A Place Both Wonderful And Strange

a place both wonderful and strange, the New York dark electronic duo of Russ Marshalek and Laura Hajek, have carried this album with them for nearly a decade. What follows is their full statement on how Matter and Desire came to be.

We set out to make this album 8 years ago, and it simply did not happen. A Map for Birds was the first song we had for this, and we’ve been playing it live for what feels like a decade, and we couldn’t capture it on record. It wasn’t the right time and it didn’t feel right.

But the album never went away. We kept collecting sounds and lyrics, and at times even full songs, like our version of “I am stretched on your grave”, but there was never a reason, or really a desire, to finish this album. We’d both read Andreas Weber’s ecological masterpiece “Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology” and resonated with it in ways that became more and more real, and that was a theme, but we had no real juice to keep crafting songs. Maybe we were done with a place both wonderful and strange. Things end. But we had all these songs and ideas and sounds and they would not leave us alone.

In 2023 our friend Devery, whose vocals feature on “Intro444”, invited us to play a showcase show at her night in Rockaway Beach. We took the stuff we’d been noodling on for half a decade and mustered up a live performance, and it stunned us how fierce, visceral and vital that show felt.

In 2025 we finally got into a studio, finished these songs in a flurry, and gave them to our friend Gavin to help complete. Everything clicked, finally, and we realized we had needed to become different people, in our own lives and as a creative pair, to ever get these songs to be realized and authentic.

Matter and Desire is about ecology, yes, and it’s about the moment before something changes forever. In some cases it’s for the worst, in some cases it’s for the better, but in every song it’s the moment right before something changes forever. There’s a guy watching an apocalypse happen in a car service, like a less euphoric version of “Everybody Hurts”. There’s someone in Intro444 that has decided to choose a path that might, for once, lead out of darkness, and then in the next song it’s a choice to potentially go the other way. People change, but only when they absolutely have to, and each song on this album is a frozen moment right before that change happens. It’s staring down an apocalypse of the natural, the political, and the personal, and saying “what the fuck am I going to do now because I can’t simply do nothing”.

Matter and Desire is the sound of that moment held still, the breath before the break, the point where everything could go either way.