Purelink appeared seemingly out of nowhere four years ago with two tracks of atmospheric dance music so evocatively ’90s in spirit that it was hard to believe they weren’t vintage productions. “Head on a Swivel” was a 10-minute excursion in sidewinding drum’n’bass, while the ambient dub techno of “Maintain the Bliss” instantly rocketed itself into the rarefied air of the genre’s canonical greats.
Not only were these new productions, but it also turned out that the artists behind the music—kindtree (Ben Paulson), Millia (Akeem Asani), and Concave Reflection (Tommy Paslaski)—were Chicagoans just a few years out of college. They’d been young children, in other words, when the styles they were channeling were new.
Over the past few years, the foggy strains of leftfield dance music that Purelink tapped into on their debut EP have grown in popularity, but the trio has stayed one step ahead of the revival. Rather than repeating themselves, Purelink have progressively twisted their music into more abstracted shapes, from the dubby trip-hop of 2022’s Puredub EP to the pulsing ambient of 2023’s Signs, their debut LP.
Childhood friends Paulson and Paslaski knew each other first, and they completed the circle when Paslaski bought a Visible Cloaks LP from Chicago’s Shuga record store. “I love that album,” said Asani, who was working behind the counter. Thus began an extended conversation about esoteric sounds that has continued to this day. (When, during a recent Zoom call, I mention an obscure late-’90s glitch record to them, Asani chimes in a few moments later: “Hey, guys, I just sent the Discogs link to our group chat.”)
Raised on indie-rock, the three musicians found their way to their chosen aesthetic by fits and starts. In high school, Paulson wanted to make shoegaze, but found the whole forming-a-band thing to be an insurmountable roadblock; learning that he could make music on his laptop was a revelation. Asani was DJing PC Music–adjacent dance tracks until an encounter with the sounds of Oneohtrix Point Never introduced him to the pleasures of slowing down and tripping out. “Music you could just soak in,” he says.
As they dug deeper into underground oddities and decades-old obscurities, they found camaraderie in their relative isolation within Chicago’s rock and club scenes. “We were definitely bonding over music that it felt like other people weren’t really touching, whether in their production or their DJ sets,” Asani says.
It was discovering the crew around Brian Leeds—the West Mineral Ltd. label head who records as Huerco S., Pendant, and Loidis—that convinced the three friends they could actually start making this music too. It helped that the scene was rooted in Kansas City. “I could do that,” Paulson says he realized. “It’s not some European people. It’s like, oh, these kids are from the Midwest, and they’re doing this more abstract type of music.” As they began to explore that scene’s loose network of friends, peers, and allies—artists like Ulla, Pontiac Streator, and Ben Bondy; labels like C-, 3 X L, and Motion Ward—they were struck by what Paslaski calls the “community aspect: everyone finding their own voice within this shared vision and sound palette.”
The three musicians moved to New York in 2023, where they juggle day jobs with music-making. (“It’s a whole thing,” Asani says: “clocking out after work and then clocking into the Ableton factory.”) Their new album, Faith, is their most engrossing yet: Rather than leaning into the percussive side of their music, they’ve buried the rhythms even deeper into a churning wash of grainy textures and shape-shifting clouds of electroacoustic tone. Guest vocals from Loraine James and a meditative spoken-word piece by Angelina Nonaj, meanwhile, lead the music in even headier directions, suggesting blurry frontiers just begging for further exploration.
We linked up over Zoom on a recent Saturday morning (the only time all three of them were free from work obligations, despite having been out late at a warehouse party the night before) to discuss Purelink’s history, their new album, and the importance of having faith in your instincts—and your friends.
Akeem Asani: Living in the suburbs, the only shows we could go to were rock bands.
Ben Paulson: Me and Tommy didn’t even have that. Where we were, it was like Dave Matthews Band cover bands.
Tommy Paslaski: We went to Catholic school in Libertyville, Illinois, so there was no scene there. I didn’t know much of this stuff even existed.
Paulson: My older sister was a huge influence on me. She’d give me a burned CD with, like, Animal Collective, Skrillex, Daft Punk, just all over the place. You have no context of what is cool in the suburbs. You’re just guessing and listening and making your own decisions.
