Dizzy Panda and The Perics named their album Pentapolis after a grouping of five cities, and the metaphor is load-bearing: they made the record without ever setting foot in a physical room together.
Remote collaboration used to be the compromise you accepted when the good option was unavailable. For these five, it is simply the shape the work takes - and it changes what the records sound like, not just how they get made.
Dizzy Panda & The Perics
A Dutch producer duo joined forces with a Liverpool indie rock band, bridging the UK and the Netherlands. Dizzy Panda started in 2020, when lockdown made distance the default: it was, they say, a way to work together from a long way apart. The Perics met online. Their method is additive - start with sounds and a composition, then ask others to add to it - and they are candid that the final release is usually something completely different from where it began. Three singers from Younique, who had been on the Dutch version of The Voice, turned up partway through and added harmonies. They pressed Pentapolis to vinyl after a Kickstarter fell through and they decided to do it anyway. The next one is already drafted: a 30-song concept called Helping Hand.
Pandorama
Julien and Davy had known each other twenty years before making a record together, and Pandorama's first full release was, in effect, its own concept. "While we didn't work from an initial concept, I think you could say that working together for the first time on a full release was it." The process is a loop: one of them roughs out a structure from synth jams in Ableton, then they bounce it back and forth. Life interrupted for eighteen months mid-project, and they say the pause was needed. On promotion they are blunt: "There's nothing exciting about promoting music. It's soul-sucking. The music making is what it's all about."
TDC Tunes
TDC collaborates with an audience rather than a co-writer. Classically trained on piano and pipe organ, now working primarily on modular synthesizer, he streams to Twitch three times a week from North London, and his tracks begin as improvised jams recorded as stems. His debut album Awakening tells the story of an android's journey - a concept that arrived during a stream, when viewers began building the narrative alongside the music in real time. The follow-up expands it with contributions from twenty creators - stories, artwork, animation. The live-recorded stems made production awkward, since he often did not have enough channels to separate the elements cleanly. He came to modular late and by surprise, having assumed for years it was not for him.
The Peace Option
The Peace Option ran the experiment in reverse. After years of writing and producing for other people - and, as he puts it, not always loving the music-by-committee results - he made an album he would actually want to listen to. That meant playing most of it himself: he bought an electric bass having not touched one in twenty years, and had to re-learn drums. The bass overdubs, he says, were the most fun he had. He is back to collaborating on other people's records now, most recently playing piano and drums for a songwriter friend in the UK. His own writing habit is closer to surveillance: when he is on, he says, he is obsessive, filtering everything - remarks people make, things he sees - for whether it works in a song.
Living With Giants
The Sacramento instrumental trio made a split release with beneathwaves, a band in another country. "The biggest challenge was working remotely, as both bands are in different countries. Coordinating album art, mixing, and vinyl production required long-term planning and late-night calls." They committed early to a physical vinyl release, which is a hard commitment to make across an ocean before you know the record works.
What distance costs and what it doesn't
The costs are logistical and real: late-night calls, no live shows because everyone lives too far apart, eighteen-month pauses when life intervenes. What does not seem to suffer is the music itself.
The Peace Option's account is the useful counterweight. He went solo specifically to escape committee results, then went straight back to playing on other people's songs. The distance is not the problem. Being outnumbered in a room you did not choose is a different thing entirely.