“Lessons” with psydfx — out now
July 3, 2026 · sauvachi
“Lessons” with psydfx is out now. It is the first thing we have put out together, and the first time in a while I have handed a track to someone else knowing it would come back unrecognisable.
How a remote collaboration actually goes
Nobody was in the same room at any point. The version that became the record is roughly the eleventh file in a shared folder, and the folder is a record of two people slowly converging: I sent a skeleton, psydfx sent it back with the harmonic content changed and the drums at half the tempo they started at, and the next four rounds were spent working out which of those two songs we were actually making.
Remote collaboration has a reputation for producing music that sounds assembled — two people politely leaving each other's parts alone. The fix, for us, was doing fewer rounds with bigger changes in each. Nobody nudging a hi-hat by three milliseconds and calling it a contribution; each pass had to justify itself by changing something that mattered.
What each of us brought
- The chord movement and the vocal are mine, more or less from the first sketch.
- The rhythm section and the sound design are psydfx's, entirely — including the texture running under the second half that I still could not tell you how to make.
- The arrangement is the thing we fought over, and the released order is psydfx's. It was the right call and it took me two weeks to admit it.
The bit that nearly did not survive
There is a moment about two-thirds through where everything drops to almost nothing before the last section. In my version it was four bars. In the version that shipped it is twice that, and it is the part of the track people mention first.
The lesson, appropriately enough, is that space is not empty — it is the thing that makes the loud part loud. I have a habit of filling gaps because a gap feels like an unfinished job. Watching someone else refuse to fill one, and being wrong about it in public for a fortnight, is a faster way to learn that than another year of doing it alone.
Working with someone whose instincts differ
The useful part of a collaboration is not the extra pair of hands. It is that every habit you cannot see in your own work is immediately visible to somebody else. Half the notes that came back on this track were about things I did not know I always do — start sections the same way, resolve tension too early, mix the vocal a little too far forward because I am used to hearing it that way.
None of that is a criticism of working alone, which is still how most of this catalog gets made. But a record that came out of an argument sounds different from one that came out of an agreement, and you can hear which this is.
Listen
“Lessons” is on Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal, and in the player here. All the links are on the card below. Go and hear what psydfx does on their own too — this record makes more sense once you have.