Devendra and Noah met on the night of Halloween, 1999. Noah lived on Castro Street, the epicentre of San Francisco’s Halloween celebrations, so their first encounter was in costume. “He was wearing a skirt and I was dressed as Bjorn Borg,” Noah remembers. “I wasn’t sure if this was Halloween or just him and it was the same for me. His first impression was that I was a French drug dealer.” Having established that he was not, in fact, a French drug dealer, they became fast friends. Noah, whose production and mixing credits include Joanna Newsom and the Strokes, came on board as co-producer of Devendra’s 2005 album Cripple Crow and they have been working together ever since.

Devendra grew up in Venezuela while Noah, six years older, is a native of Nevada City, California. But as they got to know each other, they realised that they had a similar history in the New Age subculture of the 1980s: a world of meditation, Eastern music, the Bhagavad Gita and The Whole Earth Catalog.

The two men approach a similar mood from very different compositional angles, ranging from weightless synth drones to luminous lattices of woodwind and strings. “Noah’s are more composed,” Devendra says. “Mine are a bit more ethereal. The ambient music I’m interested in is quite utilitarian. It’s kind of like incense: it heightens the mood and the environment.