Stars of the Lid have raised the ambient chamber music ante with an exquisite live show. Stars of the Lid are yet another band originally from Texas exploring a slowed down chamber music edged with electronics. In this case, the guitar/keyboard duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie augments their ambient drone music with a string quartet. I heard the results in full-effect at their concert in Philadelphia at The Gatherings on May 3. They opened with a deeply moving rendition of Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres.” Pärt is the patron saint of ambient chamber music and Stars of the Lid paid him due honor with this textured, painstakingly paced performance. They continued from there into a set of original music drawn from their latest CD, And Their Refinement of the Decline.

There is no groove to this music. The pace never rises above funereal, the dynamics rarely amount to more than a ripple on a pond, yet SOTL kept the audience, and me, transfixed throughout their slo-mo journey. The accompanying visuals were very effective, especially in the second half of the show where they seemed to be married better to the music. In the first half, the transitions were jarring and the movement of the images choppy, providing a disorienting counterpoint to the music that I don’t think was intentional. The mirror image Rorschach-like designs provided some interesting effects projected on the stained glass windows and Christ on the cross.

Stars of the Lid highlighted a few things for me. One, that this music played with live musicians is more powerful and nuanced than when it’s played off a laptop. And it made me wonder why SOTL filled St. Mary’s Parish Hall with a completely different audience when similar sounding artists using synthesizers usually play to less than half a house at the same venue for The Gatherings. And very few of that typical half-house crowd attended on this evening. Hmmmmm.
John Diliberto
(((echoes)))

Brian Eno has spent the last year or so producing the new Coldplay album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.

As a teaser, the band has released a free download of a single from the disc, “Violet Hill.” It’s available for a limited time off the Coldplay website. The full album is set for release on June 17, 2008.

“Violet Hill” opens with an Eno soundscape of gently sustained synth pads and some trumpet that recalls Jon Hassell, although I don’t think it’s him. Then it launches into a U2esque anthemic rocker.

Enjoy and remember, on the week of May 12 we’ll be featuring Brian Eno with interviews Monday-Thursday and an entire show based around the music of Eno. Go to the Echoes website for more information.

John Diliberto
(((echoes)))

One of the original pioneers of the electronic frontier has passed. Bebe Barron’s work goes back to the Conestoga days of electronic music when everything was DIY. She and her then husband and partner, Louis Barron, worked with John Cage on one of his earliest tapes pieces, “Williams Mix.” Their best know work remains their controversial score to Forbidden Planet.

At the time, they couldn’t submit it for an Academy Award and they couldn’t even get a film credit as composers because electronic music and instruments weren’t recognized. We were fortunate to interview Bebe and Louis in the mid-1980s for our Totally Wired series. Louis died in 1989. I was notified of Bebe’s passing by electronic composer Barry Schrader and he gave me permission to reproduce his fine obituary below.
John Diliberto
(((echoes)))


barryschrader.com

Bebe Barron (1925 - 2008)

It is with great sadness that I report the death of Bebe Barron on April 20, 2008 at the age of 82, of natural auses. Bebe was the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music. She was a close friend, an enthusiastic colleague, and a most gracious lady.

Bebe Barron was born Charlotte Wind in Minneapolis, on June 16, 1925. She received an MA in political science from the University of Minnesota, where she studied composition with Roque Cordero, and she also spent a year studying composition and ethnomusicology at the University of Mexico. In 1947 she moved to New York and, while working as a researcher for Time-Life, studied composition with Wallingford Reigger and Henry Cowell. That same year, she met and married Louis Barron (1920 - 1989). Shortly thereafter, the Barrons began their experiments with the recording and manipulation of sound material by means of a tape recorder that they received as a wedding gift. They created a private studio in New York and, in 1955, composed the first electronic music score for a commercial film, Forbidden Planet. In 1962 the Barrons moved to Los Angeles; they divorced in 1970. In 1973, Bebe married Leonard Neubauer, a screen writer. Bebe became the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) in 1985, and also served on the Board of Directors. In 1997 Bebe was presented the SEAMUS Award for the Barrons life work in the field of electro-acoustic music. She is survived by her husband, Leonard, and her son, Adam.

Bebe’s last public appearance was on January 12, 2008, at an event held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, celebrating the work of her good friend, Anais Nin. Bebe was too ill to speak in public at this point, but she agreed to be interviewed for a video piece that was shown at the event. This is her final interview, and you can see it on YouTube.

