SPILL FEATURE: STRIPPING AWAY A LOT OF THE VENEER AND THE RETROGRADE NOSTALGIA AND REPLACING IT WITH SUBSTANCE – A CONVERSATION WITH ART D’ECCO

STRIPPING AWAY A LOT OF THE VENEER AND THE RETROGRADE NOSTALGIA AND REPLACING IT WITH SUBSTANCE

A CONVERSATION WITH ART D’ECCO

A new Art d’Ecco album is upon us! The innovative art rocker flawlessly shifts genres, constantly reinvents himself, and always surprises listeners with where his next album will go. His newest album, Scheele’s Green, is unlike anything he’s done before, and it’s his angriest and most dystopian album yet. Recently, I chatted with d’Ecco about Scheele’s Green.

“I assembled a really formidable band that could play live off the floor, and we came in with scratchier, janky, almost iPhone demos…. [and] used a lot of tape and fun sonic experimentation, and the end result is Scheele’s Green, which is hopefully a progression of the sound and stripping away a lot of the veneer and the retrograde nostalgia and replacing it with substance,” d’Ecco says.

Scheele’s Green features lots of cool instruments and fascinatingly odd sounds. “I love the idea of using instruments that don’t really belong in an arrangement and shoehorning them in,” d’Ecco states. “This album is tapping a lot into the chaos of society – the urban decay – I added instruments that could be as chaotic as possible. “The Death Of Indie” features tubular bells and a 300-year-old harpsichord. “Why is a harpsichord used on the song? It just felt like a baroque instrument of death.” Meanwhile, “The Wolf” features a celesta (or bell piano). “I’ve just always loved those old chiming magical instruments.”

While creating Scheele’s Green, d’Ecco says he was “trying to forge a new musical language for myself and a methodology on how I would try to squeeze inspiration.” An example of this is “The Death of Indie.” “That song was a real experiment on, like, ‘How do I write a song raging about data centers and AI that is so anti-sounding of AI.’ I used all these fucking random instruments, had long interludes, time signature changes, and did all these things that a prompt into some generative sound AI website couldn’t generate.”

Books were a huge source of inspiration for several songs on Scheele’s Green, including George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, which d’Ecco used as inspiration for “Like Trilby.” “What I took from it as inspiration is this idea of faded memories of people that come in and out of your life that have a profound effect on you,” he shares. “Svengali is an evil character in this book and takes Trilby under his guide and turns her into a renowned singer. She goes from being tone-deaf to enchanted by Svengali, and it has a very tragic ending for her… Svengali is a pejorative term used for someone who manipulates somebody. The expression ‘That guy is a Svengali’ comes from the book… We’ve all forgotten about Trilby, but we remember the evildoer of her life: Svengali. Why isn’t Trilby used as a verb, adjective, or an expression? I wanted to get to the root of why the term Svengali is used and has been used for over 100 years, but no one knows who Trilby is.”

Alternatively, “Disappear Here” is a reference to the phrase ‘disappear here’ from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel Less Than Zero. “This idea of people going to Hollywood generation after generation to make it big, the version of that now is to go and be an influencer,” d’Ecco says. “It led me down this thread of influencer culture and how YouTubers and content creators are sort of like the new gold rush of people living in a small town who come from impecunious means who want to strike it rich and be famous, and there’s this glut of parody that starts to be prevalent. You go on social media and YouTube, and you see the same ragebait, clickbait, headlines – the shitification of social media. It all just swirled around in my head, and I find it so exhausting – is it ever a fucking relief to unplug, go for a walk, and not be bombarded with shit… The whole song is just a warning to the younger generation not to get sucked up into this fucking vortex of hell that they are inevitably getting sucked up into because social media is so fucking addicting.”

PURCHASE SCHEELE’S GREEN VIA BANDCAMP

“Beware of Dog” sees d’Ecco tapping into his love of Pearl Jam. “That’s the most Pearl Jam sounding song a guy could ever write,” d’Ecco says. “It took me 20 years, but I finally wrote a rip-off of Pearl Jam. I have a Pearl Jam tattoo. They were one of my first favourite bands. Reflecting on the song’s theme, d’Ecco explains, “It’s this Dostoevsky type raging from the underground keyboard warrior. I imagined this person in the late-stage capitalism era that we’re existing in and being thrust into with AI running amok for another fucking 10 years, and like what’s gonna happen to the bottom end of society and how radicalized are people going to get. I was putting myself in the position of the character; someone who is so bitter and hard done by, like, ‘I used to be great. I used to write. I used to play in bands, but now the kids just want the AI music.’ I just pictured myself as a crusty old asshole. No one wants to hang out with me except for my own dog. We got to the dog park, and every other dog owner just wants to run from me because I’m so fucking angry and bitter about how things used to be and how things are now.”

“Break & Enter” was a demo from d’Ecco’s previous album Serene Demon that he revisited and included on Scheele’s Green. Reflecting on the song’s lyrical content, d’Ecco states, “I don’t want to really give too much away because it’s not my story to tell, and I don’t wanna sensationalize or use someone else’s trauma or tragedy to sell a record, as it would be very distasteful and unbecoming of me. It’s a true story of a crime that was committed in an area that I used to live in, and it haunted me. I was thinking these random acts of violence happen a lot in society. When you look at the root cause of it, it’s usually someone who has been abandoned by society at a young age or who has gone through some personal trauma at a young age and has been untreated or unchecked, and in that personal trauma they get seduced into the darkness of society, you could say, for lack of a better word. I wanted to put myself in the first-person narrative of someone who is bleeding out and living their last moments with compassion and forgiveness for the person who committed the crime against them and having an understanding that they are not an awful, evil person. They’ve just been abandoned by society and let down by things decaying due to late-stage capitalism and existential forces beyond their control. Obviously, everybody has to be responsible for their own actions. I’m not, as the narrator of the story, pointing blame solely on society. I’m just saying there is a thread running through all these songs… [and that is] we sometimes forget about the humanity in society.”

Nine of the songs on Scheele’s Green were written by d’Ecco. He brought demos of these songs to his band to complete together. He set aside four days while recording the album for him and his band to write two songs from scratch together. These two songs were “Endings For Beginners” and “Darién Gap.” Recording these two songs was a wonderful experience for d’Ecco. “I don’t need to overproduce, over demo, or meticulously structure everything going into a project. I can leave things to happenstance, creativity, happy accidents, or things to materialize in the heat of the moment.” “Endings for Beginners” is described by d’Ecco as “the most artistically rewarding day in the studio of my life. I was so proud of those kids just for fucking trying shit.”

Scheele’s Green releases on October 23. “Scheele’s green poisoned a bunch of people, and it took years for it to be removed from culture and society – it’s this toxic ass thing, and even when it was killing people, causing cancer, and causing birth defects, it took a long time for society to get rid of it because they were just addicted to the visual aspects of this thing,” d’Ecco says. “Are we intrinsically as humans addicted to shit that is killing us?’ I just found that a rich narrative vein to explore, and this idea of Scheele’s Green is this insane asylum that I’m living in. It’s just this toxic wasteland of hell. It’s a very dystopian outlook on society.”

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Photo Credits: Izzy Kazenbroot-Guppy