“They’re not my memories, but I feel like I inherited those memories,” said Paki. “It makes me nostalgic in a weird way.”

That feeling — longing for something simultaneously present and unreachable — runs through the music Paki makes alongside Marilou Lyonnais Archambault as ebb. Their dreamy, downtempo compositions inhabit a world suspended somewhere between memory and imagination, melancholy and beauty, electronic experimentation and organic instrumentation. 

“We both have our individual sound practices and what’s really special is exploring the space in between,” said Paki.

It’s an appropriate philosophy for two musicians who arrived at ebb from seemingly opposite directions.

Paki came through the experimental noise scene, making music with hardware instruments before moving into techno, electronic music and DJing. Lyonnais Archambault grew up studying classical and Celtic harp, but struggled to express herself within the rigid structures of classical music. Searching for other ways to approach the instrument eventually led her toward spiritual jazz and other left-field practices.

A mutual friend introduced them nearly a decade ago, and the pair began finding a shared musical language through long, expectation-free jam sessions.

Paki remembers those early sessions as “exploring [and] experimenting with no expectation.” They could play for three hours and emerge with only around 25 minutes that were “kind of great,” added Lyonnais Archambault.

The point wasn’t necessarily efficiency. It was discovery, figuring out what could exist in the space between their respective musical worlds.

The result is music they describe as electronica and downtempo, but those terms only provide coordinates for a project that seems more interested in atmosphere than genre. Dreamy universes and suspended spaces inform ebb’s sound, which carries an undercurrent of melancholy and nostalgia without becoming entirely consumed by either.

It is, as Lyonnais Archambault explained, “a game between light and shadow.”

That relationship with nostalgia became more personal for Paki a few years ago when her mother put on sevdalinka, melancholic Bosnian music rooted in longing and family.

Growing up in Canada with parents from the former Yugoslavia meant Paki inherited their nostalgia for a country and time that wasn’t exactly hers to remember. Sevdalinka gave that complicated feeling another language.

Paki described the music as the Bosnian equivalent to Saudade, the Portuguese word associated with longing and nostalgia. The connection was particularly fitting because ebb itself originally operated under the name Saudade.

Changing the name didn’t mean abandoning the sentiment behind it.

The tides ebb and flow. The water recedes, “but there is always a little something that stays behind,” said Lyonnais Archambault.

Nostalgia works much the same way. Something disappears, but a trace remains.

“We always return to the past, and even in the present, we dream of a future that doesn’t exactly exist,” said Lyonnais Archambault.

Original photo by Isau Borges

That idea takes on a physical form in the video for ebb’s new single, “Fleurs de rupture,” which finds the duo wandering through Montréal’s refineries.

Inspired by Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology, Paki sees the industrial landscape as representative of a “lost future” — something in the present that remains haunted by the past. Once constructed as monuments to industrial and societal progress, the refineries now stand as symbols of capitalism and environmental decay.

For ebb, those ghosts aren’t exclusively societal.

“It’s kind of like the ghosts of our pasts that can also haunt us today,” Paki elaborated. “In our personal lives, in our love lives as well.”

To Paki, “Fleurs de rupture” represents that “ritualistic moment” of breaking up with your past self and past cycles.

Lyonnais Archambault sees another image in the title: giving someone flowers at the end of a relationship, acknowledging the beauty something once contained even as you let it go.

It’s another threshold for ebb to occupy — the space between saying goodbye and celebrating what was beautiful.

That preoccupation with spaces between states extends beyond the duo’s recordings. Lyonnais Archambault is currently pursuing an MFA in Intermedia, experimenting at the intersection of sound, music, sculpture and installation. ebb gives her and Paki another environment in which to explore that “intermusical space,” with increasingly unconventional audiovisual projects on the horizon.

Their next opportunity arrives Aug. 30, when ebb return to the stage at MUTEK after taking a short break from live performance to focus on their upcoming album.

They’ll perform inside the SAT’s Satosphère, an immersive dome surrounded by 360-degree visual projections — an environment uniquely suited to music built around atmosphere, space and perception.

“I’m certain it’s going to have a particular effect on the tones,” speculated Lyonnais Archambault about the dome shape.

The performance will also introduce a new live setup incorporating percussion, tambourine, voices and synths, while Lyonnais Archambault’s harp will make a special appearance. The pair plan to sing onstage for the first time in years, and there is at least one other element they aren’t ready to reveal. Paki would only hint that something they’ll be wearing will “come to life.”

It feels appropriate that ebb would resist making the boundaries too clear.

Their music has emerged from the meeting point of two very different practices and grown into a project fascinated by what lingers: memories inherited from someone else, relationships after they end, abandoned visions of the future and the traces left behind when the tide recedes.

For ebb, the most interesting place isn’t necessarily one side or the other. It’s the space in between.

Catch ebb at MUTEK in Montreal, QC on Saturday, Aug. 30.