Listen to more Icons of Echoes:

Robert Rich

Lisa Gerrard & Dead Can Dance

Brian Eno

R. Carlos Nakai

Mickey Hart

Steve Roach

Andreas Vollenweider

Over the years certain artists have emerged as icons of the Echoes soundscape. These are musicians who shifted the direction of music, whose work influenced a generation and usually , musicians who also tend to be articulate thinkers about their art. In this series, you'll hear features Echoes has produced on these artists, often encompassing their entire careers.

STEVE TIBBETTS: An Icon of Echoes
One of the reasons we created Echoes was so we'd have a place to play the music of Steve Tibbetts. I first discovered his music when his self-titled and self-released debut came out in 1977. Hailing from Minnesota, Tibbetts has been charting a course through a hallucinogenic world fusion for a quarter century, most of it recorded by the German ECM label. A legend in indie-progressive music circles, Tibbetts garnered additional renown a few years ago when he adapted the chants of Tibetan nun Choying Drolma to his ambient landscapes. In this series of features with Steve Tibbetts, we hear a sound portrait painted in electric colors with acoustic shading in a pallette of the world.

In this special Icons of Echoes collection, you'll hear four sound portraits of Steve Tibbetts and his musicthat track his prolific career from 1991 to the present.


STEVE TIBBETTS: INTO THE EASTERN ABYSS (1994)

When artists travel to Indonesia and India, they often come back with visions of utopia in their heads, whether it's the idyllic life of Samoa as observed by Margaret Mead or the Indian mysticism of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, channeled through The Beatles. When Steve Tibbetts returns from one of his many pilgrimages east, he comes back with something different. His 1994 album, The Fall of Us All is like a harrowing diary of his experiences.

listen>> (approx. 7 minutes)

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listen to all interview features>> (approx 35 minutes)

STEVE TIBBETTS IN TIBET              (1997)
In 1997, guitarist Steve Tibbetts released another CD spawned by his many trips to India and Nepal. On a few trips in the 1990s he recorded a group of Tibetan nuns led by Choying Drolma. He's taken their sacred chants, recorded in Tibetan shrines, and framed them with his own ambient orchestrations. The results are the album, "Cho". Tibbetts talks about the nuns, their music and his transformation of their sacred hymns.

listen>> (approx. 7 minutes)

STEVE TIBBETTS: EXPLODED GUITARS     (1999)

Rarely has an artist prevailed with the unique vision of Steve Tibbetts, from his early self-produced solo albums like Yr, through to his recent critically acclaimed collaborations with Tibetan nun Choying Drolma, Tibbetts has woven an intricate, often psychedelic soundscape, mixing acoustic and electric guitars and the global percussion of Marc Anderson.

In 1999, we chose Steve Tibbetts as one of Ten Artists for Ten Years of Echoes. In this 10th anniversary feature, we talked with Tibbetts and Anderson about music that results from taking out your brain and playing with it.

listen>> (approx. 7 minutes)

listen>> (approx. 7 minutes)

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