Bebe’s final composition, Mixed Emotions (2000) was composed in the CREATE studios of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

I first met Bebe Barron in the middle 1970s; I don’t remember exactly when, but I think it was around 1975. I had asked Bebe and her former husband and composing partner Louis to attend a showing of Forbidden Planet that I had arranged as part of a class at CalArts. They agreed to do it, and I quickly became good friends with Bebe and we remained close over the years.

In writing about Bebe Barron, it’s impossible not to focus on the pioneering work that she and Louis did in electronic music. They began their experiments in 1948, shortly after they were married. This early
work was done using a tape recorder, preceding the work of Luening and Ussachevsky and the switch from disks to tape by Pierre Schaeffer and the GRM. But, to my knowledge, the Barrons’ early experiments did not result in any completed works, a state of affairs not uncommon with early pioneers in the field. In 1949 they set up one of the earliest private electro-acoustic music studios and began their experiments with electronically generated sounds. They built their own circuits which they viewed as cybernetic organisms, having been influenced by Norbert Weiner’s work on cybernetics. The circuits, built with vacuum tubes, would exhibit characteristic qualities of pitch, timbre, and rhythm, and had a sort of life cycle from their beginnings until they burned out.

The Barrons recorded the sounds from the amplification of these circuits and this formed the basis of their working library. They also employed tape manipulation techniques as part of their compositional procedures.
The sound qualities of these various amplified tube circuits and the tape manipulations that they underwent formed the musical language that the Barrons created in their studio. Unlike some of the work being done
elsewhere, the Barrons’ music reveals long phrases, often stated in tape-delayed rhythms, with the stark finesse of the tube circuit timbres. They created a style that was uniquely their own yet married to the
technology they were using.

The Barrons earliest finished work, Heavenly Menagerie (1951) does not seem to have survived in a complete form. But their score for Ian Hugo’s film Bells of Atlantis (1952), based on a poem by Anais Nin, who appears
on screen, does exist on the film sound track. This may be the earliest extant work of the Barrons and presages what was to come with Forbidden Planet, the music for which was composed in 1955, the film being released
the
next year.

The music for Forbidden Planet is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music. This was the first commercial film to use only electronic music, and the score for the movie displays an attitude towards film scoring that was different from anything that had happened before. In Forbidden Planet, while there are themes for characters and events in the film, as was traditional in the scoring of that day, the themes are composed and
perceived as gestalts, rather than as melodies in traditional movie music. Even more important is the fact that the scoring of Forbidden Planet breaks down the traditional line between music and sound effects since the Barrons’ electronic material is used for both. This not only creates a new type of unity in the film sound world, but also allows for a continuum between these two areas that the Barrons exploit in various ways. At some points it’s actually impossible to say whether or not what you’re hearing is music, sound effect, or both. In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.

The Barrons composed many other works for tape, film, and the theater in the 1950s. Their studio became the home for John Cage’s Project of Music for Magnetic Tape, and they assisted in the creation of Cage’s first chance piece Williams Mix (1951-52), as well as works by other members of the group such as Earle Brown and Morton Feldman. As a studio for the creation of their own and other composers’ works, the Barrons’ studio
served as a functioning center for electro-acoustic music at a time when there was no institutional support of the medium in the United States. It’s curious, then, that, for many years, the Barrons, their studio, and their works were largely overlooked by composers and historians in the field. Fortunately, that injustice has since been corrected, and, in 1997, it was my great honor to present to Bebe and, posthumously, to Louis, the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award. Bebe was involved with SEAMUS from the very beginning of the organization. She was one of the ten original members who responded to my organizational call and met at CalArts in November of 1984 to form the group, and she was SEAMUS’s first secretary. There may have been a little strong-arming on my part to get her to be involved so actively, but Bebe was always ready to support the
cause of electro-acoustic music in whatever way she could.

Bebe created a firm legacy in her music. If the importance of one’s work is to be judged in any regard by it’s influence, acceptance, longevity, and innovative qualities, then the score for Forbidden Planet is an
enormous success. It remains the most widely known electro-acoustic music work on this planet. For me, Bebe Barron will always be the First Lady of electronic music.

After approximately 30 years, Brian Eno and David Byrne reportedly have a new album completed and a tour booked. This is completely out of the blue. Eno has spent the last year or so working on Coldplay’s new album, due any day and a forthcoming U2 album.

Eno co-produced what most people, including me, thinks are the quintessential Talking Heads albums, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music and Remain in Light. Eno gave the Heads a sense of atmospheric depth and musical breadth bringing in African music elements and minimalist concepts. Eno and Byrne went on to produce My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a signpost album of ethno-techno, Fourth World music.

Byrne referred to the album as “electronic gospel” and since Eno has a deep affection for American gospel music, that makes a bit of sense. This is hot off the web and even Enoweb.com, the usual source for all things Brian Eno, hasn’t mentioned this yet.

