ECHLO Stays in the Loop
On Gluttony, a genre-blurring film and music project, desire just keeps coming back for more.
By Glenn Alderson
- Published on
There’s no clean entry point into ECHLO’s world. With the recent release of “Hungry For You (Scarfidi Remix),” the emerging artist isolates a single moment from her larger multidisciplinary project, Gluttony, with a deep-house offering that refuses to resolve while the full work stretches toward something much more expansive.
Where most narratives frame gluttony as excess or failure, ECHLO is more interested in digging a bit deeper. “I feel like gluttony, like all the sins, is framed as a moral judgment,” she tells RANGE. “But I’m more interested in what sits beneath that… these behaviours feel like coping mechanisms for an unrealized sense of purpose.”
It’s a perspective that quietly reorients the entire project. In Gluttony, desire isn’t indulgence, it’s evidence. A reaching outward in the absence of something that never quite arrives. Meaning, resolution, a reason for being. The cycle doesn’t close, it just repeats.
That idea finds its most visceral expression in the film’s central image: a protagonist with a literal hole where her heart should be. It’s not a metaphor ECHLO is interested in over-explaining. Instead, it behaves more like a condition—an opening that “doesn’t close,” something that “keeps asking to be filled.” The body becomes unstable, porous, endlessly consuming but unable to hold.
If that sounds abstract, the execution is anything but. Co-directed with Madrid-based filmmaker Dr. Formalyst, the projects accompanying 13-minute short pulls together orchestration, choreography, motion capture, CGI, and AI-assisted post. It’s a lot, but ECHLO keeps the centre of gravity simple through its voice. Everything orbits it. Even as the forms slip and misalign, there’s a core emotional frequency holding the work together.
“I’m drawn to that tension between beauty and something more disturbing,” she says. And it shows. In one sequence, the body doesn’t just consume—it collapses into excess, rolling through an endless buffet, letting it cling, pass through, accumulate without resolution. It’s grotesque, seductive, and just slightly off.
That sense of imbalance is kind of the point. The original orchestral composition of Gluttony moves through an arc—expansion, saturation, collapse. But the remix and its accompanying visual locks into a single moment and refuses to let go. Time flattens. Progression disappears. You’re no longer watching something unfold; you’re inside a loop that keeps insisting on itself.
“I think there’s something more honest in not forcing a release,” ECHLO says.
It’s here that Luca Scarfidi’s remix makes its move. What was once internal becomes physical. The phrase “I’m hungry for you” mutates into a hook—insistent, inescapable, built for bodies rather than introspection. But instead of breaking the loop, it tightens it. The club becomes another system of repetition. Another space where desire circulates without landing.
If there’s a lineage here—echoes of trip-hop’s tension and atmosphere—ECHLO doesn’t treat it as a boundary but rather a launching point. Her work stretches outward, beyond the track itself, into something more immersive, more architectural. “I don’t want to make just a song,” she says. “I want to build a world around it.”
That world is already expanding. Gluttony will screen as part of the Wide Angle Section at Sommets du cinéma d’animation in Montreal from May 11 to 16, marking the project’s first festival selection and a significant step into its next phase. Future iterations point toward VR, installation, even opera.
As a multidisciplinary body of work, Gluttony feels much less like a traditional rollout than a system opening in multiple directions at once. Which raises the obvious question: when does something like this end?
For ECHLO, it doesn’t. At least not in any traditional sense. The work evolves until a form has said what it needs to say. Then it shifts. Opens. Repeats.
Based on everything we’ve seen, we’re here for exactly that and can’t wait to see what form it takes next.
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