, a rhythm half-remembered and already dissolving. Lime68k’s work invites a mode of attention that is increasingly rare—patient, exploratory, willing to dwell within uncertainty. It reminds us that listening is not simply the reception of sound, but a way of inhabiting the unknown.
What kinds of sounds—or even non-musical experiences—still genuinely surprise or excite you today? Do they find their way into how you approach sound design or composition?
I naturally “see” or feel sound and overall experience tangled synesthesia things, I tend to quickly absorb sensory phenomenons around me and many things can get translated into sound textures and ways to organize information and events. It’s either pretty abstract things that take form when I’m “materializing” them through software or physical means, or very specific ideas that are straightforward to apply or develop. I guess I’m excited about everything that gets my attention, subtle stuff like UI sound effects in a sci-fi movie, a recurrent machine sound in town, weird stuff light does while encountering a diffracting surface while I’m in the subway, nature sounds etc. Lots of stuff coming from my environment.
Are there particular environments, physical or digital, where ideas tend to emerge more easily for you? What is it about those spaces that makes them creatively productive?
Computers are especially efficient for me regarding this. Software and languages I have a lot of experience with really are playgrounds where I do what I want, I’m always curious to try other frameworks or environments because even if I know I won’t try to get high proficiency using them, you can still squeeze some pretty weird stuff out of them fairly easily. It’s very very fun to try to tinker with all the stuff that’s out there, it’s something I realized pretty young while playing around with the grooveboxes and synths we had home.
Your work often feels attentive to texture, density, and instability. Are these qualities you deliberately pursue, or do they emerge naturally from your process?
It’s mostly emerging naturally probably because I approach things very non-linearly, I think ? Inaccurate triggers, badly implemented reverbs, very destructive ways of combining effects...this can get out of hand unless you have enough control, then intuition pretty much does all the job. If I notice that something isn’t working correctly or acts weird, I will just let it do its thing, just to see how far it can go.
Who or what has shaped your understanding of what experimental music can be—not necessarily other musicians, but perhaps writers, technologies, places, or ways of thinking?
I think I struggle a lot at defining what experimental music is. The “try to tinker with all the stuff that’s out there” thing pretty much eroded my original and persistent understandings of what experimental music could be. Many things can get qualified as “experimental”, the boundary is very subjective because there’s stuff coming out from academic settings to DIY places. For example, is Algorave experimental ? It has been around for more than 25 years, and has now a wide range of tools and languages with some of them pretty accessible. I saw during algoraves how the boundary can take form in people’s head, I think my understanding is mostly based on the observation of people’s perception, if that makes sense.
How do you approach the visual side of your practice? What tools, software, or environments do you use, and how does a visual idea typically begin to take shape?
I mostly use Blender, Max/Jitter and web stuff (html/css) along with image editing software and other tools I’m stumbling upon. Most of the time I come up with a kinda abstract idea, mostly fueled with thoughts, emotions and things I saw then it’s a lot of iteration from a simple shape or generator. I have a very similar approach to making music, it’s mostly intuition. There are times when I’m focused on specific textures like metal, glass, paper...which will influence the geometries a lot, for example.
When developing visuals, how do you balance intention and unpredictability? Are you aiming for a specific outcome, or do you prefer to create systems that define the outcome?
It’s mostly intention, lots of destructive editing. I’m never really sure of the wanted or potential outcome, but once I find a tangent I will gladly follow it, and will follow another one if it’s more “appealing” to me. Most of my projects aren’t really complex but are mostly messy, because it’s easier to find weird trajectories. The systems I make are often not very complex but with a large space of possibilities.
Do you feel your practice is driven more by curiosity, necessity, or a desire to challenge established ways of making and experiencing music or visuals?
Lots of curiosity, and a necessity to express many things. I don’t really want to challenge the outside world as I mostly create stuff for me first and I don’t have groundbreaking or highly technical approaches to sound and visuals, just playing around with simple structures to merge them into complex ones.
When you’re working on a piece, how important is it to maintain control over the process? Are there moments when unexpected results become more interesting than your original intentions? And if so do you lean into it or try to stay true to the original idea?
Embracing weird trajectories is pretty much the way I approach creation, expected but unexpected results without giving up control. It’s fine if the original idea got destroyed in the process because I have enormous space to explore, with stuff more interesting than my original abstract idea.
Because your work combines both sound and image, do you see one as leading the other, or do they develop together as part of the same creative process?
I think they’re independent despite having very similar creative process, but they highly influence each other all the time. Though sound really influenced my visual creative process, especially when I was vjing a lot.
As someone who is into building systems in Max and other environments, Where do you think a work truly exists: in the system that generates it, in the finished result, or in the experience of the person encountering it?
I think it exists in all three. A person experiencing it is the result of a finished product resulting from a system making those sounds. They all exists together, like different copies of the same phenomenon. I tend put a lot of control on the mostly small systems I’m making, sometimes I’d reopen one and jam a little bit with it, which leads to different places I’ve been to with this system or project. It’s like zooming into the space of possibilities, and sometimes keeping and freezing this selected zone to bring it somewhere else.
PODCAST : Lime68k - Unidentified Network 02
Nathan Ho - Despite our Best Efforts
Rabit - Ox
Secat - GEARSHIFT
speed table - generated 2
Trash Panda QC - Dicey
BZMC - Zara (NO-NU-GRDZ excerpt 2)
S280F - [҈]
Nathan Ho - Warring Factions
Qebrus - ◙◙◙◙◙◙◙◙
Özcan Saraç - AaAC7ES7F2n
Nathan Ho - Exterior Algebra & Heroin
Autechre - [Unearthed Test Track]
wk[es] - Ghost
Daniel Ruane - IV (CF_BD)
Fausto Mercier - GLUT
Cocktail Party Effect - Bleep Test
Kinlaw - 2nd Cave
Philippe Vandal - Blighted Apparus (Renick Bell Remix)
enn{kdog - criminal polycule
Deli Kuvveti - midievil
SDEM - h [At Quadrant Park]
Autechre - recks on
YAYAYI - 666% [Part 20]
YAYAYI - 666% [Part 28]
Artist Links:
www.l68k.com
www.instagram.com/lime68k
