Junge Eko - Pierced (June17th) (2026)

To be pierced is a process of change: what’s inside opens to what’s outside, and vice-versa. 'Pierced (June17th)' is a document of such a process, a series of reorientations following a rupture.

Junge Eko is the solo project of Swiss musician, composer, and performer Catia Lanfranchi. Lanfranchi first began the material that became 'Pierced' following a period of professional momentum and personal upheaval. While at a residency in 2025 at Prozess Bern, she found herself returning to songwriting and its basic tools: voice, bass, organ, and language. Lanfranchi's personal meditations on care extend into the work of music. Live takes and intimate exchanges with longtime collaborators took the place of the digital production and conceptual systems that underpin Lanfranchi's previous work, both solo and with the group Kush K.

The ten tracks that make up 'Pierced (June17th)' move elliptically towards the solidity of song. Often, Lanfranchi lingers in repetition and humid atmospheres, the indeterminate spaces before song takes shape. Opener “Drifting” is built from long, soft organ tones that gradually accumulate vocal textures as they cycle: first a murmur from somewhere within the instrumentation, then a distant refrain, then a harmony from below. A dirge-like bass phrase on “Blushing” is broken up by samples, while “June17th”’s ambient piano becomes a surface across which saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve scrawls. Lanfranchi's electroacoustic arrangements emphasize the physicality of sound in shared space, and how sound and feeling are both absorbed and held by the spaces in which they take place. Live instrumental fragments stutter and glitch in the mix alongside layers of samples and field recordings, the performing body a constant presence.

When Lanfranchi’s compositions take the shape of full-fledged songs, exploratory ambivalence gives way to direct expression. Lanfranchi borrows from pop songwriting and slowcore ambiance, exploring the song as both a produced world built from the ground up and a live, improvised thing emerging between collaborators. On “Span,” the composer’s voice is doubled, an internal chorus observing the unease of relation. “Metal Horse II,” which anchors the record, finds something approximating resolution in a full-band setting, with Jan Sutter on guitar and Paul Amereller on drums. The feelings lodged in Lanfranchi's lyrics—which touch upon grief, distance, and memory—are transmitted by her collaborators, the trio producing a slow-burning eulogy. Yet clarity (formal, emotional) is as much a passing state as the transitional uncertainty that precedes and follows it.

'Pierced (June17th)' is a record of movement and of layers, of observing oneself transformed. In Lanfranchi's words, “To be pierced means carrying traces of experience and being shaped through contact, friction, and time. Not as a fixed condition, but as an ongoing process of repositioning.”
– Thea Ballard