“It was beautiful,” D’Eith remembers.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, D’Eith made 1,000,000, the debut album from 06 Automatic and a sharp left turn from the music he’d previously released as Cam Blake.

The new moniker marks a new chapter for D’Eith. He describes 06 Automatic as an “experimental electronic collaborative solo project,” which sounds contradictory until you understand the community surrounding it. D’Eith writes the music, while Creighton Taylor masters, co-mixes and co-produces it and joins him onstage. 1,000,000 expands that circle further with contributions from Jackson Bell, Dacey, Young Friend, Kid Filthy and other cool creatives from the Vancouver music community. 

The resulting music is appropriately difficult to pin down. Electronic production provides its foundation, but D’Eith is happy to let individual songs wander elsewhere. “Mine & Yours” veers toward chamber pop, while “Nonchalant” and “Defence Mechanism” land somewhere closer to club music and hyper-pop. Across the record, delicate songwriting can suddenly collide with blown-out production, strange samples or an idea that initially seems almost too ridiculous to work.

Sometimes D’Eith would make something so dumb-sounding that he’d laugh. The trick was figuring out whether there was a song hiding inside it. “I had a lot of project files that were really cool ideas,” he says, “but ultimately I had to find a way for that idea to become ‘music’ or a ‘song’ instead of what was essentially just sound or an eight-bar loop.”

There were plenty of those ideas. The first version of 1,000,000 contained roughly 28 songs before D’Eith whittled it down to 16, many of them unusually short. He finds some comedy in the amount of labour that went into music that might disappear almost as quickly as it arrives.

“It’s funny to think I spent weeks or months tinkering [with] a song for its final runtime to be one minute and 40 seconds.”

The album began taking shape with “You,” a collaboration with Basso that emerged shortly before the pair became roommates. Basso played D’Eith two sketches he had been working on — one built around a simple vocal sample, another involving granular sampling — and within hours they were adding vocals, guitars and drums.

“It was very easy and effortless,” D’Eith says.

That feeling became important. D’Eith spent much of the winter alone in his room making music without any particular objective, while absorbing everything from Yeat, Injury Reserve and Jane Remover to Bon Iver, Andy Shauf, Dijon, Alex G, Aphex Twin and the house records Basso would play for him. At the same time, D’Eith was recording an EP with Cherry Pick, another experience that seeped into the way he approached mixing 1,000,000.

But the basement itself shaped the record too. Having previously been accustomed to recording vocals somewhere relatively soundproof, D’Eith suddenly had roommates on the other side of thin walls. Instead of belting, he often sang softly into the microphone. The limitations of the space quietly became part of the album’s sound.

So did the people inside it. 

“It was the first time as an adult that I had the chance to live with immensely creative people that were in a very similar place in life,” D’Eith says. “We had the privilege to inspire one another.”

Feedback was rarely far away. Basso and Lars were in the house. Taylor was perpetually on the receiving end of D’Eith’s messages. Other friends were making their own music around him. Today, the group even maintains a chat devoted to sending one another things to listen to.

“I look at myself and see pieces of my friends,” D’Eith says, describing the record.

That may be the most useful way to understand 06 Automatic. For all the language of a “solo project,” 1,000,000 feels like the product of people rubbing against one another creatively — sharing records, arguing over ideas, offering criticism and sitting around listening intently while somebody DJs in the living room.

Even D’Eith’s battered 2006 Honda Civic became part of the process. He’d export works in progress and blast them through its worn-out speakers, listening for whatever still sounded wrong.

He still drives it.

“It’s not my dream car by any means,” he says, “but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do.”

There’s something fitting about that practicality sitting alongside music this restless. 1,000,000 wasn’t born from a grand reinvention strategy. D’Eith says he made it “accidentally, mainly out of necessity.” He was cold, stressed and broke, surrounded by people making things, and for a while he couldn’t stop making things either.

Now he’s figuring out how to bring that experimentation out of the basement. D’Eith and Taylor are rebuilding the songs for the stage rather than simply performing over backing tracks, with an album release show at Vancouver’s Green Auto on Sept. 5. A limited physical edition is also coming through Portland DIY non-profit Pleasure Tapes, alongside a church-shot live performance and a collection of music videos.

And D’Eith already has more material waiting, with a possible B-sides EP assembled from songs that didn’t survive 1,000,000’s 28-to-16-song cull, followed by an instrumental album planned for 2027. Apparently a million ideas wasn’t quite enough.