This is our first album that we're releasing with Horse Vision. First of all – thank you so, so much for buying our album. This album is self-released through our own label – inadvertent.index – and we don't have any additional funding other than the money we get through sales and playing shows. Since we're located in Stockholm, Sweden, pretty much every city is far away, and by selling these flash drives, it's financially possible for us to go on tour and meet you all.

It is a bit unclear when to date the beginning of 'Another Life', but in a peculiar way it started even before the embarking of Horse Vision. In the autumn of 2023 Johan had just moved back to Stockholm from three years composition studies at Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. One night, we met and Johan told Gabriel that he had a bunch of songs that he wanted to release. The only problem was that he did not have a band name. Gabriel, on his side, had a list of names and suggested Horse Vision. This became, not only the beginning of Horse Vision, but the beginning of the work of ‘Another Life’, however unknown at the time.

We started to play around in the studio, and it became obvious that we had a very similar vision of what we wanted to do. We had already been working alongside in music, sharing a studio right outside of Stockholm, and even worked on a few projects together. However, both felt that the music often got lost in trying to find the perfect production and mix. Perfection had become an end in itself.

Now we wanted the finishing process to be as quick and convenient as possible. The aesthetic formula of Horse Vision became to follow ‘the law of least resistance’. This is not about making things sloppy. Rather, it is having a very condensed and focused idea from the very beginning, trying to capture it with as few elements as possible. At the same, it is allowing things to happen during the creative process. You cannot force something to sound in a certain way – a musical piece is what it is, but equally what it is not. The lack of fulfillment of an idea tends to vigorously capture that idea. To paraphrase Theodor Adorno;

Hence, the unfinished and tentative is what bring forth the whole, and oftentimes it is the unexpected that become the most interesting and characteristic.

The first piece that Horse Vision wrote as a band, 'Segundi Garinasso', is very emblematic for this method and style of making music. We wanted to make a soft rock song and since both of us love ‘Gold Dust’ by Duster, we decided to use it as a musical blueprint. We spent a lot of time finding some nice guitar parts, and then recorded everything very swiftly. You might say that we recorded the making of the song, rather than the song itself.

A big part of ‘Another Life’ is about the musical process itself. Not only our own process, but what it means to be a part of an unremitting global musical automaton. Music can no longer portrait the world in an old fashion way without paraphrasing music itself – music has become a game that plays with its own rules. And in a time when subversive and alternative music has itself become mainstream, it seems almost impossible to negate the prevailing musical landscape and produce something radically ‘new’. To be against the new is itself to be part of the mainstream. Instead, we want to capture the contradictions and paradoxes innate of the musical paradigm of today – we wanted to depict the world of music, rather than the world itself.

Therefore, the creative process of Horse Vision is transparent. We want everyone to know exactly where from we got the ideas. The influences are meant to be self-evident, as in the obvious influence of ‘Gold Dust’ by Duster in 'Segundi Garinasso', 'Where Is My Mind?' by Pixies in 'Partly Get By', 'Heartbeats' by The Knife in 'Animal'. We do not claim to produce anything original in that kind of sense. We rather want to collect and assemble different elements in the form of a beautiful collage. The disparate parts do not have to be perfectly fitted together – the unity is the result of the listener's own productive synthesis. This is inspired by Adam Curtis documentaries and the art of Arthur Jaffa, intertwining different narratives into one dynamic whole, without interpreting the historical material itself.

Horse Vision is essentially a classic rock band, but we are not against the mainstream or the new. Neither do we see ourselves as part of the so-called DIY or indie scene. Horse Vision evades the dichotomies of contemporary and old; organic and synthetic; pop and alternative: analog and digital; sensuous and serious. This echoes through the musical productions. For example, a lot of the live instruments appear together with their digital mimicry – the acoustic guitar and the synth guitar; the vocal and the vocaloid. However, this is not an expression of musical eclecticism. The juxtaposition of different elements mediates something beyond the elements themselves. It is in the tension between the different elements that the music begins to resonate.

The album has been in the making for little more than a year; we released our first single 'My Man' in the very final weeks of 2023, so we spent almost the entire year of 2024 to finish a full album. It's been recorded mostly in our studio in uptown Stockholm, as well as in a small cottage in the archipelago of Stockholm, in apartments throughout London, Stockholm and Copenhagen. The vast majority of it was not created nor recorded in a studio; we tend to make things at home.

All of the tracks have been mastered by the amazing Jacob Günther Andersen in his studio in north-western Copenhagen. We owe a lot of our sound to him. He's really helped us a lot in dealing with sonic issues and flat mixes with amazing mastering and stem mastering services.

We'd like to thank Emil Emborg (Emil F, Neon Priest) for adding an additional layer of beautiful synthesizers and sound design on our track 'Partly Get By'. Furthermore, we owe a great deal of the overall sound of the track 'Partly Get By' to the amazing drummer and producer Karl Hovmark. The incredible Ester Thunander was kind enough to lend us a recording of her playing strings, which can be heard throughout 'Donkey Horse'. Our great friend and drummer Guido Roos recorded the drums for 'Chemicals' before the track even existed, which gave us a beautiful framework to center that song around when writing it. Finally, we'd like to thank the one and only Tiffi Malmgren (Tiffi M) for being a big inspiration and an amazing singer. She's helped us in writing and singing on the title track 'Another Life' and is also featured on 'Chemicals'.

Lastly, we've included one special extra track on this flash drive – the acoustic and original version of 'Partly Get By'. The song was written by Johan in an apartment in Copenhagen in late 2021 and had been sitting on a hard drive until we picked it up and finished it in order to have a bigger repertoire for our first ever gig, at Year0001's "Spiral"-event in Stockholm in early 2024.

This album was really fun to make. We've always been striving to create music through the means and paths of least resistance, and we really hope you like it.