Art d'Ecco

A line cook, a band that stalled, and a house in the Gulf Islands

The man behind Art d'Ecco has never published his birth name, and the rest of the biography is kept just as spare: born in Ottawa, raised in Vancouver, working a restaurant line as a teenager while trying to make music pay. His first serious band was Speed to Kill, formed with the Vancouver musician Jason Corbett. It stalled for long enough that the plan had to change shape. His father offered him a room in the family house in the Gulf Islands, where he looked after his grandmother, who had Alzheimer's disease, and the songs that became his first album were written there.

Day Fevers appeared in 2016 on the small Your Face imprint, cut alone with a piano and an iPhone for a recorder. It remains the only Art d'Ecco album that sounds like one man in a quiet house. Everything since has been on Paper Bag Records, the Toronto label that signed him for Trespasser in 2018.

The wig arrives

By 2018 the visual identity had settled into the form most audiences now recognise: a blunt bob wig, androgynous makeup, a suit. Speaking to Wavelength in August 2019, he described the decision as terrifying at first, and then as something to use deliberately — fear of rejection, in his phrasing, can be weaponised once its power to inspire becomes obvious. The same interview is blunt about what the costume cannot do: if the songs are poor, no amount of window dressing saves them.

The touring operation in those years was small. Synths, strings, percussion and saxophone parts were triggered from a drummer's sampling pad because a larger band was not yet affordable. He played Bumbershoot in Seattle in 2019.

Two Paper Bag albums followed in quick succession. In Standard Definition, in 2021, was built as a concept record about entertainment itself and recorded on analogue equipment. After the Headrush came in 2022. Covers have been part of the project throughout, among them a reading of The Jam's That's Entertainment.

Serene Demon, and a year of being noticed

Serene Demon was released on 14 February 2025 and did more for his standing than anything before it. Reviewing it for Exclaim!, Sydney Brasil identified the arrangements as the record's high point — horns, marimba, steel drums, congas, forward basslines and synthesisers — and reached for David Bowie's Station to Station period crossed with early dance-punk as the nearest coordinates. The review also catches the album's deliberate kitsch, comparing its atmosphere to an old hotel where the honeymoon suites have heart-shaped baths.

The album was longlisted for the 2025 Polaris Music Prize. In August 2025 the track The Traveller picked up a nomination for the newly created SOCAN Polaris Song Prize, the first such nomination of his career.

Touring expanded to match. Billed with a group he calls The Demon Band, he recorded a set at The Pearl in Vancouver for CBC Music's Road to the Junos series, released in video form on 24 March 2025, with proceeds going to the music education charity MusiCounts; CBC's own framing of the performance leans on its swagger and its humour. He played Brooklyn's Sultan Room on 4 June 2025 and Zebulon in Los Angeles on 8 June, then took the band to the UK in October, including The Deaf Institute in Manchester on the 10th. A cover of Chris Spedding's Video Life followed on 15 October 2025.

Scheele's Green: arsenic as a metaphor

The fifth Paper Bag album — his sixth overall, counting the 2016 debut — was announced in August 2026 and arrives on 23 October 2026. It is named after an 18th-century green pigment whose colour depended on arsenic compounds. The shade was hard to obtain, so it became a marker of wealth; the people who covered their houses and themselves in it then fell ill. His own summary is that it created a literally toxic society, and that the addiction and the allure of the thing were the rich part of the story, in the same way that an obsession with social media or with a new technology can be impossible to look away from even when the harm is visible.

From there the album widens into AI, technocracy, climate collapse, consumer culture and the military-industrial complex. The seven-minute opening track, The Death of Indie, was the lead single and sets the tone. He has characterised the record's mood as defiance rather than defeat, on the grounds that musicians playing together in a room in real time is the one thing an algorithm cannot reduce.

The method was chosen to make that argument physically. Recording ran from 8 February to 30 March 2026 at Hipposonic in Vancouver, co-produced, mixed and engineered by d'Ecco with Eric Shea, engineered by Noah Dinsdale with Kris Fearon assisting, and mastered by Brock MacFarlane at CPS Mastering. Much of it was tracked live with his band — Junny Chen on guitar, Olivier Leclerc on bass, Hayden Cohen on keys, Kyler Young on saxophone and Yato Noukoussi on drums — using a mix of digital and 24-track tape. Tubular bells and a harpsichord said to be three hundred years old turn up in the instrumentation, with Miles Davis cited as the model for the improvisational approach. Of the eleven tracks, the final two, Darién Gap and Endings for Beginners, were co-written with the whole band, which is new for him.

Where things stand in October 2026

Three singles have been issued ahead of the album: The Death of Indie in August, Disappear Here with a video on 11 September, and How Real is Real? on 9 October. A Spotify playlist assembled around the record went up on 14 September. The album is out on CD, digital and a limited green double 12-inch.

The festival year was spent on home ground: a headline set on the MacDonald Stage at Khatsahlano Wonderland in Vancouver on 11 July 2026, the Second Summer festival in Toronto from 24 to 26 September, and Break Out West in Victoria from 1 to 3 October. As of mid-October 2026 there is exactly one show on the books — the Scheele's Green release night at The Rickshaw in Vancouver on 20 November, announced on 15 September, with Scarlet Fever and Sleep Country supporting and advance tickets through Eventbrite. No wider tour behind the album has been announced yet.

One small detail has shifted in the paperwork: he has been described for years as Victoria-based, and his label's current biography places him in Vancouver.

What the show is now

The documented sets from 2025 are consistent and tight: thirteen songs, roughly an hour, opening with True Believer and running through Tree Of Life, Only Ones and TV God before Head Rush, Dark Days (Revisited) and Live It Up close it out. Dark Days (Revisited) and Who Is It Now? are the two most frequently logged songs in his live history. The Pearl session broadcast by CBC ran to about 65 minutes.

The rooms are club-sized — The Deaf Institute, the Sultan Room, Zebulon — and the staging is the band plus the character: suit, makeup, wig, with Kyler Young's saxophone doing a lot of the work that used to come off a sampling pad. The November Rickshaw show will be the first full airing of the new record, and the first chance to hear whether material tracked live in a room plays the way it was designed to.