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Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club
This Month's Pick:Patrick O’Hearn
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~© 2011 John Diliberto you can see a video and listen to songs from the CD on the Echoes Blog>> |
Atomic Skunk Alchemy It’s difficult finding a signature sound in the fragmented world of electronic music, but Rich Brodsky, recording as Atomic Skunk, has succeeded. Each successive album has found him developing his own voice, one that merges influences from The Grateful Dead to The Orb, into his own sound and he’s finally reached maturity on his new CD, Alchemy. Atomic Skunk’s compositions are built out of seemingly random sounds, some from nature, some from places undefined. These become the sonic clay that Brodsky molds into his compositions. On “Rhino,” an abstracted forest murmurs and chirps while metallic percussion burbles to the surface of algae-covered pools. Eventually a groove enters, a little ominous, like a descent into the Amazonian canyons of the film Aguirre. Gamelan metallophones, glitch effects and a slowly assertive bass line propel the piece into its slowly-resolving arc. On his last album, Portals, Atomic Skunk cut a beautiful cover of The Grateful Dead’s “China Doll.” “Equinox” seems almost like an extension of that track as Brodsky pulls his hands away from the computer keyboard and strums a plaintive guitar refrain. It’s a nice contrast to the more hypnotic, eastern inflected central melody played on a sampled violin. Atomic Skunk’s music has a definite connection to the exotica of Les Baxter’s “Quiet Village.” Only now, instead of a band making jungle noises, Brodsky pulls those atmospheres from the libraries of freesound.org. And Atomic Skunk is working in a more free-form world of sound design where Balinese Gamelan can mix with Middle Eastern percussion and none of it sounds like it originally appeared in either of those traditions. Instead, Atomic Skunk orchestrates his own culture, a global village of the imagination. Gamelan instruments figure on many tracks, especially “Lotusmud” where they’re played in a cyclical figure that sounds so innocent next to the more frightening sounds and percussive thuds that surround it. Brodsky’s not afraid to cut loose into more dynamic terrain including the forceful, sawtoothed, phased and harmonized buzzsaw that dives across “Sunwheel” like an avenging angel. That sound returns on “Ghosts and Angels” the most melodically haunting track with the buzzsaw arcing over an array of metallic percussion hocketing across the stereo spectrum. Atomic Skunk’s Alchemy concludes like every piece begins, in ambience. Only on the final track, there’s no build or arc. There’s no groove or melodic hook to pull you out. The ambience continues for 24 minutes on “Temple of Stars,” a deep interior space journey full of twinkling bells, groaning monks, evanescent synth pads and horror film sound effects of a creaky spaceship. Don't put this track on at night when you're alone. This dark ending belies the colorful journey that came before it. Rich Brodsky has made an album that invites you in, then sends you slowly spinning through his surreal world. Alchemy is the Echoes CD of the Month for August.~© 2011 John Diliberto you can see a video and listen to songs from the CD on the Echoes Blog>> |
| Fionnuala Sherry Songs from Before On her solo debut album, Fionnuala Sherry tackles the old chestnut melodies of her Irish home, but Songs from Before is far from a traditional album. Instead, Sherry has reimagined these songs, pulling them out of an Irish mist, coaxing them slowly from the low-lying fog of a distant past. “An Cuilthionn,” often know as “The Coolin’” sets the tone with a dark, brooding texture of storm clouds on the horizon. Ghost strings trail Sherry’s violin over a groove that’s part bodhran drum and part electronica loop. Another original composition on the album is Sherry’s “Song from Before.” It taps Balinese gamelan and Japanese koto sounds for its lilting pentatonic backing while Sherry plays a romantic melody across the top, alternating with Espen Leite’s nostalgic accordion. Nostalgia tints much of the music on Songs from Before which isn’t surprising given the traditional source material. You don’t need the scratchy record sound effects on “The Last Rose” to tell you these are old tunes, but it creates a poignant contrast with Bjerkestrand’s modern arrangements. “The Last Rose” combines minimalist percussion in a looped groove with pipa plucks for a sound that’s far from the Emerald Isles, yet Sherry’s violin playing never leaves tradition too far behind. Fionnuala Sherry’s Songs from Before is the Echoes CD of the Month for July. ~© 2011 John Diliberto you can see a video and listen to songs from the CD on the Echoes Blog>> |
