Heartbeat Valtz, by Mikhail Kukva

Heartbeat Valtz isn't our song. Mikhail Kukva wrote it, the words and the music. It appears on Geometric Series as track four, Heartbeat Valtz (feat. Mikhail Kukva), and it's the first time Graviton Theory has featured another musician. We're proud that the first one is him.

Where the song comes from

His former band, Lucky Thirteen, also written LXIII, performed Heartbeat Valtz live. Their YouTube channel still has the video: live in Aurora, St Petersburg, on 29 May 2012.

Start there. That's the song as Mikhail's band played it.

What we changed

Our recording is a reinterpretation. We remixed it, gave it a new voice, added effects and found our own interpretation of it. The song underneath is still Mikhail's.

It's built on questions. What did you dream about? What is the cause of your racing pulse? Someone asks about the small signs between two people instead of naming the feeling outright, until the chorus turns the questions into an invitation: Don't hide your tenderness, don't worry. Let's write tonight our story of pleasure and love.

That's why it belongs on this record. Geometric Series is about distance: how it opens, how far it goes and how it closes. Heartbeat Valtz sits in the opening five, before the series begins, and it measures the smallest distance on the album: the space between one racing heartbeat and the next, between asking and being answered.

Why Mikhail

Mikhail is an outstanding person, and a musician who really knows what he's talking about. Putting someone else's song at the centre of a Graviton Theory recording isn't something we've done before, and we couldn't have asked for a better person to do it with. We're proud of this collaboration.

Listen

Heartbeat Valtz is on Geometric Series, with its lyrics and credits on its own page. Then go back to the 2012 performance and hear where it started.