Art d'Ecco

Entertainment is entrainment is the message on Art d’Ecco’s all mod concept album, ‘In standard definition’, the follow-up to 2018’s ‘Trespasser’.

Dolled up to the androgynines d’Ecco is a face-caked deconstructionist, a pop-savvy raconteur who offers a neuro-mantic parlay through the perils of technophilia, a (hu)manual guidebook to the reflective screens that short-circuit sensibilities and corrode the inner-sense of self. ‘Oh, the sham-glam of it all …’ he declaims.

D’Ecco is creating, producing and finessing an analogue treatise on mass media as strange distractor, deranged attractor, articulating and shattering Hollywood’s dream factory illusions and soul-destroying realties revealing the deep abscesses beneath the veneers (dental and mental).

D’Ecco is unmasking celebrity ‘culture’ and its vacuous venality of fabricated representations, manufactured falsehoods and artificially superficial existences, all capricious cogs in an endless cycle of bland consumerism and chic bleakness.
A murky world of aspiration couched in unearned, filtered perspiration, it could be YOU. Chances are it won’t be though.

D’Ecco’s copper-bottom end-product is a glamphetamine infused album indebted to Sparks (in both theatrical musicality and pantomimic philoso-popera verbiage, so prominently dominant on ‘Desires’ and the titular track), Chinn-Chap’s glitz-waltzin’ platform boot-stompin’ work with The Sweet (‘Head Rush’; ‘Good Looks’), the famed Bowie>Eno>Visconti praxis (‘Bird of Prey’) and the doomed chanson demure Jobriath (‘Nothing ever changes’).

D’Ecco is ideologically in tune with prophetic medaiticians such as Marshall McLuhan (‘The medium is the message’) and Neil Postman (‘Technopoly’; ‘Amusing ourselves to death’). All in all, it’s an arty-smarty takedown of the atomising effects of the screen-fixated being-pixelated hordes (be aware!) and also a celebratory sonic-tonic to the replenishing and intoxicating power of giddy sounds.

The electro-throbbing ‘I am the dancefloor’ is a ‘New Pop’ glamalgamation of the cultural crossover between post-punk and disco-funk, a catchy call to arms cri de chorus that explores and implores the emancipatory pursuit of letting rip. Freedom resides inside, so push the buttons.

Thought-out throughout, hyper-pop humannequin D’Ecco is perennially (com)posing such metaphysical conundrums as where does such ‘need’ actually come from, is it innate and integral to existence or a broadcasting, signalled, transmitted and implanted form of manipulative seduction?

Be the carrot 'and' the stick.