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Winterlight Hope Dies Last The name is decidedly out of season but the music of Winterlight will soothe a sun‑seared mind on the hottest summer day, so maybe it is an appropriate selection for the June Echoes CD of the Month. Winterlight is the recording persona of Tim Ingham from England. He's also recorded as Lightsway. With his American debut, Hope Dies Last, he has created an album of electronic melancholy, a sound that echoes back a decade to Ulrich Schnauss's Far Away Trains Passing By with its mix of major key melodicism, minor key moods and propulsive rhythms. They also share a penchant for shoegaze guitar textures, albeit, often rendered via computer modeling. Winterlight takes you on a trip that begins on "A Sky Full of Clouds" with a triumphal heaven‑sent array of descending synth melodies and ascending choral voices swirled in psychedelic colors. Like most of the other tracks on Hope Dies Last, Winterlight manages to be moody and exultant at the same time. It's music that begins in quiet and isolation and maybe even a little pain and somehow rises above it all to joy. Perhaps that's where "Between Joy" derives its title. But then, Ingham finds joy and triumph even in "Plattenbauten: Palast," named for the pre‑fabricated block construction of Berlin Wall‑era East Germany. You'd think that would inspire mechanistic music, but Winterlight's sound evokes vegetation breaking through the concrete cracks, subsuming the ugly architecture into its own, organic world. Ingham took the name Winterlight from the Ingmar Bergman film, Winterlight, a story about loss of faith. But again, where others might find doom and desolation, Ingham seems to find affirmation and redemption ‑ except the last track. "I Still Hope" may have a positive message, but this drone‑zone excursion sounds like a slow motion fugue, trawling the depths of despair like Gollum wandering the wasteland of Mordor, or Bukowski in an alcoholic fog. Tim Ingham has described Winterlight's music as "a warm light in the darkness and the cold." It's that mixture of shadow beneath the surface, a kind of serrated joy that makes Hope Dies Last an album that can follow you into the bleakest or the brightest days. It's the Echoes CD of the Month for June. you can see a video and listen to songs from the CD on the Echoes Blog>> |
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Moby Destroyed With Destroyed and his previous CD, Wait for Me, Moby has moved from an iconic electronic trendsetter to a singer-songwriter exploring personal stories with melancholy depth. Even his instrumentals, of which there are many on Destroyed, have the feel of diary entries. The opening track, “The Broken Pieces” sets the introspective mood of the album, playing like the soundtrack for a train moving through a rain-swept countryside. Moby says that Destroyed was written while touring, during nights of insomnia in fluorescent-lit airports and luxurious hotel rooms. That may account for the sometimes desolate, isolated and sealed-in feel that pervades many of the songs here, although the same could be said of much of Moby’s oeuvre. He’s not a complex lyric writer, in fact, many of his songs could almost be taken as haiku or mantras. The sense of loss is powerful on the techno-driven, vocoder chant of oblivion on “Be the One.” I’ll never see what you wanted …love Moby repeats that technique on “After,” repeating the phrase “But my mind was low” in a hymn of insistent despair. As he did on Wait for Me, Moby brings in several singers including Emily Zuzik who co-wrote “The Low Hum.” With the classic electronica voice, cool and a bit seductive, she contrasts with the world-weary vocals often favored by Moby. That comes from Inyang Bassey. She was a soul-belter on his 2009 tour, but she taps a more introspective side for another Moby mantra on “Rockets.” “The Right Thing,” however, presents her in more of a torch song mode. Like “JLTF” from Wait for Me, Moby’s songs are often about friends lost to drugs and disease. “The Day” covers both angles as a bedside prayer to his mother who is heading toward the light that also doubles as a lament for friends struggling with addiction. Although Moby’s voice is as flat as the western plains, like Brian Eno, he’s somehow able to make it work in these soulful, heart-rending songs of loss. That song also has a sound design and rhythm machine groove that recalls Eno’s “Cindy Tells Me.” (Dig Heather Graham as an animated Valkyrie angel in the video.) Moby doesn’t break any new ground on Destroyed, but like seeds in a garden, his music sprouts in different ways with every growth cycle. “Lie Down in Darkness” evokes the vocal sampling of his earlier recording Play: this time Moby deploys a gospel-like hymn sung by Joy Malcolm over a surging rhythm and symphonic synth strings. He also still includes anthemic instrumentals like “The Violent Bear It Away” which uses a repeated piano arpeggio to build tension amid a wave of synth strings and percussion. “Victoria Lucas,” a pen name of Sylvia Plath, is a throwback to the more techno-driven sounds of “Go!” His chilled electronics have the 1980s synth feel of Arp String Ensembles, drum machines and vocoders. Much of Moby’s music is about framing. And you can see that in the companion photographic book. He places a border around an object that would otherwise go unnoticed in the babble and clutter of the real world, drawing it out of the background, like the title in the cover shot of the album. The word “Destroyed” is in the frame of an LED scroll at an airport, pulled out of the context of the warning that “Unattended luggage will be destroyed.” I was destroyed by Moby’s latest, which is why Destroyed is the Echoes CD of the Month for May.
