Athene island is an album that I've been laboring over for quite a long time. Work on it started around 2012 as some of the earliest material created under the Zwei Kreise name, and I've kept coming back to it over the course of the past few years, changing details here and there and polishing and tweaking, again and again.

As it happens it is also, somewhat, the first "true" Zwei Kreise album, as it is so far the only one that has been conceived from the very beginning as a coherent, complete entity, in which every track has a place, with the whole piece telling a coherent story that you will have to piece together out of the given elements, in this case the music and the track titles. The narrative is linked to one of my earlier records as well, so you can consider Athene island a kind of thematic follow-up to that album, if not a sonic one.

When in early/mid 2015 I felt like I was finally done with retouching the album, I enlisted the help of some fellow music producers. They are people that I both like as individuals and deeply admire as craftsmen, and I wanted them to provide remixes for the album. I am very grateful that they heeded my call : Canada's premier atmospheric dub sorcerer, wzrdryAV (aka. Kelly Claude Nairn) ; France's pride and joy, Zzzzra (under his new experimental alias Brutalisme) ; Korea's best kept secret, Xiami ; and USA's very own underground electronic music mastermind, Milieu (aka. Brian Grainger, or Coppice Halifax).

Fortunately, the album was also recently mastered by Zzzzra, who again did a wonderful job on it. I also created a variety of printable covers that you can mix and match to your leisure, and that will hopefully provide a welcome extension of the sonic material on display here.

I hope you will enjoy this album, and I wish you a happy listening...

~ ZK (November 2015)