You can ready more about it in The Daily Swarm and Drowned in Sound
John Diliberto
(((echoes)))

An electro-pop classic from Air inches towards the timeless on the 10th anniversary of Moon Safari.

You can hear a three and half minute audio version of this with music.

When you’re making retro music for the future, time becomes nebulous. So we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been 10 years since the French duo called Air released their debut album, Moon Safari. In 1997 Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicholas Godin orchestrated an electro-lounge music with seductive rhythms and bubbling synthesizers. Their sources were drawn from 50’s space age bachelor pad music, 60’s psychedelic pop, and 70’s space music. On top of that, they toss in porno film soundtracks and French crooner, Serge Gainsbourg. That’s a reference I didn’t quite get until I listened to Gainsbourg’s “Je t’aime… moi non plus”

Their music was never populated with the latest instruments or the hippest beats. They dragged out ancient Moog synthesizers, Rhodes electric pianos, Theremins and other instrumental techno-exotica. Because it already sounded retro, Moon Safari has hardly dated at all.

Air told me that if you take five seconds of any classical piece you can make a great pop song and they lift some chords from Brahms for their track, “La Femme D’argent.” Air could be slinky and hip on that track, but they could also be completely goofy on their fashionista satire, “Sexy Boy.” That piece has a killer groove and that sonar ping into the chorus never fails to get me. All these songs and more are on a double CD plus DVD 10th anniversary release of Moon Safari. In fact, the additional CD, which is filled with the requisite demos and live tracks, has an outrageous revved up rendition of “Sexy Boy” recorded at the BBC in 1998.

The bonus treats are fun, but it’s Air’s more manicured recordings from the original CD that keep drawing you back. JB Dunkel and Nicolas Godin do a lot of singing in their Munchkins -on-qualude voices now, but back in ‘98, they were hiding their singing with Vocoders and Leslies or better still, getting American vocalists like Beth Hirsch to lend poignancy to songs like “All I Need.”

The Moon Safari 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition contains a DVD with their minimalist, quirky interviews from the album as well as a documentary by Mike Mills, Eating, Sleeping Waiting and Playing.” It was boring 9 years ago and still is.

In 1998, Nicholas Godin told me they were trying to make a music that couldn’t be pinned down to a time. It’s still a little early to call it timeless, but 10 years on, Moon Safari still sounds great and it’s influence on artists like Zero 7, Goldfrapp and Ulrich Schnauss can’t be denied. We’ve had air on Echoes several times, in live performances, interviews and in the Echo Chamber. Our first interview took place in London just as Moon Safari was released in February 1998. We’ll be hearing that on the Wednesday night broadcast of Echoes. You can hear an audio version of this blog here.

Air. It’s what we rebreathe.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

You couldn’t get two drummers more different than Stu Nevitt, the drummer with Shadowfax and Klaus Dinger, who percussed for Kraftwerk and Neu!

Keyboardist Armen Chakmakian, from a later edition of Shadowfax, passed on the sad news of Nevitt’s passing on March 15 from complications of diabetes and heart disease. He was 55. Stu was a founding member of Shadowfax and appeared on all their albums until the death of reed player Chuck Greenberg signaled the band’s end. There’s a nice obit in the LA Times.

Nevitt was an underrated drummer who negotiated the tricky time signatures and global grooves of Shadowfax with striking precision and drive. He was a drummer in the post fusion mold, which meant he had chops to spare, yet he could also negotiate the more delicate and fragile melodies that Shadowfax often explored. He pounded out ferocious polyrhythmic charges on tunes like “Oasis” and coloristic filigree on “Angel’s Flight.” He apparently had a solo project called The Marion Kind due for release.

Klaus Dinger wasn’t just at the opposite pole from Stu Nevitt, he was completely off the chart. Dinger, along with Jaki Leibezeit of Can, brought a mechanistic approach to drumming with Kraftwerk and then Neu! and La Dusseldorf. There are drum machines that couldn’t get as metronomic as Dinger, and that’s a compliment to the late musician who centered the often psychedelic soundscapes of Michael Rother and Ralf Hutter and Florian Scheider, giving us a pathway into this new sound world they created in the 1970s. Check out his monster mantric groove on tunes like “Hullagallu” from Neu!’s debut.

Klaus Dinger died on March 21, four days shy of his 62nd birthday.

A cult icon who influenced Pulbic Image Limited, Brian Eno and The Orb enters his 8th decade.