Asani: And, in the U.S., you have to be 21 to go to most electronic music events or clubs, so it was hard to get into that. It was way more accessible to go to DIY rock shows, punk shows. While we were in high school, Skrillex and EDM were what electronic music was. I was like, this sounds like shit. In high school, the most electronic I got was probably Animal Collective.
Paulson: Panda Bear was huge for me getting into sampling. Growing up on hip-hop, it was like, how do they make these tracks? I remember my friend who had Ableton and a Maschine coming over at the end of high school and was like, yo, you can just flip a sample like this. I was like, whoa, game over—this is it.
Paulson: We were really searching for a community. My music life at that time was so insular and I was afraid to show anyone what I was doing. But eventually I got onto this idea that anyone can do it. I was like, Tommy, we’re doing it. We’re going to start making music like this. I’d take them to shows and be like, this is the vibe. Then, in 2020, Ryan [Loecker], who ran C-, hit me up on SoundCloud DMs, and it turned into a good friendship. He was super open to getting together all these weirdos that no one even knows. The first time we went out [to Kansas City], there was a crew that knew each other, like Brian [Leeds] and Ulla and Rory [Pontiac Streator], but there were a lot of other people that no one had met, and it was like all these shy kids meeting up.
Paulson: It was a mini festival. Ryan hit me up in 2021 and was like, do you think you guys could come down? I wasn’t working at the time. We had just started Purelink. It was the first time we ever DJ’d.
Paslaski: I remember I met Brian Leeds, Ulla, and Pontiac Streator all at the same time, and I was just like, What the fuck is this? It sparked a lot of really meaningful friendships. Just a few months later we hosted a festival in Chicago with all those people, and that’s where we met all these other people. It spiraled very quickly from this insular thing of us trying to figure out where we fit in in Chicago—I feel like I met so many people in a year. I feel grateful to have that community.
Asani: I still have the recording.
Paulson: It’s really bad!
Asani: It could be a lot worse. It was so bare-bones. I was doing drum loops on Ableton, and they were both doing random loops.
Paulson: It sounded like a KLF set or something. It was really bad.
Paslaski: I think you’re remembering it worse than it actually was. I had YouTube open and I was playing some Yiddish chanting or something.
Asani: We were all over the place. But it was fun, because you’re just doing this thing with friends. At the end of the day, that’s all it really is—making something with your friends is special.
Paulson: We were inspired by seeing other people in the community doing a similar thing. We were like, Oh, we can be a band, but with noise and computers. I was living in this really small bedroom in an apartment with friends, and Tommy had a one-bedroom just down the street, so I was like, Can I put all my synths and shit in here with you?
Paslaski: I had this neighbor who would pound on my ceiling with a broom.
Paulson: We were all sharing techniques and rapidly getting better at it.
Paslaski: I had my cello and then Ben had this—
Paulson: I had a contact mic attached to a yo-yo string.
Paslaski: We had an electric toothbrush, a drill, and a cello. But that was the spirit of it.
Paulson: We have to thank the lady downstairs, because we were like, we can’t make music here anymore. So we found this cheap studio in Humboldt Park. I wasn’t working, so we were on Trump bucks, going to the studio every day, really grinding.
Paslaski: Wasn’t it Biden bucks at that point?
Asani: A little bit of both. But money from the government was funding that. We didn’t have anything else to do. Everything was shut down, so if we weren’t at home, we were meeting in the studio two or three times a week. We had a lot of time to hone our sound and figure out what we wanted to do and how to do it. Then one weekend, four years ago, we turned these jams into what they are.
Paulson: Our Lillerne Tapes release, Puredub, and the Purelink EP that was on UwU dust bath were recorded before “Maintain the Bliss.” Trying to get them out took forever. We felt like we were advancing past them day by day, so we recorded those two songs in a weekend and were just like, right, let’s just put it out.
Paslaski: Those are the only tracks that are truly just a live recording—each one is like an hourlong recording.
Asani: “Bliss” was one day; “Swivel” another. It all happened one weekend. That’s never happened again.
Paslaski: There was something so organic when we were making it. We had two computers going and we were taking turns with stems, talking and coming up with ideas.
Paulson: You just hit “record” at some point.
