Our Life With The Wave

Mike Huckaby (1966–2020) and Stephen Hitchell (cv313, Echospace Detroit) started this record in 2008 while both remixing Juan Atkins’s Model 500’s “Starlight.” It sat unfinished for fifteen years. Huckaby died in 2020. Hitchell exhumed the sessions and finished the record; Pole (Stefan Betke) mastered it at his Berlin studio. So this single 12-inch is a four-way handshake across time and geography: Huckaby and Hitchell in Detroit, the Model 500 connection to Atkins, and through Pole’s mastering a direct thread to the Basic Channel / Rhythm & Sound continuum.

There is an obvious parallel with Donuts: another posthumous record, another collaborator finishing what the dead left behind. Huckaby was one of the great quiet figures of the Detroit scene, in the same way that Dilla’s influence was felt more in what other people absorbed from him than in what he managed to release himself. Our Life with the Wave functions as a working record precisely because Hitchell treated it that way — sitting with the unfinished sessions, finishing what Huckaby could not, and releasing it as music rather than as tribute.