Nathan Fake Made Evaporator on an Ancient Cubase Rig in Single Takes

Cubase VST5 shipped when Nathan Fake was a teenager. It is a sequencer from the era before audio and MIDI editing converged into the single window every modern producer takes for granted, and by any ordinary measure it should have been retired three or four upgrade cycles ago. Fake is still using it, along with a Korg Prophecy, the monophonic synth Korg built in the mid-1990s to do physical modelling before the processing power really existed for it.

That pairing made Evaporator, his seventh album, released on 20 February 2026 by the French label InFine. The record was written in six weeks during the summer of 2024 and, according to the label’s own account, built entirely on that ageing setup and recorded largely in single takes. For a genre where the take is usually a fiction assembled from a hundred edits, that last detail is the interesting one.

Why the Old Rig Still Matters

There is a practical argument for keeping obsolete software running, and it is not sentiment. A twenty-year-old sequencer paired with a specific synth produces a specific set of constraints: fixed plug-in versions, fixed routing habits, limited polyphony. Constraints of that kind speed decisions up, which matters enormously when the goal is finishing a record in six weeks rather than perfecting one over three years.

A Closer Listen’s Jeremy Bye described the results as the sounds of old machinery coaxed into still working, with the equipment audibly on the ragged edge. That is not a complaint. Ageing digital gear has failure modes that are musically useful, aliasing and quantisation artefacts that newer code carefully removes, and a producer who knows a machine well enough can aim at those edges deliberately.

The Prophecy is worth dwelling on because it is not a nostalgic choice in the usual sense. Korg built it as a monophonic physical-modelling synth, meaning it calculates the behaviour of a plucked string or a blown reed rather than shaping a stored waveform, and it plays one note at a time. Both traits push a player toward lines rather than chords, and toward performances that respond to the ribbon controller in real time. Much of what reads on this record as looseness is a monosynth being played rather than programmed.

Six Weeks in an Unusually Warm Summer

The writing period shaped the material. Fake made the album during a hot British summer and turned deliberately toward what the label calls a lucid, tactile form of daytime electronica, radiant and full of air. That is a real reversal for him: Blizzards in 2020 and Crystal Vision in 2023 both worked in a nocturnal register, and the shift here is toward light and openness rather than pressure.

Some of the raw material had an unusual provenance. Sounds on the record began life as demos for Digital Memory, the sample pack Fake built for Spitfire Audio’s LABS series. Sample-pack work is normally a commercial sideline that stays separate from an artist’s own catalogue; folding the offcuts back into an album inverts the usual direction of travel, and it explains some of the record’s texture, since pack material is designed to be characterful in isolation.

Where the Album Finds Its Centre

Eleven tracks run 41 minutes, and the sequencing is uneven by design. Aiwa opens melancholic, close enough to Boards of Canada that Bye thought it a little too in love with that sound. Hypercube, released as a single almost a year before the album, rides a thumping kick that builds without ever resolving, and Fake himself has called it almost a pastiche of dance music.

The heart is Sunlight on Saturn, three minutes that pull everything around them into focus on a hazy synth lead bathed in a sunset glow. It is also where the character of Drowning in a Sea of Love, his 2006 debut, resurfaces most clearly. Against those short pieces sits Slow Yamaha at nine minutes, the album’s longest by some distance, with The Ice House and Black Drift both running barely over a minute as connective tissue.

The rest of the running order keeps that variance going. Yucon lasts under three minutes, Bialystok four and a half, and You’ll Find a Way just over three, so the album repeatedly states an idea and moves on before it can settle into a groove. Placing a nine-minute piece at track ten, after nine tracks that mostly refuse to sprawl, is a structural decision as much as a musical one. It turns the closing stretch into the only place on the record where a listener is allowed to sink in.

The Two Guests and What They Change

Clark co-composed and performs on Orbiting Meadows, a two-minute piece built on microtonal piano that takes its name from the space cemetery in Futurama. Microtonality in an electronic context is a deliberate irritant: intervals that sit outside equal temperament refuse to settle, which is the opposite of what a synthesised pad usually does.

Baltasound features Dextro, the recording name of Ewan MacKenzie of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, and includes processed guitars recorded in Newcastle. Two collaborators on an eleven-track album is restraint by contemporary standards, and both are placed in the back half where the record has already established its own logic. Lorenzo Targhetta mastered it, and InFine issued it on digital, double gatefold CD and bio-vinyl.

Twenty Years From the Debut

The timing is not incidental. Evaporator lands two decades after Drowning in a Sea of Love, and the reviews that liked it best heard that debut in it. Spectrum Culture, scoring 80 out of 100, called it his most straight-shooting effort since that record and his most evocative and direct work. Pitchfork gave it 6.9 out of 10, and Sound of Violence three and a half stars. Cyclic Defrost read it as deeply focused work that balances its quiet passages against its energetic ones, which is the same observation the running order makes structurally.

The label move matters here too. InFine is a French independent with a catalogue weighted toward the crossover between electronic production and contemporary composition, and it is a different institutional home from the labels that carried his earlier records. Signing there for a twentieth-anniversary album, rather than returning to a familiar imprint, suggests Fake sees this material as sitting nearer the composed end of his range than the club end, whatever the kick drum on Hypercube implies.

Telerama reached for the most memorable formulation, describing it as an album for old ravers who no longer go to raves but have kept the penetrating memory of them. That is a precise read of who this music is for. Fake’s influences run through Autechre, Orbital, Aphex Twin and Slam, a lineage whose audience is now in its forties and listening at home rather than at four in the morning.

The Sleeve Says Something Too

For the first time on any of his albums, Fake’s own face is on the cover, photographed by Marco Dos Santos. After seven records of abstraction that is a conspicuous change, and it reads as a piece with the rest: an artist who spent years working nocturnally and anonymously deciding to be visible in daylight.

The three singles trailed that shift over eleven months, Hypercube in March 2025, the Bialystok and The Ice House pairing in November, and Slow Yamaha in January 2026. Spreading a campaign across nearly a year for a six-week album is a strange ratio, and a revealing one: the making was fast, the releasing deliberately slow.

Two Records That Arrived the Same Day

By coincidence Evaporator shares its release date with Apparat’s A Hum of Maybe, and the two make an instructive pair. Both are by European electronic producers around twenty years into a career, both were made after a period of creative difficulty, and both answer it by narrowing the method rather than widening it.

Apparat brought in a chamber ensemble and let acoustic players carry the harmony. Fake did the opposite, shutting himself in with software older than most of his listeners’ phones and refusing to fix the takes. Bye’s verdict was that Fake emerges blinking into daylight with new purpose, which is as good a description of the difference as any: one producer opened the room up, the other closed the door and turned the lights on.