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Essential Echoes

Internships

Gifts from Echoes

Radio Massacre International


State of Grace


Tony McManus


Acoustic Eidolon


Dave Fulton
and Giles Reaves


Michael Halaas


Rena Jones



BT


Richard Leo Johnson


Stephen Bennett

Several tunes on the album come from a west coast trip that took us from San Diego to Los Angeles to San Francisco in six days with 10 concerts and interviews. General Fuzz provided one of the most surprising shows from that tour. General Fuzz is essentially James Kirsch, a 30-something software engineer who spends most of his time going to concerts and making his own downtempo electro-lounge music. We were actually wondering if he could pull off a living room concert at all since most of his music is just him and a laptop computer. If you've been reading my blogs over the last year you know I have some issues with plug and play music in a live setting. But Kirsch assured me he could bring a live element to his performance. His latest CD, Cool Aberrations, features several conventional instrumentalists, but they are all sliced and resequenced by Kirsch in his computer. So for his Living Room Concert, he reverse-engineered his own album, with live musicians playing their parts as he had reconfigured them for the CD and proceeded to blow us away.

There was no questioning whether Michael Halaas and Joan Jeanrenaud could play. He's a virtuoso pianist and she was the cellist with the Kronos Quartet for their first 20 years or so. They recorded an underrated album called The Lucidity Project which was more than enough to get us to the living room of former Windham Hill Records producer Dawn Atkinson in San Rafael. Her piano sits in an extended room in her hillside home with glass on three sides giving way to a panoramic view. While they played, a large bird, probably a hawk or falcon, swooped back and forth in front of the windows as if riding the sound of the powerful, wave-like motion of their duet on "Mural" (listen). A great al fresco lunch at an Italian bistro capped the afternoon.

Listen to an interview with Michael Halaas and Joan Jeanrenaud

From the Los Angeles leg of that trip, we connected with Aurah, the duo of Marc Dold and Judith Martin. They're Swiss transplants who had inaugurated our second Echoes Living Room, which doubled as our lunch room, five years ago. That was a nice performance, but didn't quite capture the atmospheric sound they make on record. But in their own studio, a charming cottage in their back yard, they brought their full live sound to bear. Even though it was just the two of them, through live-looping they were able to create choirs of voices and layers of guitar. Martin is an angel with an earthy soul while Dold’s playing reminds me of 60s San Francisco psychedelic guitar transformed through German guitarist Daniel Fichelscher from Popol Vuh. They reach a heroic crescendo on a weave of two songs "The Calling/The City" (listen). Listen to an interview with Aurah

The oldest piece on Resonance comes from a trip to England Jeff Towne and I took in the late spring of 2006. That tour entailed nine interviews and performances in four days from London to the southern coast, and convinced me to never drive a car in London again. The left side driving and right-hand steering thing doesn't bother me at all. But London traffic and chaotic street patterns turned half hour jaunts into three-hour Kafkaesque odysseys. The Marconi Union and AjantaMusic tracks from last year’s disc, Refractions, came from that trip. Radio Massacre International didn't make it because their tracks were a little long and we ran out of space. But we loved this Living Room Concert so we made room for "Gibraltar" on Resonance. It took place in Duncan Goddard's ramshackle flat in northeast London, which had seen better days but one could hardly detect the faded and chipped paint for all the musical gear, ancient stereo equipment, piles of books and music memorabilia that occupied every surface. A highly improvisational band usually prone to 30 minute-plus excursions, RMI did a fantastic job of paring their music down. "Gibraltar," (listen) which only appears on Resonance, is one of my favorite and certainly most cogent RMI pieces.

John Diliberto with State of Grace

Most of the pieces I've talked about so far were recorded by our producer/engineer Jeff Towne, rolling into a multi-track hard disc session. But for State of Grace, I went alone to Legacy Recording Studio in New York and worked with a house engineer in a cavernous room where they usually track full orchestras. State of Grace was a bit smaller than that, a septet of drums, violin, bass, cello, guitar, singer Lisbeth Scott, and composer Paul Schwartz on piano. Schwartz was masterful in stripping down the elaborate orchestrations and multi-tracking layers of his State of Grace recordings and rendering them live with this smaller and more intimate ensemble. For such relatively solemn, albeit ecstatic music with roots in medieval gothic chant, it was actually a really fun session (listen).

