TJ Eckleberg releases his 7th studio album Black & Amber in August 2016.
Eckleberg returns to Australia briefly from Japan, launching his new album with a solo performance at Colbourne Ave (Glebe) on Thursday 11 August.
The album is released independently on Akimbo records.
Following three adrenalin-fuelled years in Berlin, the Australian singer-songwriter’s 7th album finds him in the calm of Kyoto, Japan, delivering his most focused album to date. Black & Amber marries the rush of new adventures with the loneliness and loss of leaving things behind – offering darkness and beauty in equal measure.
On Black & Amber, Eckleberg explores what it is to trade a world you know for one you don’t. In Someone I’m becoming, he asks ‘Was it something I was becoming? Something I’ve become? Someone coming undone?’. It’s a soulful, lush guitar-based album of sparkling tremolo, ragged radio speaker vocals, rippling sunshine delay lines and Eckleberg’s knack of balancing world weary whisper with fragile wail. From the disorientation of I swallowed the ocean to the sweet nostalgia of Mini Moke, the album merges a lost sixties garage soul with an off kilter indie aesthetic – magnifying small details into glimpses of what it is to make it through the day.
“Berlin was a crazy endless summer, but Kyoto is a different world – I’m walking past centuries old temples and sculpted gardens by the river, past Maiko and priests catching bullet trains. The silence, the detachment, the confusion throws a curious light on who I was, and who I could be…” – TJ Eckleberg