A Band Without Borders
Divine Elements is not a duo or a solo project with session players. It is, by any honest count, a full band — and one that happens to be scattered across the United States. Concise and the core production team are based in Los Angeles. Doppler operates from North Carolina, three hours ahead by the clock and an entire country away by the map. Brian on keys is in LA. Brian Beckon handles guitar. Gabe Southpaw holds down scratch DJ duties. Dave Finina — a new addition — brings drums and beatboxing. Chris Young MC Dino handles vocals on the live side.
That’s a lot of moving parts. The fact that it works is not an accident.
“We’re all on the same level all the time,” Doppler says, speaking from the perspective of the member furthest from the room. The group runs on constant communication — phone, internet, file-sharing — and a shared instinct for what each person brings to a track. “When I send someone something, they know exactly what to do to it.”
“Everybody has the option and the ability to take what has been given to them and build upon it in their own personal home, their own studio, and add their personal touches.”
The Challenge of the Clock
Ask Doppler about the hardest part of being in Divine Elements and he doesn’t hesitate: geography and time zones. Three hours ahead of his LA-based collaborators, working over the internet for most of the year, the distance between North Carolina and California is a constant variable in the production process.
But when it’s time to prepare for a live show, the dynamic shifts. Doppler arrives three to four days before the date, and the rehearsals are serious. Five-hour sessions. Six-hour sessions. Sometimes twice a day. They burned through Guitar Center Studios down the street before running out of rehearsal space. The drum element alone — a relatively new addition to the live setup — demands that kind of time investment.
“The rehearsal time — it’s literally intense,” Concise says. The live show requires a precision that the studio work, spread across time zones and home setups, can’t fully simulate. That final stretch before a performance is where the scattered pieces become a band.
“We ran out of rehearsal space. Five-hour practice, six-hour practice — three and four days before the show.”
How a Track Actually Gets Made
The production workflow for Divine Elements is distributed by design. Concise, Doppler, and Ru anchor the music production side — the Hydra team, as WOMP TV describes them. But “music production” in this context doesn’t mean three people in the same room with the same software.
It means someone sends a stem. Someone else in a different state or time zone hears what it needs and builds on it. No lengthy back-and-forth explanation required — the musical understanding is already there. That foundation of shared language lets the collaboration happen asynchronously without losing momentum or coherence.
When the band finally does get into the same room, the convergence of all those separately developed threads produces something none of them could have made alone. “What c
What’s Coming
At the time of filming, the pipeline was full. “Back in the Game” was set for release on Ammunition Recordings within the coming months. A separate release on Dangerous New Age — an electro house remix of a Rico and Scoop track featuring vocalist Carrie Greenaway — was also in the works. More shows. More touring across the United States.
Most significantly, a new album was taking shape. Multi-genre by intention, the record had been collecting collaborations with new artists across a range of sounds. The direction was still being refined, but that was part of the point — the breadth of styles they’d been pulling in had started to coalesce into something that felt distinctly like their own.
“It’s really starting to come together as its own sound,” Concise says.
“We’ve been working on so many different genres of music that it’s really starting to come together as its own sound.”