Before samplers and computers; before rap and electronica; before ambient and new exotica, Holger Czukay was doing it all. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen and a founding member of Can, the German avant-progressive rock group, the sound of Holger Czukay presaged much of what we take for granted in music today. And despite turning 70, he’s still pushing at the seams and pulling at the threads of music.

Here’s an update of what I wrote in a 1997 piece for the now defunct Pulse Magazine:

Every generation kicks up its music eccentrics, artists like John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart, who hear music differently from most of us, and who ultimately change the way we listen. Holger Czukay could easily move to the top of that list. He was a member of the seminal German rock group called Can and he’s gone on to a quirky solo career that has drawn people such as David Sylvian and Jah Wobble into his elliptical orbit for collaborations.
In the late 1990s, Holger Czukay and Can experienced a revival of sorts, rediscovered by the techno-generation as progenitors of cut & paste sampling techniques and by more experimental rockers as free-form explorers of improvisational space. Can and Czukay are cited by artists ranging from The Orb to Tortoise to John Lydon. Mute Records released “Sacrilege,” an album of Can re-mixes that includes Brian Eno reconstructing “Pnoom,” The Orb dissecting “Halleluwah” and Sonic Youth attacking “Spoon.”

We’re featuring Holger Czukay tonight, Monday, March 24 on a special Echoes half hour that will include an interview with the idiosyncratic musician. Holger Czukay is a wildly eclectic and eccentric musician who falls outside just about any category you can come up with. That also means that his music isn’t always easy to wrap your ears around. I recall buying his solo debut, Movies, when it came out in 1979. I returned it after a couple of listens. But 6 months later, I found an entry into his Dadaesque world and Movies became one of my favorite albums with his mix of hipster lounge exotica on “Cool in the Pool” countered by the epic expanse of “Hollywood Symphony.” That album is my first pick for essential Holger Czukay CDs.

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The second is his second album, On the Way to the Peak of Normal. It’s 37 minutes of ecstatic non-sequitor bliss. When we visited Holger’s Cologne studio in 1982, he had a giant, outdoor TV antenna in his studio. He wasn’t using it to get better reception. It was draped with hundreds of tape loops and tape snippets that comprised songs like “Ode to Perfume” from On the Way to the Peak of Normal.

Another album from the early years would be Full Circle, composed with Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit and bassist Jah Wobble, who at the time was working in Public Image, Ltd. It’s zen-dub hipsterism at its best.

Leaping forward, I was taken by the more song oriented spaces of Good Morning Story from 1999. It mixes cut-up jam sessions and bizarre dialogs centered by Jaki Liebezeit’s metronomic drums and the voice of Czukay’s wife, U-She, a really good singer when she isn’t eerily channeling Nico.

Holger has done some of his most accessible work with David Sylvian, contributing immensely to his albums, Brilliant Trees and Words with the Shaman. But I would point to their collaboration Flux & Mutability, for it’s subversively soothing textures and surreal sound designs.

Finally, you can’t have a complete Holger Czukay collection without some Can. Critics tend to cite their earlier works with whacked out singers Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki. You have to be in the right state of mind to experience albums like Monster Movie and Tago Mago. The records that really sold me on Can were some middle period recordings, Soon Over Babaluma and Landed. Kinetic grooves, lacerating guitar from Michael Karoli and Holger’s throbbing bass and hallucinogenic engineering make these albums classics of post-psychedelia.

I saw Holger Czukay play New York’s Knitting Factory in 1997 to an SRO room. I also saw him play the TLA in Philadelphia in 2004 to about 5 people. That’s wrong. A musician who has never fit into easy popular or critical pigeon-holes, Holger Czukay makes people like Thom Yorke and Trent Reznor seem like corporate cogs. Holger Czukay prefers to be the wrench in the machine.

Again, from my 1997 Pulse article:

Holger Czukay enjoys his status as a homunculus in the machinery of pop music. “I did an interview with German MTV and at the end I asked the director of the station if they had a chief editor. He said, ‛No.’ I said, ‛Take me. I can make your station very successful. Don’t play anything that I like and you’ll become very successful.’”

Damn. I knew that was the problem with Echoes.

John Diliberto
(((echoes)))

Like a lot of the more philosophical science fiction writers, the themes expressed by Arthur C. Clarke in novels like Childhoods End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Rendezvous with Rama have found their way into music.

