Ecker & Meulyzer have released their extraordinary Carbon LP via Subtext Recordings this month. Based on field recordings made at Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure seed bank on the island of Spitsbergen, the 10-track effort combines the Belgian pair’s interest in the electro-acoustics of place with rhythmically-based electronic music composition. Ecker and Meulyzer first began the project when they scored the performance “Frozen Songs,” a commission by Zero Visibility Dance Company led by Ina Christel Johannessen. The duo explains:
“In 2016, we got the chance to visit the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, thanks to Zero Visibility…There, we made hours of field recordings, which would become the basis of the score for Zero Visibility’s dance performance “Frozen Songs”, on which the music on “Carbon” is based. “Carbon”, our debut on Subtext Recordings, 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.”
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is meant to preserve seed copies from key crop varieties. However, it is located in one of the fastest-warming places on earth. With the permafrost rapidly melting, the once safe location is currently imperiled. Located across from Svalbard’s now-closed coal mines, the area is rife with contradictions. Emblematic of the challenges facing society as capitalist economies collide with the impacts of climate change, the pair makes it clear they have no time for a dystopian vision. Ecker offers: “We don’t have the luxury to afford that kind of pessimism.”
Carbon finds Ecker and Meulyzer continuing to explore their longstanding interest in field recordings. As Stray Dogs, the pair explored the electro-acoustics of locations like a deconsecrated church in Antwerp for the 2013 LP Wasteland and the cooling tower of a former power station in Germany for the 2015 release “Kalkar.” Ecker is also one-half of the Opal Tapes affiliated duo Lumisokea with Andrea Taeggi, while Meulyzer is a percussionist active in projects including the Belgian jazz band Hamster Axis of the One-Click Panther, contemporary music and theatre company Post uit Hessdalen, and experimental psych-krautrock band Slumberland.
Below, you can watch a short documentary about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault featuring the Ecker & Meulyzer track “Growth,” which is off the Carbon LP out now on Subtext.
