Boulder, Colorado-based techno and electronic music producer Craig Heneveld’s sound thrives as an ecosystem. His music is built on a driving, relentless 909 kick drum as thick and unyielding as the growth of the forest floor. This kick serves as the substrate for the music, which roots, and flourishes throughout the rest of the sonic spectrum, sprouting vibrant flora that pervades. In the midst of this musical forest, polyrhythmic, shuffling percussion serves as the song’s canopy, where the synthesized waveforms teem with life that grows and then sheds back to the forest floor, feeding the cycle. These patterns, while mimicking the vibrancy of a forest, also give homage to the stars from which the canopy draws energy – creating a celestial tapestry that is both familiar and sublime in its size and unpredictability.

Despite Boulder not being a techno hotspot, this organic approach to sound has garnered support from tastemakers such as Marco Carola, Joseph Capriati, and Dax J, among others.

Craig’s musical growth and evolution are unconventional, to say the least – taking divergent influences that range from punk rock and Latin music, to studying tabla and sarod under some of the world’s more predominant Indian classical music gurus.

His DJing career began in 2004 as part of the Florida breakbeat scene, using the money from band gigs to buy vinyl at the local Painted Puppy record store. Between 2008 and 2013, he further refined his style while DJing in support of live electronic bands as a resident at The Crowbar in Tampa. It was among this audience he recognized his fondness for house music and its deep, funky cuts, and four-to-the-floor kick – elements that would subtly engrain itself into the techno he would produce a decade later. Immersed in this scene, he would cofound the Aura Music Festival, a platform that brought together the eclectic colors of funk, rock, jazz, and electronic performances. While he was primarily involved in its early years, Aura would become a premiere Florida music festival for over a half-decade.

Craig’s relocation to Boulder in 2013 marked a pivotal detour towards the rhythmic intricacies of Indian classical music, taking lessons from disciples of the illustrious Zakir Husain and Ali Akbar Khan. The nuanced art of polyrhythms, intrinsic to this genre, struck a chord with Craig, indelibly influencing his sound. While traditional Indian motifs are not overt in his work, these lessons profoundly reshaped his rhythmic perception, infusing his compositions with a new layer of complexity.

His journey eventually led him to the symbiotic realm of audio synthesis and Eurorack, a pathway to techno that emulates nature’s intricate networks and cyclicality. Analogous to a forest biome, each module in his setup ‘borrows’ energy from another, fostering the organic growth of his compositions.

This natural cyclical connection of exchanged energy, the essence of life itself, resonated with him and resulted in the formation of his label, Deciduous Circuits – a name that encapsulates Craig’s philosophy of music-making. Deciduous Circuts first EP, a release by Craig himself, “Hello Koto / Envelope,” is already seeing pre-release support from Luke Slater and Marcell Detmann. 

This philosophy of a symbiotic ecosystem is deeply evident in his work, representing the intricate, seemingly unpredictable growth observed in the wilderness, which he reflects through his modular compositions. Each song he creates is a symbolic ecosystem, an interplay of energy, timing, and melody that he orchestrates into a unique soundscape that is as relentless as it is vibrant.