Frankfurt-based Ekkehard Ehlers is an artist who refuses to be pinned down by genre constrictions or fan expectations. No boundaries, please. On A Life Without Fear he has been searching for a historic position. This serves as a reference which in turn encourages subjective formulations in the blues, a world presumed lost. Taking its starting point as the hum and hiss which emanates from wiring up multiple amplifiers and allowing them to “speak naturally,” he digs deep into the darkness and records a nine-song session of Delta porch blues whiskey—soaked with nihilistic lyrics and fuzzed-out computer throbs and pops.

Ehler´s instrumentation of choice varies from his other works, as he collaborates with a small voodoo-style jazz group using viola, trumpet, mouth harp, and guitar to create drones that sound like they're processed through a rusted tin can. Ehlers paints a stark portrait that would be a fitting soundtrack to traveling the destroyed Deep South countryside and viewing the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina. It is this disturbing tone that Ehlers serves as a reminder of just how beautifully fragile the human condition is under the strains of adversity and despair.

This rough-hewn experimental bluestronica emphasizes the point where traces dissolve— even those of the blues. Neither territory nor country can be discerned here. And yet, maybe it is this homelessness beyond all boundaries (be they of the moral, religious or cultural kind) where one is able to live without fear.
(adapted from press commentaries)

Ekkehard Ehlers (DE) is an artist and educator who recorded his first work in 1998 as part of the duo Autopoieses, with Sebastien Meissner (for Mille Plateaux), and now records under his own name, the aliases Auch and Betrieb (for Force Inc. and Klang Elektronik, respectively) and in the group März with Albrecht Kunze (Karaoke Kalk). Over the last couple of years he's conducted a digital interrogation of Schönberg, turned out an album of folktronica and fashioned tributes to such diverse figures as Albert Ayler and Cornelius Cardew on his acclaimed Plays series of EPs.