you can see a video and listen to songs from the CD on the Echoes Blog>> |
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Vicki Richards She Vanishes Vicki Richards is a violinist who’s plugged in and globally wired. And she has been since we started playing her music back at the dawn of Echoes in 1989 with the original version of her album, Parting The Waters. She’s played on albums by Steve Roach (The Serpent’s Lair) and Black Tape for a Blue Girl (Remnants of a Deeper Purity) and released four solo albums since then, but her latest, She Vanishes, is the most complete realization of a sound that was always based in world fusion motifs and classically-tinged melodies. You can hear it in the energized groove of “Trail Head (Berkshires)” with Richards soloing freely across the two-handed guitar maze of Mitch Kopp and the Indian tabla percolations of Jeff Deen. The title track on the other hand, takes a more elegiac approach, with Richards and Koop dueting as Richards layers and loops her violin creating electric string sections in a work that soars over a serengeti plain. While the imagery Vicki Richards has employed in the past have put her in the New Age category, (and a CD of guided meditations called Cleansing Water – Pura Vida amplified that image), her music has always exhibited an edge and improvisational daring that reveals her to be a fusion burner at heart. You can hear it in her freewheeling solos as well as the arpeggiated guitar riff that runs through “Midnight Whisper,” recalling The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Birds of Fire” without the electric firestorm roar. Richards is a modern violinist, expanding her instrument with loops, harmonizers and other effects that often turn her into an orchestra as she does on the serene but relentlessly moving “Driving Till Dawn,” creating string beds while soloing down the midnight highway. Even when she plays solo, it’s not merely solo as she turns herself into a string ensemble on tracks like”Riding the Thermals.” She plays with the expression of an Indian sarangi on another solo track, “It Was Love,” an alap of serpentine violin and trailing string pads. Richards has had good musicians on all her albums, but there seems to be a special simpatico between her current trio. Kopp and Deen latch onto grooves that seem to hover between India and Africa and Kopp especially lays the groundwork for several tracks, like “Ocean Sun.” His two-handed tapping brings out bass lines and ostinato pads that propel the track. Vicki Richards’ She Vanishes is an album of intimate moods, but expansive designs. It’s the Echoes CD of the Month for April. ~© 2011 John Diliberto you can see a video and listen to songs from the CD on the Echoes Blog>> |
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A sideman to New York's music elite turns in a solo electric chamber work Ambient chamber music is often atmospheric, melancholy and serene, but rarely is it as charming as Seria II by multi-instrumentalist and composer Skúli Sverrisson. This Icelandic musician via New York's downtown music scene - has sculpted an album that sounds like a Mediterranean fling tossed into space. Sverrisson manages to have a folkloric sense of melody and an ambient sense of sound design. Sverrisson has been on the American music scene since the late 1980s. He was a member of an early techno-tribal group, Mo Boma, that cut four CDs and he's performed with people like Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and David Sylvian. Anderson even appears on the first Seria CD. Sverrisson can play wild fusion with the likes of Allan Holdsworth, but Seria II takes him in a deeper, more contemplative direction. These detailed and imaginative works have a more European flair with cinematic hints of Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone on some tracks, elements of Brian Eno and Philip Glass on others. With a string section consisting of just Eyvind Kang and Hildur Gudnadottir on viola and cello, Sverrisson gets a ghostly chamber music sound on several tracks like the lilting "Unbend" and more classically pastoral "Módir." Even though there is only cello and viola on those tracks, they sound like an orchestra wafting in from across the lake. It's the details that make this album, with instrumental accents from celeste, omnichord and charango decorating Sverrisson and Amedeo Pace's often arpegiatted guitar lines. "Volumes" brings in toy piano, autoharp and glockenspiel set in mediaeval mode with Indian undertones before a cycling rhythm track emerges with a melody that sounds folky and gothic at the same time. Ólof Arnalds (cousin of Ólafur Arnalds) sings on most of the tracks, and like the strings, she effects a wistful sound with wordless vocals in phantom choirs on "The Sound of Snow," "Divena" and "Her Looking Back." The latter tune starts as a plaintive folk song before turning into a cinematic mood piece. Sverrisson is best known as a bassist, but he also plays guitar, keyboards, and dobro on the album. There's no denying his melodic gifts on the over-dubbed "Instants" where he plays bass and electric guitar in a wistful, end of summer song that again, plays like a Rota score. Skúli Sverrisson has composed a quietly masterful recording that draws you into a world that brims with nostalgia, while being thoroughly part of the 21st century. ~© 2011 John Diliberto you can listen to songs from the CD on the Echoes Blog>> |