Paslaski: Why don’t we do that now? We torture ourselves with this slow process. Why don’t we just hit “record”?
Paulson: It was a funny day; we had a bunch of friends over and we wouldn’t stop playing.
Paslaski: It was just looping for hours.
Paulson: We were in there for, like, 12 hours, just like, This is so sick.
Paslaski: That’s the litmus test—if you don’t get sick of it after six hours, then it’s something.
Paulson: I remember one of our friends was like, It’s too long. And we were just like, Nah. This is it. We reminisce so much about those days.
Asani: The good old days.
Paulson: It was pretty organic. With Signs, we were all living together in this duplex in Chicago and working on it all the time. For this record, I have a studio in my house. It’s all one console these days; sometimes we’ll get the three computers out again, but most of the time, it’s challenging to all be in the same room all the time. Sometimes you have to be on your own and find that moment and then be like, Hey, guys, let’s get on this.
Paslaski: I think it’s a complement to the last record. We’re not trying to just do Signs again, but get more introspective, dive deeper.
Asani: There was a point during the process when we scrapped half the record, because it sounded too much like the first one. Then we stepped back and reapproached it and turned it into what it is now. We wanted to push ourselves out of our comfort zones, take what’s inspiring us right now and put our own spin on it.
Paulson: There’s a lot of guitar sounds.
Paslaski: There’s cello on there as well, but good luck finding it.
Asani: There’s some recorded bass on there. And voice. Working with vocalists seemed like an obvious thing to do for a sequel. Like, what’s something that we can do here that we haven’t done before?
Paulson: It was very natural. We had met Loraine playing some shows over the years, and she seemed like someone that would understand our music on a different level than some vocalists would.
Paslaski: That song is hard to sing over, I will say.
Asani: And she did it literally in one take. The first thing she sent us, that was it. We didn’t really touch it.
Paulson: And Angelina is an internet friend of mine. We sent them the craziest prompt. Me and Akeem were watching this Matt Lauer interview of Tom Cruise going on this rant about his life, really vague egomaniac vibes, and we sent it to Angelina and they were like, I don’t understand what you want me to do with this. [laughs] But I love what they sent us, it really captures the feeling we were going for.
Paslaski: That’s a really unique Purelink track. It sounds different than a lot of our music. It has a certain breadth to it and a lot of empathy.
Paulson: Kind of reaching into Robert Ashley, a huge influence for me, so getting into that mode was really nice.
Asani: Working in a record store, it was easy for me to dig. And it’s the classic 20-year cycle of stuff bubbling up again.
Paulson: I’m just Discogging all the time, like, oh, there’s still so much I haven’t heard from that era. There are a lot of similar sensibilities to what’s going on with our music. Just if you take the clicks out it sounds way better [laughs]. When you take away that aesthetic—
Paulson: Yeah, you can really venture into unknown sound worlds. Like Jan Jelinek, how he was sampling jazz, I saw a lot of similarities between that and what our friends were making.
Asani: Speaking of Jan, Loop-finding-jazz-records got reissued in 2017, and that was a huge gateway. I’d never heard of ~scape before, and then started digging into the back catalog.
Paulson: We got huge into ~scape for a minute.
Paslaski: And then getting really inspired by DJ Olive and We(™) and illbient.
Paslaski: A friend of ours—John Daniel, Forest Management—put out DJ Olive’s Listening to Fir on his Reserve Matinee label. He helped put me on to this whole other world. I think what was beautiful about the time of making the first two studio releases was we had such a big pool of inspirations to pull from.
Asani: For me, the way this album came about, scrapping some of it, the idea was as simple as just having faith in ourselves, trusting each other, knowing that we can work together and do something that we’re proud of. It just had a nice, simple ring to it.
Paulson: There’s a lot going on in the world that makes you question your faith in many ways, and promoting the idea of trusting and finding your own way was rewarding to hold on to, rather than being super nihilistic. And it really just resonated with the music.
Asani: Well, that and George Michael.
Paslaski: It’s a charged word, you know. I think it has personal meaning for all of us. It started with the idea of calling it Trust, but it felt like Faith was more fitting and resonated with the music more.
Asani: And now we have Chicago pope, so it makes it relevant.
