Yves De Mey

Hailing from Antwerp in Belgium, sound designer and engineer Yves De Mey has explored a range extending from submerged minimal techno to expansive long-form drones. Late in the 1990s he began releasing music as Eavesdropper, opening with abstract drum'n'bass before shifting into more experimental territory that encompassed scores for dance and theater productions. The final Eavesdropper outing arrived in 2009 as the minimal techno 12" Ibidem, after which De Mey adopted his own name for subsequent solo work. Together with Peter Van Hoesen he formed Sendai, a project whose trajectory moved from dubby techno toward sparse, clicky IDM and clattering industrial textures. The duo entered the catalog in 2009 via two techno 12"s on Time to Express, System Policy and Sustaining the Chain. That same year Richard Chartier’s Line imprint issued De Mey’s solo album Lichtung, a 35-minute score composed for Catherine Jodoin’s dance performance. Two years afterward the U.K. ambient techno label Sandwell District put out his double-12" EP Counting Triggers. Following Sendai’s first full-length Geotope, issued on Time to Express in 2012, De Mey returned in 2013 with three solo EPs—Transfer on Modal Analysis, Frisson on Archives Intérieures, and Metrics on Opal Tapes. Semantica Records released the 2014 EP Double Slit, while Sendai’s second album A Smaller Divide appeared on Archives Intérieures; the year closed with the techno EP Lower Bounds on Inner Surface Music, credited to the new alias Grey Branches. Early 2016 brought a Sendai split EP with Cassegrain on Konstrukt alongside De Mey’s solo double-LP Drawn with Shadow Pens on Spectrum Spools, and the Grey Branches full-length Neuroclaps followed in 2017.