Distance is no problem for Echo City. With vocalist and songwriter Jade Goodge based in Melbourne, and producer Carter Carlton over in Los Angeles, it is their instant creative chemistry and a speedy internet connection that has helped bring the duo together.
Goodge describes Echo City as a city that doesn’t have cars, where it’s always the weekend, art and music are the currency and there is complete creative freedom. “I’d always be going to sleep when Carter would be waking up, so we started pretending that it was a secret city that we could meet in, we’d say ‘See you in Echo City,’ when we’d sign out. So we decided, ‘Let’s just use that for our band name,’” she says.
Countless hours spend writing via Skype and email saw Echo City create what would have been a whole album. That was until Goodge flew to the US. There the pair decided to scrap the whole project, writing a new album in just three days.
“We had such a better energy in real life, we didn’t even have expectations and the music was so good when we were in person,” Carlton says. “We were cranking them [songs] out, and by that time we’d figured out what we really liked about our sound and were making things with an actual sound in mind. It was really fun.”
Echo City likes to keep things light-hearted and fun, with their only rule being not to take themselves too seriously. When asked if they had a name for their debut EP, Goodge laughs. “I was thinking we should call it Will Send Nudes, because I feel like in the music industry, it’s really hard to break in.
“I was saying to Carter at one point, ‘I reckon we would have way more in-roads if I just ended every email with, “Will send nudes for cooperation”’ and I was like, ‘We should call our EP Will Send Nudes.’”
On what fans can expect to hear on their debut EP, Goodge says, “The second single’s got a lot more dance elements to it. It’s got a similar kind of urban, gritty, edgy, dark pop feel to it with electronics and singer/songwriter type vocals.”
“Yeah, I guess we’ll call it dark pop really, that’s the best description for it,” Carlton adds.
With Goodge predominantly doing all of the songwriting and vocals, and Carlton doing the programming from the other side of the world, Echo City isn’t a band that could have existed ten years ago.
“This is a great time to be alive as a musician because you as a musician or creator of any type of art, don’t have to be in a huge studio or you don’t have to have somebody shoving you a lot of money to hire a bunch of people to work with. If you have the tools and the patience to learn how to do it yourself, there are really no obstacles for you as a creator,” Carlton says.
Trying to turn the tables around on a common belief of electronic music, Echo City decided to make their slogan ‘Digitise your soul’. “People have this idea that electronic music has got less soul than real instruments. We put a lot of thought into our lyrics and everything’s quite introspective in terms of our lyrical content. We felt there’s a bit more soul in there and electronic music can have singer/songwriter type lyrics as well. It’s more of a digitising,” Goodge says.
Keeping things colourful, Echo City posts a lot of photos of street art on their social media pages. When asked about it, both Goodge and Carlton say that they feel like street art is a visual representation of what they’re doing and what they want their music to sound like. “I think it also matches the music. I feel like sometimes the electronic elements are like a splash of graffiti on certain lyrics,” Goodge says.
