Memories of a Place That Never Existed

Can you be nostalgic for somewhere you’ve never been?

Can you miss a decade you never really experienced, pine for a place you’ve never visited, or hear the hiss of an old tape, the warmth of an analogue synth or the crackle of an imperfect recording and somehow feel like you’re remembering something that was never actually yours to remember?

It’s a strange contradiction. Nostalgia is supposed to belong to our past, to childhood bedrooms, old friends, forgotten summers and songs that instantly transport us back to a particular moment. But sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes we find ourselves longing for a version of the past we’ve constructed from fragments. Music discovered years later, films, photographs, stories, sounds and perhaps even other people’s memories. Somehow, after a while, they begin to feel a little like our own.

“For me it’s kind of nostalgic feel of something that I never had. Almost like remembering something that you can’t really remember, all those feelings you know you have never felt, but somehow they are still so familiar.”

Loosely Based on EDM understands that feeling. In fact, it sits right at the heart of Analog Space.

Maybe that’s the real question behind Analog Space. How do you make music from a memory you never had?

The Sounds We Carry

To understand Analog Space, you probably have to go back a little further, because there are sounds that become part of us without us really noticing.

Loosely Based on EDM talks about Pink Floyd, Gary Moore, Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis, alongside artists that might be less familiar to some of us, including Soviet-era synth bands Zodiac and Space, and Estonian electronic composer Sven Grünberg. There was also a period filled almost entirely with electronic music: Enigma, Dagda, Sacred Spirit and Oliver Shanti. Different genres, different cultures and different decades, but all becoming part of the same musical memory.

Among all those sounds are a couple of very real memories.

One takes us to Prague. It’s dark at the Křižík Fountain when Vangelis’ Conquest of Paradise begins playing alongside the illuminated fountain show. Music, light and place suddenly become inseparable. The other happens at two in the morning in somebody’s house, experiencing a proper surround sound system for the first time while watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall from beginning to end. Apparently nobody complained about the volume. Maybe they were all asleep.

Some memories become important because of what happened. Others become important because of how they felt, and music has a peculiar ability to preserve both.

The slightly surprising part of this story is that Loosely Based on EDM hasn’t actually been making music for very long. It started in November 2025, and almost completely by accident.

A YouTube short appeared containing what sounded like a Modern Talking song that couldn’t be identified. Lyrics were searched, melodies investigated and every possible route to identifying the mysterious track seemingly exhausted. Eventually there was another explanation: maybe it wasn’t a forgotten song at all. Maybe it was AI.

That curiosity led to Mureka and a first attempt at making AI-assisted music. The result was Stardust Wars, a track that, looking back now, apparently contains all the familiar early AI oddities, including female vocals occasionally disappearing somewhere into the ultrasound spectrum. It might not be perfect, but it still matters because it was the first.

Then came Moonlight in Suno. Original lyrics, melodies and more deliberate decisions about styling began appearing, and suddenly all those years of accumulated sounds were no longer things that could only be listened to. They had become something that could be explored.

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A Place Called Analog Space

Which eventually brings us to Analog Space.

Although when we described it as the latest album, we were quickly corrected.

“You must be using Internet Explorer still.”

Fair enough.

Analog Space has already been followed by Do You Want To Be My Friend, an exploration of 70s psychedelic rock. But there’s something about Analog Space that feels particularly connected to the question we started with.

The album is built around the idea of analogue sound and, perhaps more importantly, how analogue sound makes us feel. Loosely Based on EDM wasn’t there when analogue ruled the world, describing instead being born into the “second coming of synth” and growing up as a child of the 90s. Yet the 80s seem to have a strange gravitational pull.

Maybe we’re born into certain sounds and others find us later. Perhaps after enough time, it becomes difficult to tell the difference.

In Analog Space, that imagined past is fuzzy. Tape recorders, hiss, crackling stereo, rough edges and sounds moving imperfectly through space. These are all things that modern production technology could quite easily remove, but instead they’re deliberately put back.

On Old Tapes, imperfect mixing, background hiss and crackles aren’t flaws in the recording. They’re part of the memory. Because memories aren’t perfectly mastered either. They’re distorted. Bits disappear while other parts somehow become stronger every time we remember them. The edges soften, and maybe that’s exactly what makes us want to go back.

