“So I was in the bar one night,” E. W. Harris recalls with a gleam, ever the wily storyteller, whether entertaining strangers onstage or friends amid the cozy chaos of his home in Crown Heights, “and somebody—I don’t remember who—says ‘You won’t make a completely acoustic record about robots and AIs’, to which I replied: ‘The hell I won’t!’” And so it was, on the whim of a half-remembered, half-drunk dare, that MACHINE LIVING IN RELIEF began buzzing and whirring its way out of his limbic system, and into ramshackle cyborg life. “Thinking about it hungover the next day,” he continues, “I realized that acoustic music, and folk type in particular, is generally an excellent vehicle for the type of depression-tinged, anxiety-pickled lyrical explorations I love, as well as having the built-in textural richness that only things made and played by people can have. Add that to the alienation intrinsic in looking at stories from a non-, or only partially human perspective, and Bam! I was off to the races.” Just the latest in a five-album series set inside Harris’s self-styled “romantic dystopia” Rocket City, these six character vignettes find Brooklyn’s premiere folktronica polymath coming, in many ways, full circle after many long and winding trips around the sun (if not the entire solar system). 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. A Southern transplant originally from Akron, Ohio, Harris was always something of an outsider to the “cool town” music scene of Athens, Georgia, often preferring to hone his craft through neighboring hamlets and intimate house shows. In this way, he slowly but surely began drawing likemindedly wayward musicians into his sphere, like curious fireflies from the gloaming – an undeniable bonfire in the outer dark – such that by the time he decided to start experimenting with pedals and loops and tales of space pirates on the run, he already had the makings of a whole different band at his disposal, ready and willing to follow him into the stratosphere. The bottled heat lightning of Ghost Dad the Robot and its next-gen replicant Resident Patient were factory floor playgrounds of electronic excess, as likely to make you quietly rue lost love as to grab a beautiful stranger and work those feelings out on the dancefloor. Climbing fast through his personal sound barriers toward a new echelon of creative fertility, it was with his parting gift to smalltown country life – the exceptional A WASTE OF WATER AND TIME – that Harris finally adopted the E.W. moniker he uses to this day, packed up his gear, and set coordinates for NYC. Relocation quickly gave rise to the more ambitious, cloudbursting inventions of The Sky Captains of Industry, the project that first ushered Harris’s growing fanbase into the world of Rocket City. “It’s New York City, 250 years in the post-apocalyptic future,” he explains, with the eager enthusiasm of a kid just home from Space Camp. “But all the buildings have been replaced by rocket ships that never took off. It’s my Neverland, Star Wars expanded universe, or Narnia, I guess you could say. I wanted a place to tell exciting and compelling stories that didn’t have to be burdened with my own everyday existence.” Through subsequent releases – including 2016’s MIMETIC DESIRE and 2018’s HOMUNCULUS, along with a slew of singles, cassettes, remixes, and other sundry airlock detritus – along with relentless touring and gig work on every side of the musical moonscape, 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. “So, if it wasn’t obvious, I love science fiction movies,” Harris jumps in, ready to get to the literal nuts and bolts of his latest creations, “and the first track on the record ‘Sooner or Later’ is perhaps one of the purest direct bi-products of this love. For some reason after listening to Gary Numan’s ‘Are Friends Electric?’ during lockdown I got the idea to binge watch Spielberg’s 2001 classic AI on repeat with the sound turned off and The Cure’s GREATEST HITS playing instead. About the third go-round, I got fixated on the character Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) and began to think about the internal life of an android sex worker. Do they experience longing? Envy? Love? Is there meaning to be had in the endless parade of names and faces? I wanted to focus on a character whereby, in spite of formatting, intrinsic human-ness is not a given. What then? How intrinsic is our own humanity? Is identity just the backflow of data from interacting in the world? What are our connections with others really?” Heady questions to be sure – the kind it often takes a lifetime of living just to know enough to ask, but which Harris has already been chasing for years. Surely reflecting his own genre-welding, era-collapsing, by-hook-or-by-crook career path, “Chemical Fire,” Harris goes on, “follows a cyborg musician that winds up in a post-apocalyptic machine world. This just so happened to coincide with my becoming obsessed with Jackson Browne’s ‘The Load Out.’ I was a live sound engineer and production peon for many years and something about that song, there’s like a peaceful bitterness that gets me feeling some kinda way. It’s like coffee when you first get used to drinking it black. I wanted to incorporate some of that feeling with a 70’s folk rock flavor in the harmony, but with these post-apocalyptic images.” Indeed, if one weren’t already familiar with Harris’s more traditionalist background, the chummy strum of his guitalele on these first two tracks damn near 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. And then, of course, there’s the banjo. 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. This transitions into the towering “Casual Violence” – “a series of fragmented episodes in the internal life of a service robot tasked with the preparation of other robots (and ultimately themself) for disassembly and recycling.” The penultimate “Accidents Repeating” is “a bit of a stream of consciousness kind of tune from the perspective of a non-corporeal AI,” and closer “Treble Negative” is written from the perspective of “a chatty robot named Cube that, due to a series of unfortunate events, lost a wheel, was repurposed as a doorstop, and ultimately left alone for 200 years.” With each of these oddball, off-grid new characters, the world of Rocket City grows both more intricate and more expansive, and with Harris himself likening it to some of America’s most beloved, and multifarious IP, it’s easy to imagine each of these lonesome contraptions striking out on its own in a shapeshifting constellation of spinoffs, traipsing the cosmos in infinite search of that evolutionary upgrade that might finally make them whole. For Harris, that search has always felt like the beating heart of the mission – the weight he’s moved on every intergalactic smuggler’s run – and having now crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe several times over, his dogged refusal to stagnate, (or God forbid, go straight), has kept his work fresh and unpredictable in ways most artists can only dream of. It’s also drawn a host of new collaborators into his pinwheeling orbit, from trusty tourmates Niall Connolly, Dale McPhail, and Ali Aslam, to the dulcet-voiced Jo Kroger and their harmonious folk duo Caves and Clouds, to regular bandmates Sonny Ratcliff, Georgia Weber, and Ginja Skwurl and their fledgling outfit The Zero Saga. “The Zero Saga kinda pushes into the art rock space my Radiohead/Bjork addled soul craves,” he says, trying and failing to hide his excitement. “Also, it is the case that, for me, after I ‘super DIY’ a record, I come out the other end really wanting to collaborate with others – not to mention the desire to make a big, loud, chaotic thing after a very minimal and vulnerable thing. It definitely operates in the rocket City Universe, but how exactly is still thrillingly unclear.” What is clear, however, is that 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?” Harris wonders, waxing eloquent about his curious, acoustic robot friends, before adding, with that storyteller’s twinkle in his eye, “It’s a damn good thing songs don’t need to answer questions.”