♫♪  Koenraad Ecker - Ill Fares the Land

As the development of new DAW software, means of digital processing, and virtual instruments breeds increasingly complex methods of electronic composition, more strategies exist now for a musician to max out his or her output than ever before. Some artists that embrace these new technologies can sink into a mire of endlessly customizable plugins, Macbook over-dependence, and physically stale live performance. Some continue, perhaps stubbornly, to mine the limitations and specific tones of analog instruments and processes, for better and worse. Some bold minds select what they want from the deepening arsenals of both electronic and analog tactics and mash them into previously unheard permutations, documenting the war of HUMAN vs. MACHINE from somewhere in the middle of its timeline.

Armed with a cello and a dense system of electronics, Koenraad Ecker produces overwhelming drone/noise compositions that blast hi-fi electronic depth-charges into your consciousness. Ill Fares The Land, his new LP on Digitalis, holds nothing back in its bleak vision of contemporary electro/acoustic music, cycling through consuming passages of white noise static and thick walls of barely tonal low-end savagery. Punctured with fractured rhythms, randomized synth bleeps, and martial bass drum beatdowns, Ecker’s post-industrial dronescapes slither with sonic details as they veer between near silence and maximal overload. The whole affair might run the risk of crumbling under the weight of its own abstraction, if not for the stunning moments of live cello performance that Ecker braids into his productions as tenuous lifelines back to some form of humanity. Grafted to our screens, tethered to a continual stream of data and stimuli, who among us is still purely “human?” Ecker demonstrates the futility of such a question: we are all enriched, cursed, augmented, and disfigured by the tools and machines we choose to integrate into ourselves. We are flesh and we are steel and we continue to evolve.

You can order Ill Fares The Land on LP from Digitalis. Strike before physical copies disappear, or remain strictly digital.

• Koenraad Ecker: https://soundcloud.com/muteboymusic
• Digitalis Recordings: http://www.digitalisindustries.com

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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