One track on Analog Space perhaps comes closest to explaining all of this.

Into the Future asks: “So you want to tell the stories that you never got to hear?” Maybe we do.

Because Analog Space isn’t really trying to recreate the past. It’s creating a past of its own from fragments of Pink Floyd and Vangelis, synth music from another place and another era, the 80s imagined by someone who didn’t really experience them, and real memories from Prague and two o’clock in the morning mixed with imaginary ones made from tape hiss and fuzzy synthesisers.

Somewhere between all of those things, something new appears. Something strangely familiar.

When asked to choose a favourite moment from the album, it’s the closing track, I Walked Away.

“It’s a perfect ending for almost perfect memory.”

There’s something beautiful about that description. Not a perfect memory, but an almost perfect one.

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When the Tools Catch Up With the Idea

There’s another part of the Loosely Based on EDM story that matters here. Years ago, there was already a desire to make music.

After hearing someone on YouTube mixing the sounds of Jarre and Vangelis into something new, there was a simple thought: I wish I could do something similar. But the tools and skills weren’t there, so nothing happened.

AI has changed that, and inevitably that raises a question we’ve encountered plenty of times around Distraction: what actually counts as making music?

Loosely Based on EDM has never used a traditional studio, but the process involves writing lyrics, developing melodies and themes, directing sounds, choosing styles, listening to results, rejecting what doesn’t work, separating stems, recombining elements and carrying out mastering, noise removal, compression and normalisation. There is experimentation, there are decisions and, most importantly, there is intent.

A computer can produce sound, but somebody still has to decide what that sound is supposed to mean.

Perhaps that’s why the term AI-assisted music is useful. The technology didn’t create the desire to make something. That was already there. The tools finally caught up with the idea.

And once those tools arrived, things started getting interesting.

The creative process often begins somewhere in the real world, perhaps with a forgotten artist, a film or a particular song. One recent trail started with the film Criminal and its haunting use of Madsonik’s Drift and Fall Again. That memory led to M83’s Wait, which in turn led towards dream pop, ambient sounds, floating synths and shoegaze.

Then those influences get pulled apart, mixed with something else and experimented with until they become something new. That’s how you end up somewhere around darkwave blues or a synthwave string quartet.

And perhaps the name finally starts making sense.

It’s not necessarily EDM. It’s just loosely based on it.

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The Little Virtual Smile

Loosely Based on EDM isn’t one of our Distraction Records artists, but that red panda mask has become a familiar sight around Distraction Radio.

When we asked what being part of our community means as an artist, the answer was wonderfully simple: a pat on the back, a few good words and some validation. It’s about people listening to each other’s music and encouraging each other, even when it isn’t necessarily a style they’d choose for themselves.

You don’t have to love a genre to recognise when somebody has put something of themselves into it.

Sometimes you tell an artist that you enjoyed what they made. You’re sitting behind one screen and they’re sitting behind another, so you don’t see what happens afterwards. But somewhere out there is what Loosely Based on EDM describes as that “virtual smile” an artist gets when somebody says something good about their art.

We really like that idea.

Because perhaps that’s another thing that exists without physically existing at all.

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Somewhere Inside

So let’s go back to our original question. Can you be nostalgic for somewhere you’ve never been?

Maybe we’ve been thinking about nostalgia in the wrong way. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be a perfect historical record of our own past. Perhaps we’re allowed to borrow pieces: a sound from another decade, a photograph of somewhere we’ve never visited, a story somebody once told us, a record made before we were born or the crackle of a tape we never owned.

We collect those fragments and build somewhere for them to live.

Music is particularly good at doing that. It creates places that only exist for a few minutes at a time, and yet somehow we can miss them when they’re gone.

At the end of our conversation, we asked Loosely Based on EDM what should stay with someone after Analog Space finishes. Not what they should think about AI, whether they understood the concept or whether they recognised the influences.

The answer was much simpler.

A smile, and a warm feeling somewhere inside.

Maybe that’s the answer to the question we started with.

Maybe you can miss somewhere you’ve never been, because for a few minutes, music made it real.

And somewhere inside, Analog Space exists.

Even if none of us have ever actually been there.