Mile Me Deaf - Ecco - Tape

Mile Me Deaf returns with Ecco, reborn and revived as an outfit whose increasingly synthesized sci-fi productions are buoyed by the most infectious melodies of Wolfgang Möstl’s career.

Following the release of Mile Me Deaf’s last full-length LP – Alien Age – the long-since fruitful project of Austrian visionary multi-instrumentalist Wolfgang Möstl seemed to have run its course, coming to a head with a vibrant vision of a colourful pop dystopia. Having started out in the early-aughts with his noise-rock outfit Killed By 9V Batteries, Möstl has become one of the key – and most prolific – cogs in Vienna’s busy viral underground scene, brimming with DIY groups and exploratory solo projects. Transcending the confines of the scene too, Möstl has also toured the US twice with both Mile Me Deaf and anarchic fuzzy pop group Sex Jams, a song by the former also featuring on US drama series This Is Us.

So – where to go from there? As Möstl puts it: “It’s hard to write songs about a world you basically destroyed.” The intervening years saw Möstl meet increasing demands for his production chops (Dives, Voodoo Jürgens), work with his stoner rock outfit Melt Downer, vaporwave project Voyage Futur, plus singer-songwriter Clara Luzia – and most importantly of all, become a father.

Inescapably drawn back to Mile Me Deaf though, Ecco manages to somehow find Möstl at the peak of his pop prowess. The revived bionic project’s soundscapes are now populated by synths, samplers, and a futurist pulse rather than guitars, underlining Ecco’s central theme of repetition and rebirth. Fuelled by an impulsive stream-of-consciousness writing process, Möstl finds himself guided down a dark – and basic – path towards a glittering album of potent post-psychedelic, post-vaporwave, post-human pop about birth and death.

Ecco explores how everything, ultimately, repeats itself. Built from loops and pulsing electronics as much as human fingers on keys and some of Möstl’s most captivating melodies, songs like ‘Stop And Rewind’, ‘Phase’, or ‘Loop’ have a clear message: “All is echoing infinitely.” As Möstl himself is well aware, the next stage of Mile Me Deaf is impossible to resist. Ecco finds bliss in repetition, and assembles utterly intoxicating pop grooves out the other side of his project’s first death.

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