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aportrait discusses the process of his new album 'Lost Tapes'
With Lost Tapes, Aportrait presents a sprawling, process-driven second album on Memoire Affective—an unfiltered 26-track archive that blurs ambient, IDM and club forms while challenging the disposability of the streaming era through raw, instinct-led production and a focus on long-form immersion.
‘Lost Tapes’ feels less like a conventional album and more like a living document. At what point did you realise this material formed a cohesive body of work rather than a collection of separate ideas?
I approached Lost Tapes as more than something confined to the dancefloor. While it’s rooted in underground club culture, that culture itself extends far beyond the club — it spills into everyday life.
For me, it’s a holistic experience, not tied to a specific time or place. It exists within the flow of daily life. Sometimes it’s deeply introspective, almost meditative; other times it becomes a collective state of losing yourself. It can be felt in movement, in stillness, in transitions — sometimes alone, sometimes together.
At a certain point, I realised these tracks weren’t separate ideas anymore, but different states of that wider experience.
That’s when it stopped feeling like a collection, and started to feel like a living body — a record of those moments.
Your process leans heavily on real-time mixing and intuitive sampling. How important is immediacy in your work, and what does it allow you to capture that more deliberate production methods might lose?
This approach comes directly from my background as a DJ.
For me, DJing is about reacting in the moment. It’s not fixed or pre-programmed — it’s a journey shaped by instinct, where each decision opens a new direction.
I bring that same logic into my production. I press record and follow where the rhythm and melodies lead. I build, remove, and reshape things in real time, often hearing combinations for the first time as they happen.
What matters is capturing that initial excitement — something immediate and unrepeatable. It’s less about control, more about preserving a feeling.
In many ways, it reconnects me with the early spirit of electronic music — when things were more open, less defined, and driven by instinct rather than precision.
There’s a clear embrace of imperfection across the record tape hiss, distortion, raw signal chains. What draws you to these elements, and how do they shape the emotional tone of your music?
It comes from an interest in imperfection as something inherently human.
I’m drawn to the point where machines and humans meet — and where both reveal their limitations. Instead of eliminating those imperfections, I prefer to work with them.
Analog systems carry a certain unpredictability. That instability creates emotion. In contrast, digital environments often remove that tension, becoming too clean and too controlled.
For me, those imperfections allow the music to breathe.
I often think of a moment in a club: a DJ slightly missing a transition, pulling back, then locking it perfectly on the second attempt — and suddenly the whole room aligns. That fragile, human moment is what I’m trying to preserve.
The album spans ambient, electro, IDM, techno, lo-fi house and dub, yet it maintains a strong sense of flow. How do you approach navigating such a wide sonic palette without losing coherence?
There’s a shared emotional ground that connects everything — a kind of melancholic warmth.
Regardless of genre, whether it’s ambient, electro, techno or dub, they all meet within that emotional space. It’s less about stylistic consistency and more about emotional coherence.
Even as the rhythms shift — from four-to-the-floor to more broken structures — the direction remains intact.
That’s what creates the sense of flow. The album works as a journey because the emotional thread stays continuous.
You reference influences from Detroit, Chicago and the London underground. In what ways do these lineages manifest in ‘Lost Tapes’, both consciously and subconsciously?
Detroit, Chicago and the London underground were my first teachers.
Those scenes carried a certain freedom — a willingness to explore without strict boundaries. That mindset shaped the way I approach music.
Cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne are also part of that lineage, but they build on foundations that came earlier. Without those early movements, the later ones wouldn’t exist in the same way.
In Lost Tapes, these influences don’t always appear as direct references. Sometimes they surface in the groove, sometimes in the atmosphere, and sometimes simply in the attitude toward making music.
With 26 tracks, the project resists the short-form logic of streaming culture. Was this a deliberate push against that format, and how do you hope listeners engage with the album as a whole?
I’m more interested in continuity when it comes to electronic music.
For me, it’s not about isolated tracks, but about how one piece leads into another, forming a larger movement.
A track can stand on its own, but its deeper meaning often emerges in relation to what surrounds it.
The 26 tracks are fragments of a longer journey. What matters is how they connect, how they carry each other forward, and how they create a sense of progression as a whole.
Some of the material dates back several years alongside newer productions. Did revisiting older work change your perspective on it, or did it feel consistent with where you are now artistically?
I tend to see the material as part of a continuous timeline rather than separating it into “old” and “new.”
There’s a strong connection to earlier periods of electronic music, especially the 90s, which still feel very present to me.
Revisiting older material didn’t feel like looking back — it felt consistent with where I am now. The direction hasn’t really shifted; it has simply continued to unfold.
The limited SD card edition introduces a physical, archival dimension to the release. What does permanence mean to you in the context of electronic music, and why was it important to present the project in this way?
The idea developed partly from vinyl culture.
Vinyl remains one of the most meaningful mediums in electronic music and DJ culture for me. At the same time, a project of this scale doesn’t always fit easily into that format.
I’ve also been influenced by collectible culture — art toys, designer objects — things that exist not just as content, but as something physical you can keep.
The SD card edition became a way to bring those ideas together. It’s not just a format, but an object — something archival.
In a space where music often feels temporary, it felt important to create something with a sense of permanence.