Ekkage - Datafields

Eric Sublett has been releasing music as Ekkage from Colorado since 2023, at a pace that suggests he finds the work easy or just cannot stop. Surveillance, Entangled, Whitespace in the first year alone. Violence in March, Eclipses in June, then Datafields and Datafields 2 both landing in October. That’s a lot of material to put out into the world with no label, no press, no infrastructure. The fact that Datafields earns sustained attention rather than asking for patience says something.

The record runs just under an hour across nine tracks, and the pacing is deliberate. Exal and Digisun open things steadily, establishing a grid of clicking rhythms and slow aquatic pressure. Maniche at seven minutes is where the dub techno logic really takes hold, feedback and bass cycling through each other at low temperatures. Glietch is the outlier, the name a clue - the same texture but with something introduced that makes it stutter. Tralmedic and Pikline are shorter and more compressed, as if Sublett is testing how much he can get across in five minutes before releasing himself to stretch out again. Titan Esq at nearly ten minutes is the centrepiece, the longest track before the closer, and it earns the runtime. Stormcrawl closes at eleven minutes and does exactly what the title says.

The track naming is doing quiet work throughout. Exal, Maniche, Tralmedic, Pikline: invented words or corrupted ones, technical-sounding without being technical, which mirrors the music’s own position between the organic and the machined. One description of the record as “coldly mechanical and yet organically fluid, like an electrified swamp with a complex biomechanical ecosystem” is florid but not wrong. There’s something growing in here.

The Colorado geography is worth noting, if only because this kind of music tends to cluster around certain European cities and their associated scenes. Sublett seems genuinely indifferent to that context. Datafields doesn’t sound like it was made in conversation with those reference points, which gives it a slightly different quality, less knowing, more direct. Whether that’s a product of where he’s working or just who he is is impossible to say. Either way it helps.

Datafields is out now on Bandcamp.