(New York, NY) With the release of the new single, “The Nail Beside The Door,” alt-folk singer/songwriter E.W. Harris announces the forthcoming EP, Machine Living in Relief, due out this year. An ambitious collection of songs born out of a last call challenge to make a completely acoustic record about robots and AIs, Machine Living in Relief is the latest in a five-album series set inside Harris’s self-styled “romantic dystopia” Rocket City. (One in a Million Media, 2024)
If one weren’t already familiar with Harris’s more traditionalist background, the chummy strum of his guitalele reaches out and shakes your hand by way of friendly introduction. He also incorporates a number of unusual instruments (cedar flute, a broken autoharp), outside-the-box toys (Speak-n-Spell, Mr. Robot, Magic Wand Reader), and MacGyvered percussion hacks (can full of rice, “suitcase that I hit with a roll of duct tape”) throughout these folkways-meets-the-spaceways tracks. Call it asteroid field recording.
In a strange bit of real-time lore that feels like it could only happen to Harris, one of his cousins walked up to him mid-set a few years back and handed him a banjo, offering only the briefest explanation – “Here man, I’m not gonna learn this and I thought you might use it” – before promptly leaving the gig. The result, some months later as Harris tinkered with the unfamiliar instrument under lockdown, was this album’s lead single, “The Nail Beside the Door.” “Written from the perspective of a prisoner who becomes emotionally dependent on an AI companion,” it effectively sets out to explore the ideas behind the album opener from the other side, with all the profound, maddening aloneness of COVID isolation bleeding through the character loud and clear.
Though perhaps best known for his event horizon synths, spaghettified guitar effects, and above all, his overwhelming, spacetime singularity of a voice, Harris’s career began, some 25 years ago, in a much more earthbound vein, with the train trestle roots-rock of Luminous and the cable knit jazz-folk of The Eric Harris Group.
Through subsequent releases and relentless touring Harris steadily populated his teeming retropolis with comet-hopping hobos and android vagabonds of every stripe, worldbuilding his future from the ground up until it finally skyscraped against the present, with Machine Living in Relief, and the fateful fortune of that half-remembered night at the bar.
If Machine Living in Relief is truly the result of some apocryphal gauntlet throw issued at last call, Harris has met it in spades. Both a natural outgrowth of what came before, and a tantalizing peek at what might be soon to come, it pushes all the right buttons – even when those buttons are connected to the characters themselves – and leaves you contemplating your place within our brave new world of hyperconnected loneliness and transhuman striving.
“If the heart pumps a turbine that generates power to the computer half of the cyborg brain, what is the value of the parts? Is addiction just a modality of being a divided whole? If time is not linear, in remembering our past mistakes do we actually return to those moments? It’s a damn good thing songs don’t need to answer questions.” – E. W. Harris
SA Examiner 