Black & amber by tjeckleberg

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

TJ Eckleberg is an Australian alternative singer / songwriter, producer and guitar player. 'Black & amber' is his seventh independent album. Originally a regular on the Sydney alternative scene, he lived in Berlin from 2010-13, and currently lives in Kyoto, Japan.

tjeckleberg.com