ECOATM - S/T LP [Dagoretti]

Latest on Dr Pete Larson's DAGORETTI RECORDS!

Pete Larson (Bulb Records, Couch, 25 Suaves)

FRED THOMAS from TYVEK's electronic jams!

LIsten to ECOATM on bandcamp here

When I first heard jungle in the mid-'90s, it was so exciting that it upset me. I was still fresh off of discovering punk, and now here was this new, totally different sound that was just as mystifying. Imagining how jungle was made was extra fascinating, and I even spent some time naively marvelling at how the drummers were able to play that fast and choppy. Most of my musical life would be dedicated to songwriting, but there was always a mental room set aside for electronic music, in particular trying to crack the code of how to make jungle tracks of my own.

After releasing a couple of largely beatless ambient records under my own name and a tape of scattered electronic sketches as All Energy Must Continue Upward on the exceptional Good Glass label, I returned to my low decades-long drum & bass obsession as Ecoatm. A huge part of the inspiration for this project came from JPEGMAFIA's stuff produced solely with the SP-404 sampler. I'd initially wanted to make a loop-based album with the 404 from sounds I'd recorded on the four-track, dense and dreamy reverb cathedral sprawl like some of the songs that show up in the quieter moments of the record. After getting started there, however, I quickly started throwing breakbeats into the equation, playing everything by hand on the sampler in live takes. My favorite parts of electronic music have always been the bad edits and unintentional malfunctions, and I aimed to make a full album of that kind of stumbling chaos. The end result isn't exactly jungle, dub, or even electronic music in a traditional sense, but a celebration of error messages. All of the sounds sampled, looped, or otherwise manipulated are ones I played myself, with the exception (of course) of the Amen break and a few other drum breaks.

-- Fred Thomas