Richie: An invitation to collaborate felt like an opportunity to connect, to really connect with someone. Leena in New York, and myself in London, we’ve always worked at maintain an authentic connection. I think it’s fair to say that we both put a lot out into the world, but as evidenced by the cultural artefacts we put our names to – in very different ways. So, we searched around for what would unite our experience of the same moment in time and we fell upon our collective voice. The themes that we shared stories of were love and power, if in fact it’s able to separate them as two distinct entities. 

Recorded during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, we explored the soundscapes we were nested within and what they meant in the now. These two soundscapes, which transcend time zone and geography, connected our profoundly unique experiences of the same event. The output, is that intersection. And true to the challenges of really and truly connecting over video platforms, our collaboration was individualist to the point of distraction, akin to the mind-body dissonance we’ve all experienced over the last year. We worked hard to avoid a ‘poor connection’ in collaboration, and I think we won. 

Leena: Richie first suggested we create this soundscape at the beginning of Covid-19, when our respective cities of London and New York City first went into shutdown.  Simultaneously there was a loss of control over how we live our lives. While social distancing generated a disconnect in our abilities to connect with one another physically, this communal loss of power strangely connected us all through shared experience. By collaborating on this project, Richie and I needed to connect across time zones on a more regular basis, therefore despite the 3000 miles of distance, we became regular parts of each other’s lives during the most intense stage of the pandemic response. We entered the Electronic Zoom Call Age and the reluctant dependence on the electrical power of devices to stay connected. With all the technical difficulties that come with this, Poor Connection thus became the title of the piece.

This note on our collaborative process comes just over a year since we began, completing this project during what appears to be the reopening of the city - forming a tether between us that bonds our pandemic experiences to one another. Perhaps Richie and I have a rather Good Connection after all.