"This was my first soundtrack ever, and my first attempt at electronic music. Back then (1999), I mainly made video art. Choreographer Bud Blumenthal asked me to create the AV background for his dance piece "Rivermen". I made the video track using mainly analogue feedback generated by experimenting with an old JVC camcorder and a tube TV. The result was beamed onto the floor. I created most of the sounds using FM synthesis and other forms of digital processing from Acid Foundry's Sound Forge. I put it all together using rudimentary video editing software, laboriously, piece by piece, without a tempo or looping system like in modern DAWs (which I was only to discover later). The result is a little rough, but it still inspires me after all these years. What about you?" (A.D.B.)

"In the annals of musical history, there exists a lesser-known soundtrack, unwittingly nestled within the burgeoning glitch scene of its time, that retrospectively emerged as a harbinger of the Clicks & Cuts movement, which would take root a year later. The obscure opus in question, shrouded in obscurity, quietly laid the groundwork for a sonic revolution yet to come.
An essential touchstone, proudly acknowledged by its creator, is the seminal album 'Kulma' by Pan Sonic, unleashed upon the world in 1997. As one revisits this sonic artifact, its profound influence becomes unmistakably evident, permeating through the fabric of experimental soundscapes.
Rumours, though vehemently refuted, whisper of Carsten Nicolaï's clandestine encounter with a performance of Rivermen during the genesis of his inaugural solo endeavour under the moniker Alva Noto. Such tales, while enigmatic in nature, add layers of intrigue to the already enigmatic persona of the artist.
Beyond the foundational pillars of drone, glitch, post-techno, and post-industrial aesthetics, astute scholars have purportedly discerned faint echoes of the synth-pop ensemble Eurythmics within a fleeting passage of the composition's third movement. Veracious or anecdotal, this purported connection, although unintended by its creator, serves as a testament to the multifaceted tapestry of musical influence." (A.I.)

"The choreography of Rivermen is summed up in the words ‘complexity’, ‘transformation’ and ‘continuum’. Complexity as in nature, the surface and infinitely facetted depth of a river. Transformation as in the renewal of its current that varies at every moment. Continuum as in its apparent timeless existence. The dance and the surface on which it comes into being converge simultaneously. With high angle projection, the video image acquires a new status, no longer limited to the two-dimensional surface of a projection screen. Becoming light again, as well as providing a moving surface supporting the dance, it acts on the dancers’ bodies themselves, transforming them and integrating them into its structure. This surface reveals itself as a third partner, a third body. The musical composition is conceived as an assembly of electronic sounds, in a process similar to video-montage. A work on sound texture and sensations produced by the superposition, repetition and interweaving of sounds." (B.B.)