Conscience releases new single ‘Explain Everything’ on Echozone
Conscience releases the download single “Explain Everything” on Echozone on 28 August 2026, ahead of the compilation “Uncharted Vol. 1 (The Singles)”.
Conscience, the German electropop and synthpop project of Rüdiger Illg, releases the download single “Explain Everything” on Echozone on 28 August 2026. The label has taken it from “Uncharted Vol. 1 (The Singles 2009 – 2023)”, a compilation of the project’s singles that Echozone has scheduled for September 2026. According to the label, the single carries a further new song alongside the title track and an extended version that adds elements to the arrangement.
Despite the plural billing on some press material, Conscience is a one-man project. Illg has written, played and produced everything under the name since 1991 at Science2, his own home studio, and the recording line-up has never been anything other than his.
The single follows a run of releases that has kept the project on a steady schedule through 2026: the album “Suspended In Time” on 23 January, the single “Somewhere” on 13 March and the “Explore Life” EP on 1 May. Extended mixes and B-side tracks have been part of that pattern throughout, which is what “Uncharted Vol. 1” now sets out to gather.
What Conscience has released on Echozone
Illg signed the project to Echozone in 2009 and opened the relationship with “Gravity Has Gone + Best of Conscience” that year. “Your Frequency”, issued in 2012, was the last Conscience release pressed as a physical CD; since then the catalogue has appeared as downloads. Recent entries include “On The Screen” on 10 January 2025, the album “Phases³” on 21 March 2025, the “Black Lines” EP on 2 May 2025, “Girl In A Car” on 13 June 2025, “Control” on 3 October 2025 and “Memories Do Always Win” on 5 December 2025.
About Conscience
Rüdiger Illg founded Conscience in August 1991 as a solo project, using a single Yamaha SY22 synthesizer at the outset. He is a multi-instrumentalist, producer and remixer with training as a sound engineer, and he records in Leeste in Lower Saxony, near Bremen. Every Conscience track has been made at Science2, the home studio he named the operation after and which also gives its name to his umbrella site. He records separately as Science O.C.N. and Chaos Network.
The first six years produced cassettes only, self-released and traded through the tape network: “The Screen” and “On a Strange Planet” in 1991, “Facts and Illusions”, “Calls of Despair”, “Reflections” and “Tales” in 1992, “Evolution” and “Invisible Alienation” in 1993, “Mind-Mirror” and the retrospective “’91/’92 – A Compilation of Early Works” in 1994, “Virtuality” the same year, “Scope” in 1995, and “Hardware” and “Cleaned Up” in 1997. The first CD came in 1998, when KAFUE Systeme issued the “Hardware EP”. A sequence of CD-Rs followed between 1999 and 2003, among them “Phases”, “Hysteria Repeats Itself”, the tenth-anniversary “Skyline of My Mind – Ten Years of Conscience”, “Phases²” and “Nothing Has to Be”. NewEx Records picked the project up in 2007 for “Superior Fish” and the “Blurred Fish” EP, and reissued “Nothing Has to Be” in 2008.
Guest vocalists have appeared across the catalogue. Colin Angus of The Shamen sang on “Falling”, Dan Söderqvist of Twice a Man on “I Can’t Get Away”, and Mel of Future Trail on “The Future”. Illg has also recorded with labelmates, including Projekt Ich on “Sister” and “Leave My Dreams” and Stian Shiver on the extended version of “Life Gets Strange”. Conscience has played live only three times, each with a different line-up assembled for the occasion.
“Explain Everything” on 28 August 2026 opens the run-up to “Uncharted Vol. 1 (The Singles 2009 – 2023)”, the first Conscience compilation to draw the singles years into one set.
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