deadmau5 Protege Eekkoo Arrives With Warm, Dark “Towers” (Artist Exploration)

It’s a situation most artists dream about: toil away at your craft, working countless hours in the dead of night producing magic in the hope someone will notice and bring your art to the masses. What you don’t expect is for that person to be deadmau5, EDM’s best-known personality. Jonathan Doyon, known as Eekkoo (pronounced “echo”) has that exact story. “I respect the man. I respect the artist. And I freaking love his music. I always wanted to be part of his label. Never thought that he would be the one to notice me at the first place. Internet!”

“Internet!” is right. It’s normally a long and winding road from teaching sound design to  playing the 2014 mau5trap vs Pryda Party in Miami. But Eekkoo’s debut EP so impressed the notoriously unimpressed Joel Zimmerman that Eekkoo became his first ever Soundcloud follow. Shortly thereafter, Eekkoo was a mau5trap name, and Jonathan found himself with a whole new set of responsibilities. “With prestigious labels like mau5trap, you need, as an artist, to show them that your devoted to your career and that you can deliver. I mean, it’s an investment for both parties.”

That devotion has taken the form of Towers, a dark, progressive track with the kind of deep warmth fitting of Eekkoo’s analogue leanings. “Towers is the first track to receive the digital-only treatment. My digital fx chain is that good I guess. Truth is, I’ve been experimenting a lot with my TG-1 analog compressor by Chandler and with the military-class valves of my Thermionic Culture’s unit: the Culture Vulture. My previous EP did go through those units, but with Towers, I was experimenting with plug-ins.” Despite the fact that it was created entirely in-the-box, it retains the chunky character that caught the attention of the mau5.

[quote author=”Eekkoo”]I just know what I can achieve mixing-wise, and I now feel like I can recreate, with the right plug-ins of course, almost anything. But, I must admit, most of the raw sound material / synthesizers still comes from an analogue source: Moog synthesizers, Dave Smith’s synthesizers, etc.[/quote]

Towers is the first indication of what we can expect from Eekkoo’s upcoming second EP. The promise of more analogue goodness (“I’m quite sure that the key to great-sounding music production is somewhere in between analog source and digital fx chain”) is tremendously exciting. It’s refreshing to see artists bringing the depth and beauty of analogue to digital, rather than trying to make digital sound warm after the fact. If Towers-level production is the standard future Eekkoo tracks will live up to, the sky is the limit.

You can purchase Towers on Beatport and iTunes!