200 copies limited edition Threewave presents 36’s complete synth trilogy as it was always quietly becoming: not three isolated releases, but one long, refracted thought about memory, technology and feeling. Spanning five years of work with Past Inside the Present, the set brings together Wave Variations (2020), Symmetry Systems (2022) and Reality Engine (2024) as a continuous chain of shortform transmissions, each track a self‑contained signal and yet clearly linked to the one before and after. The constraints are deliberate - a tightly limited palette of synths, patterns and colours - but within those boundaries the music moves with surprising breadth, like watching the same landscape under shifting skies.

The first movement, Wave Variations, is all about tide‑like motion and restraint. Pieces arrive as minimalist vignettes: brief arcs of melody, soft pulses and blurred chords that seem to rise, crest and fade with the inevitability of breathing. Every sound choice feels weighted; there’s no ornamental clutter, only essential tones arranged with a quietly cinematic sense of space. With Symmetry Systems, the trilogy leans into a warmer, more obviously electronic nostalgia, drawing subtle inspiration from Warp’s early Artificial Intelligence era without imitating its tropes. Arpeggios flicker like status lights, chords swell with almost synth‑pop tenderness, and yet the emphasis remains on intimacy rather than spectacle – music for late hours and private screens, where machines hum along to human memory.

Reality Engine extends those established motifs into a wider conceptual field. The “melodic, melancholy machine sound” that has threaded through the first two chapters opens out into meditations on artificial intelligence, perception and the porous line between what’s “real” and what’s generated. Themes recur in altered forms, like ideas passed through successive algorithms, while subtle shifts in harmony and texture hint at systems learning, misremembering and dreaming. Still, the human presence never disappears: behind every glimmering pattern is the sense of a hand choosing, shaping, listening for the moment when structure and emotion lock into place. Taken together, Threewave reads as a defining chapter in the shared story of 36 and Past Inside the Present – a testament to what can happen when a label and an artist commit to patience, trust and a long view of sound as something timeless, deeply personal and built to outlast its own technology.