Recorded across the Atlantic in 2001 and originally issued by Mille Plateaux the following year as part of that label's defining run of millennial glitch and click & cuts releases, Balance remains the lone collaborative outing between two of the era's most influential label-running architects: Frank Bretschneider, co-founder of Raster (later raster-noton), and Taylor Deupree, founder of 12k and LINE.

The record was made the long way around. Bretschneider and Deupree, working from Berlin and Brooklyn respectively, exchanged Nord Modular patch files by email until each had built a shared library of sounds. Bretschneider then assembled foundation loops and rough mixes for nine pieces and sent them across the ocean; Deupree remixed, re-processed and reshaped them into their final form. The method left audible traces. Bretschneider's signature clean sine waves and white-noise architectures meet Deupree's grainier, more textural granular synthesis on every track, the two voices interleaved rather than fused, each preserved in its distinctness even as the music coheres. The resulting album sits at the precise intersection of the two artists' temperaments. There are rhythms and melodies, sometimes spare and skeletal, sometimes warm and dub-inflected, but the construction is unfailingly minimal: small repeating cells, micro-events, sine tones, dust and click. Tracks like Vertical Invader work a sparse 2-step pulse around woozy exotica figures; Freeze Frame rolls on a wobbling sub-bass; Half-Mute tilts further toward dubbier, more suspended terrain. Balance is in fact perfectly named, an equilibrium between the precision of the raster-noton aesthetic and the warmer textural patience that has come to define 12k.

Heard now, the album reads as a vivid document of the moment when European and American minimal electronics found a shared vocabulary, with Bretschneider, Deupree, Carsten Nicolai, Ryoji Ikeda, SND, and the Mille Plateaux roster building parallel worlds out of the same fundamental particles.

This Keplar edition presents Balance on vinyl for the first time, remastered by Deupree in 2020, in a limited edition of 500 copies with poly-lined inner sleeves and updated artwork built around Deupree's original photographs. A small but pivotal entry in both composers' catalogues, and one of the most considered statements of an aesthetic that defined a decade.