Bio of the Week: Virtual><Embrace
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Virtual><Embrace is the electro solo act Mike E Johnson (known for his work in Infekktion, Agonoize, and Sero.Overdose). The band was founded in 2004, built on a foundation of extremely harsh electronic music, with heavy use of distortion and power beats.
The first release from Virtual><Embrace was the 12 track EP Roots of Evil on the Alfa-Matrix label. The first Virtual> Aside from working on their debut album, Virtual><Embrace has also done remix work for bands such as Mnemonic, XP8, Aïboforcen, and Solitary Experiments. Since this biography was written by DeutschMusikLand.com contributor Nick Diak late in 2004, Virtual><Embrace released an EP in June 2005 called Hollow And Pure, which turned out to be just a taste of what was to come. A few months later, the full-length album Hellektro was released in both a standard edition and a limited edition with bonus disc and other special extras. 2006 remained pretty quiet for Virtual><Embrace, as Mike was hard at work on his other projects. But then in November of that year, he announced that he would be stopping all work on the Virtual><Embrace project due to increased illegal downloading of the band’s music. He felt the significantly reduced sales numbers he was seeing were just not worth the effort of all his time spent creating the music. This is one sad example of where music piracy can really hurt a musician and take away new great music from the fans as well. For info about many more great German bands, head on over to DeutschMusikLand.com.