Personally, I spent the 1970s and 80s spinning progressive rock on a radio show called Diaspar, which took its name from a city in Clarke’s novel, The City and the Stars. (Emmet “Bob” Ryan picked the name, as I recall. I think he liked the sound of the name more than the philosophy behind the city of Diaspar, which was a benign totalitarian culture controlled by computers, like a kinder, gentler Matrix). I remember Wendy Carlos talking to me about writing a fan letter to Clarke about his novel, The Songs of Distant Earth, and the author actually worked with French synthesist Jean-Michel Jarre on a project called Rendezvous in Space that has been performed, but not yet released although there is a YouTube video. Not surprisingly, Pink Floyd were among the first to nod to the author with their song “Childhood’s End” from Obscured by Clouds, and they were joined by Van Der Graaf Generator’s “A Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End.” “Watcher in the Skies” by Peter Gabriel-era Genesis was also reputedly inspired by Childhood’s End. Mike Oldfield referenced the author with “Sentinel” and “Sunjammer,” on Tubular Bells II and then did an entire album, based around The Songs of Distant Earth. It’s one of his better albums. You can’t think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, without thinking about the music Stanley Kubrick selected for the film: Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna,” Johan Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz” and of course, Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

Arthur C. Clarke left the planet on March 19, 2008. He’s probably hearing songs of distant earth and songs from far beyond.

John Diliberto ((((Echoes))))

Coyote Oldman returns and Gerry O’Beirne creates a career defining album with new CDS.
Coyote Oldman is the Native flute and electronic duo that single-handedly carved out the Native American space music genre in the 1980s and 90s. Michael Graham Allen, a scholar and maker of Native American flutes, plays most of the music on an Anasazi flute recreation similar to that heard on Scott August’s Lost Canyons. Allen blows elongated melodies that are electronically stretched into infinity by Barry Stramp in a seamless merging of acoustic flute and electronic processing. If you put Under an Ancient Sky on in the background, it vaporizes, but closer listening reveals a detailed soundworld and hidden melodies that are purely immersive.

At the opposite end of the drone scale is an album so full of melodic warmth that it can barely be contained.

Gerry O’Beirne is an Irish guitarist whose debut album was the evocative Half Moon Bay. It’s taken him a while, but with The Bog Bodies and other Stories: Music for Guitar, he’s put out a career defining album. “Music for Guitar” doesn’t quite capture what O’Beirne does on this album. He multi-tracks all kinds of guitars, ukelele, banjo and more in melodically compelling, cinematically shifting compositions that have an epic dimension. It recalls Mark O’Connor’s False Dawn from the 1980s which took the concept of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and applied it to acoustic instruments. The title comes from almost perfectly preserved bodies from up to 5500 years ago, discovered in bogs in Northern Europe and the British Isles. Wikipedia has a nice listing for them.
A bit macabre as an image, it doesn’t convey the exuberant and lyrical sound Gerry O’Beirne conjures on this album. The Bog Bodies and other Stories is one of the most perfect acoustic albums I’ve heard in a while.
John Diliberto
Echoes

The first live performance by acclaimed producer Tom Rothrock and a transporting set from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin highlighted a recent excursion to Los Angeles.

After Kimberly Haas and I attended the Public Media Conference in Los Angeles, Jeff Towne flew out as we remained to record 7 interviews and performances in 3 days. Among the rewarding challenges was a set from Tom Rothrock. He’s best known as the producer of Beck’s first album and James Blunt’s two CDs, including the hit “Beautiful.” On his own, Rothrock creates a gritty, but atmospheric ambient Americana centered on his dobro. In his hillside home, Rothrock gathered a string quartet, French horn player, percussionist/vibraphonist and electric guitarist to create the first ever live performance of music from his album, Resonater. In fact, Rothrock said it was the first time he played his music live in 20 years as they sat in front of a crackling fire, assailing tunes from the album.

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin is a heady, atmospheric quintet from Switzerland who coincidentally was in LA the same time we were. We recorded a private set in LA’s Jazz Bakery where they threaded a line between minimalism and ECM brand jazz with evocative compositions played with uncanny precision. Their two ECM albums, Stoa and Holon are underrated and their kinetic live performance is not to be missed.

It wasn’t all concerts. Trumpeter/Composer Jon Hassell stepped into the Echoes Chamber to hear music blindfolded. This veteran explorer offered some cogent thoughts on contemporary music and some of his precursors. Two-time academy award winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla sat down in his home studio to talk about his film scores for movies like Babel, Brokeback Mountain and Amores Perros. This Argentine musician offered some compelling insights and played his charango for us.
Look for these as well as performances and interviews from Gooding, Peter Kater & Joseph Firecrow and Scott August, sometime in the next few months of Echoes.

Finally, not more than 12 hours after touching down in Philadelphia, we recorded a haunting set of ambient chamber music from the Texas band, Balmorhea in the Echoes Living room. That’s coming soon as well.
John Diliberto