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EOTO

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Two String Cheese members improvising entire electronic sets live, with nothing pre-written — dubstep and house conjured on the spot, never repeated.

EOTO grew out of The String Cheese Incident in 2006, when Michael Travis and Jason Hann began building a side project around looper pedals such as the Echoplex and the software Ableton. They played their first show at Sonic Bloom in May of that year, working out the improvised approach that would define the project.

The duo toured relentlessly, playing over 200 shows in 2008 alone and more than seven hundred across 48 states in their first five years. They also performed at Apple Stores, demonstrating in real time how the music was built from nothing but live instruments and looping.

Hearing DJ Skream play a dubstep set at Shambhala in the summer of 2008 changed their direction. Their 2009 record, Fire the Lazers!!!, introduced a buzz-saw bass tone and a heavier backbeat, and their sound afterward pulled in sludge metal bass sounds and punk riffs alongside the dubstep and drum and bass.

EOTO released three studio albums, each one mixed and mastered from a single live take rather than assembled afterward, with some pre-set sounds worked in. Many of their live shows were also recorded and made available to fans directly.

The name began as the acronym 'End of Time Observatory', pronounced letter by letter until it blurred into one word; Japanese fans later pointed out that eoto means 'good sound' in Japanese, and the band adopted that spelling officially. Travis and Hann ended EOTO in July 2021 over creative differences, a split that did not affect their ongoing work in The String Cheese Incident.

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