The rise of electronica-based worship music
25th Sep 2018
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Music
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Eikon
Electronic
Eikon are an electronica duo, consisting of Londoners Dave Hendra on vocals and Dave Pilcher, a keyboard playing producer. Their current xRhythms hit, 'Fire From Heaven', comes from their second full-length album, ‘Look Up’.
What makes it so intriguing is that the songs on the ‘Look Up’ album are worship songs.
Wrote a Cross Rhythms reviewer, “Throughout, the lyrics are powerful and reflect the reverence of the music focusing on a personal encounter with God as ‘Here I Am’ proclaims "I'm on my knees / Just you and me Lord."
Eikon came together in 2013.
The two Daves who are Eikon came together in 2013. Dave Pilcher, who was born in the USA to British parents and has released a number of solo projects under the name Naïve Machine, expressed that Eikon intends to move into the unlikely field of electronica worship.
In an interview with Cross Rhythms, Dave Pilcher said, “I met Dave Hendra at St Mary's Church Bryanston Square, where he was really into dance music too and wanted to try some stuff out. So whilst studying a post grad in Theology we formed Eikon to gel our musical ideas together.
Our original intention was for the tracks to be listened to for more personal worship.
"Our original intention was for the tracks to be listened to for more personal worship, but then we started leading a few worship sessions at church and have expanded our songs out a bit so some can be more corporately used.”
After their EP debut, ‘The Only Thing That Matters’, in 2013, Eikon went on to release ‘My Fortress’ (2014), ‘Human’ (2015), and ‘GDWT’ (2016), culminating in the album, ‘Covers’, in 2016 and ‘Look Up’ in 2017.
Now it’s ‘That Was Then’ is getting exposure on Cross Rhythms radio and St Mary’s church.
The recently released ‘Mercy Sublime’ by Stoke-on-Trent’s Spero_UK shows that, finally, another church other than St Mary’s have taken up the concept of electronica-based worship music.
Clearly electronic music has potential.
As an alternative to ancient organ-led hymns or the stadium-rock sounding modern worship, clearly electronic music has potential. It will be interesting to see how the approach to worshipping God takes shape in the coming years.