Tools that we’ll be swinging

by Fatwires aka John Eckhardt from Hamburg, Germany

Jungle

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FATWIRES – THE WICKED PATH
depth of field music, 2020

PRE-ORDER https://johneckhardt.bandcamp.com/album/the-wicked-path
VIDEOS AT https://vimeo.com/manage/showcases/7403182/info

In ever new combinations of organic beatscapes with live and raw bass guitar playing, John Eckhardt explores the possibilities of his instrument in sound system culture to arrive at his own brand of trippy stone age futurism. Fatwires’ „The Wicked Path“ is like a book of dubwise mediations about patterns in bass, time and space that owes as much to Aston Barrett or Digital Mystikz as to Ash Ra Temple and György Ligeti.

The vibration of bass strings and the swing and poetry of the live musician shaped the roots of dub and soul. Here it gives rise to rich bottom end and spectral soundscapes, embedded in deep and rugged percussion that touches on a number of different styles. Hands on his instrument, John Eckhardt spreads out in time and frequency while keeping the funk alive. In addition, he is now working on a complementing series of special music video clips.

Over two decades and four solo releases, John Eckhardt has unfolded an unusual cosmos of bass music. In a large variety of collaborations and a number of different solo projects from hyper-acoustic double bass to bottom-heavy sound system music, installations and even photography, he keeps on reiterating the overarching theme: bass, space and time.

The vital diversity of his approaches draws the listener into the ongoing underlying quest. Like a hunter gatherer, John Eckhardt navigates in his work a wondrous, branching bass forest that is always and never the same, until he ends up facing actual wilderness: archaic patterns slowly emerge in hypnotic detail, and begin to lead a life of their own.