SOG was a complex recording; by contrast, I hosted and recorded Rena Jones alone in her kitchen in Portland, Oregon. I sat on one side of the table with one two-track flash recorder taping Jones's stereo output and another for our voices. Jones sat on the other side with her laptop, mixing board, cello and violin and laid out the electro-designs of her ambient chamber music, drawn from her album, Driftwood, including the haunting title track (listen), which we selected for Resonance. I guess I could've dragged Evan "Bluetech" Bartholomew in to engineer some of it since he shares the house with Jones, but he was quick to join us for some great Mexican food afterward. Listen to an interview with Rena Jones

Our session with BT was in a recording situation we loathe, a concert venue. Musicians and record labels always think clubs or concert halls will be great places to record, and certainly convenient since they only have to set up once. But they never take into consideration the excessive noise from heat and air conditioning systems, the rustle and clatter of club workers preparing for the show and the generally reverberant ambiences of the space.

Brian Trifon, Ben Grossman, BT Listen to an interview with BT

World Café Live in Philadelphia is no different in this regard, but it was the only way to record a complex set-up that BT had put together for his This Binary Universe tour. We agreed to the conditions and it turned out fine. The WCL folks were great, keeping hangers-on out of the room, leaving their preparations til after our session and generally providing us with everything we needed for the session to work. BT put on a surreal show of kinetically churning ambiences with Brian Trifon's effects-laden electric guitar, Ben Grossman’s mutated hurdy gurdy and BT running electronics and playing bass guitar and bowed mountain dulcimer. BT has a childlike exuberance and despite the ominous nature of this song, he was grinning and bouncing behind his gear the entire set, sometimes forgetting we were actually recording this for radio. What you don't hear on the edited version of the song is after Ben Grossman has just ground up the cosmos inside his hurdy-gurdy, BT bursts out while the music is still fading out, "I wish Ben would just keep playing. I could listen to him all day." You might not recognize the hurdy gurdy on this piece, but Grossman plays it more conventionally with Loreena McKennitt on her recent tours. (listen)

Richard Leo Johnson came in with his Ebay-purchased trash guitars and dobros and played a personal, introspective set. He used to be a post-Michael Hedges style guitarist and when we first recorded him in 1999, he had a double-necked acoustic guitar with six and 12-string runs on which he banged and tapped and performed a two-handed demolition of music. But now he's adapted a more rural style inspired by his imaginary characters, Charlie Shoe and Vernon McAlister. "Where the Rivers Meet" (listen) is a song from his album, Who Knew Charlie Shoe? and he plays a plaintive, almost Hawaiian sound on his cheap electric guitar. The only thing missing on Resonance are Johnson's hilarious stories.

Stephen Bennett is another flash guitarist who also plays harp guitar. That's the sound you hear on his tune, "Sea Rose Beach" (listen). Touring constantly, he's a legend amongst finger-style cognoscenti like Tommy Emmanuel. We had been trying to get Bennett on the show for years. He finally found time off his schedule to play for us so of course, we took full advantage of him. When he mentioned in passing his Christmas album I asked him, "Stephen, do you think you could do a Christmas set as well?" "Sure," he answered, without hesitation. So he played an entire, unplanned second set of seasonal music that will be on our 2007 Sonic Seasonings: Living Room Concerts for Christmas show. Listen to an interview with Stephen Bennett

We get tons of guitarists stopping by to play live on Echoes and it's always hard to pick a couple for the album, but there was no question about Tony McManus. He played a set of original tunes and covers with a deft style that's part Scottish and part American finger-style. We loved his version of "Maids of Mitchelstown" (listen), a traditional Scottish tune. I believe this is the only recording of McManus playing this song. Then we hauled off to the Brickside, one of the local restaurants where we take musicians after their sessions. There McManus regaled us with stories of meeting Les Paul and hanging with Tommy Emmanuel. All the finger-style players seem to know and respect each other and the conversation always goes like “Adrian Legg was here last week." "Adrian Legg! That guy’s great. We hung out at this festival and..."

We usually have two problems in compiling a Living Room Concert CD that reflects the breadth of Echoes. One is we have too many guitarists from which to choose and another is perhaps a bit more surprising, there are always too many cellists. Acoustic Eidolon is in a double-bind there since they are a duo of guitar and cello. But we couldn't pass up using a track from their most recent performance with Hannah Alkire on cello and Joe Scott playing his guitjo, a double-necked instrument that combines guitar and banjo, although the way he plays, it usually sounds very harp-like. (listen)

We always seem to have a slew of Native flute player sessions from which to choose as well, and this year it fell to Jeff Ball. He's just down the road from us in the Washington D.C. area and he brought his quartet to play his global chamber flute music live. Although Jeff is inspired by Native American players, he's really found his own, very non-Native sound, mixing his flutes with instruments like the Hang drum, which looks like two woks fused together. Played by Ted Natale, the sound is a cross between a Trinidad steel drum and a gamelan. You can hear it on “Drawing In Embers” (listen) which originally appeared on their album, The Shape of Light.

Giles Reaves and Jess Fry

Dave Fulton

Drummer Jess Fry