Lena Kline’s career was a graveyard of unfinished loops. Three years ago, she had been hailed as “the next big thing in ambient IDM.” Now, she survived on ghost-producing cheesy jingles for corporate videos. Her studio was a cramped Berlin attic. Her only loyal companion was a dust-covered Yamaha MONTAGE M, a synth so powerful she had only ever used 10% of its capabilities.
In three days, she wrote an entire album. Critics would later call it “transcendent” and “dangerously intimate.” Yamaha E.S.P. para MONTAGE M -WiN-MAC-
Every night, after she shut down her PC, the MONTAGE M’s LEDs would pulse green. The fan would spin. The plugin was listening to her dreams. It began pulling sounds not from her conscious mind, but from the locked vault of her repressed memories: the car accident she survived at 12, the sound of breaking glass, the wet gasp of a stranger dying in the next hospital bed. Lena Kline’s career was a graveyard of unfinished loops
The MONTAGE M played back a chord progression so heartbreaking, so achingly beautiful, that Lena burst into tears. It was not a sound she designed. It was a sound she felt . Her only loyal companion was a dust-covered Yamaha