Ecker & Meulyzer “Carbon” (SUB033)

Digital: https://eckermeulyzer.bandcamp.com/album/carbon

Koenraad Ecker and Frederik Meulyzer make their Subtext debut with Carbon. 

Based on field recordings made at Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure seed bank located on the island of Spitsbergen, Carbon grapples with the many contradictions that lie at the heart of our shift into the capitalocene. The project began in 2017, when Ecker and Meulyzer scored the performance “Frozen Songs,” a commission by Zero Visibility Dance Company led by Ina Christel Johannesen.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was conceived of as an effort to preserve copies of seeds from key crop varieties, ensuring their persistence in the event of large-scale crises. Yet the area is warming faster than anywhere else on earth, causing the permafrost to melt and putting the seed vault at risk. 

Across from the Seed Vault lie the decrepit remnants of Svalbard’s mining activities of the early 20th century; Carbon wrestles with the incongruities nestled in the town’s landscape. Reflecting on dissonances of stasis and change, closeness and distance, enclosure and expanse, as well as cynicism and hope, Ecker and Meulyzer consider the urgency of our situation while trying to sidestep all-too popular depictions of dystopia. In Ecker’s own words, “we don’t have the luxury to afford that kind of pessimism.” 

From close, supple sounds to cold, brutal sonics, Carbon meditates on the many challenging questions and contradictions raised by the Seed Vault and its surroundings—a landscape that embodies and makes visible the many intertwined phenomena that shape our current predicament.

Ecker and Meulyzer, formerly known as Stray Dogs, have released works such as Wasteland, recorded in deconsecrated church in Antwerp, and Kalkar, recorded in the cooling tower of a former power station in Germany. 

Koenraad Ecker works in the fields of electro-acoustic music, field recording, radio plays, stage performance and text. Together with Andrea Taeggi, he is part of the Opal Tapes-affiliated duo Lumisokea. His output encompasses studio albums, audiovisual installations, texts, performances, and sound design for film. 

Frederik Meulyzer is a percussionist active in projects including Belgian jazz band Hamster Axis of the One-Click Panther, contemporary music and theatre company Post uit Hessdalen, and experimental psych-krautrock band Slumberland.

The ecological impact of the production of this record will be compensated through a carbon offsetting program .

Bandcamp

Ecker & Meulyzer - Metabolic Rift

BUY OUR MUSIC: http://lumisokea.bandcamp.com
BOOKING INQUIRIES: lumisokeatheband(at)gmail(dot)com
UPCOMING SHOWS: http://goo.gl/sgLStc

Lumisokea is a Belgian-Italian duo, formed by Koenraad Ecker and Andrea Taeggi. Their music is at once highly physical and rich in texture, using both acoustic (cello, prepared piano) as well as  (analog) electronic instruments to create a dark and introspective listening experience. Their influences range from dub to noise, bassmusic, techno, musique concrète and contemporary classical music, while remaining focused on the key elements in their music : to induce trance-like states, to move bodies and to emphasize the tactile qualities of sound.

To strengthen the impact and concentration of their live-shows, Lumisokea have created a visual side to their musical performances together with Yannick Jacquet (Legoman), a well-respected video-artist, known a.o. from his work as a founding member of the antiVJ visual label.

The visuals and scenography that Yannick Jacquet designed for Lumisokea are based around the simple but highly effective idea of projecting slowly developing, abstract geometrical beams of light into a pitch black room filled with smoke. In contrast to most visuals used at musical performances, these moving shapes do not seek to add a certain meaning or concrete imagery to Lumisokea’s music. They rather function as a hypnotic focal point and a way to relieve the audience from the boundaries of the performance space, made possible through the use of the tactile and illusory qualities of light projected onto smoke. 

In fall 2012 Lumisokea will release their second album on Eat Concrete, entitled “Selva”, following their well-received debut album “Automatons” (2011).

http://vimeo.com/43997976 (audiovisual performance teaser)

Next release'dehNUNG' on aesthetical.de. Out on june 20 : 

An Auditory Journey into Repetition, Resistance, and Raw Reflection

Aesthetical proudly presents the latest album by SELM, the uncompromising project by Belgian brothers Thomas and Nicolas Giets, known previously for their work as Egotopia and Rony & Suzy. With SELM, the duo opened a visceral new chapter in their artistic evolution, diving deep into a world where industrial rigor meets introspective minimalism, where rhythm is both weapon and meditation.

SELM is not a project looking for comfort. Their new album eschews polish in favor of intuition. Born from minimal means and deliberate constraint, the music is steeped in contradiction: industrial and tribal, harsh and hypnotic, melodically restrained yet emotionally expansive. The record surges with rhythmic insistence, grounded in the raw, thumping DNA of 90s techno but bent through a fractured, noisier lens.

Cavernous textures trade places with stark, dry surfaces. Flickers of melody emerge from repetition, only to recede into the percussive shadows. At every turn, SELM plays with perception, refusing to choose between club energy and inner exploration. Their music occupies the grey zone where a distorted beat becomes a pulse of thought, and where sonic abrasiveness transforms into aesthetic clarity.

This album is a sketch turned statement, a reflection on how sound, even in its most unruly forms, can carry precision, depth, and beauty. SELM invites listeners to experience noise as catharsis, distortion as design, and rhythm as ritual.

Out on Aesthetical on June 20 2025, SELM’s latest album is a landmark for the label’s sonic ethos, unfiltered, fiercely intelligent, and unapologetically physical.  

A boutique music publisher and network of composers

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Subtext Recordings is a Bristol founded / Berlin based label curated by James Ginzburg.