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David Arkenstone
"Acquiring Satellites" launches the album and it sounds like nothing else Arkenstone has done before. It's a delicately painted track with thinly brushed atmospherics and twangy electric guitar while a downtempo thud centers percolating synthesizers. It sets the tone for the next two hours of music Within each track, Arkenstone orchestrates a sound world that has the precise placement of a zen garden, but the forward momentum of a slo-mo rollercoaster. You get on a track like “Gargouille” and watch it all swirl by, with a double thump heart beat groove against twinkling star light synthesizers and vibe-like keyboards. Rhythms are subtly augmented while a liquid, psychedelic guitar trawls the atmosphere like a schooner surveying the high seas of ambience. The retro-synth lead of "Liquid Sky" is like something out of a late 1960's Moog album. Twittering and fluttering like a space flute over more contemporary grooves and textures provides one of the many textural interests on Ambient World, along with the Pink Floyd "Echoes" ping on the song. In fact subtle references abound on Ambient World. Is the opening of “Star Fall” a reference to the original Star Trek theme? I don't know, but Arkenstone uses it to launch a menacing track of slowly moving chords and chilly, metallic accents. Even with purely ambient, drift tracks like the abstract designs of "Collective Dream" it's not all dark and moody. He lights up a downtempo dance groove on "Shinkansen" that contrasts with its spare, yearning synth line and "Time Lapse" has a slowly unfolding, earth-turning melody that recalls the 1980s work of Michael Stearns. This is a much darker music than listeners are accustomed to hearing from David Arkenstone. But it reveals the composer once again as a master craftsman capable of tapping a deeper, more introspective side. |
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Born in Denmark, and now living in Germany, Agnes Obel has that ethereal, mournful sound we've come to know from Nordic singers like Anna Ternheim and Emiliana Torrini. Her songs have a stark simplicity with an almost childlike accompaniment, but like Yann Tiersen's Amélie score, there is depth and portent between those spare, melancholy notes. With arrangements that are Spartan yet evocative, Obel plays keyboards and guitar, deploying them in zen minimalist canons. Obel's lyrics are ambiguously oblique, approaching her subjects from odd angles like the coy "Beast," a song of pursuit and abandon that will have you hitting repeat to glimpse its curious and addictive chorus. One sign of a true artist is when they can take someone else's song and make it wholly their own. That's the case with "Close Watch," a cover of John Cale's "I Keep A Close Watch." Over what sounds like a prepared piano or muted guitar, Obel builds this poignant work from yearning to heroic with the contrapuntal choirs of her voice. Philharmonics takes a symphonic name, and it sits comfortably among a new generation of ambient chamber musicians like Ludovico Einaudi, Tim Story and Nico Muhly, not to mention Steve Reich and Michael Nyman. It's only January, but this is already simply the most beautiful album of the year. Right now, Philharmonics is only available on iTunes in the US. But Echoes CD of the Month Club members will be receiving some of the few actual CD copies in the U.S. |
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Jeff Johnson, Brian Dunning & Wendy Goodwin Like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Jeff Johnson and Brian Dunning have forged an enduring, if not nearly as tumultuous or lucrative, relationship. They've been together for more than 20 years, since they met in Portland, Oregon. At that time, Johnson was a rising Christian artist while Dunning was in the popular Windham Hill Celtic fusion group, Nightnoise. Despite the fact that Dunning now lives in his native Ireland and Johnson has moved to Camano Island in Washington, they continue to work and record together. The duo has made some of my favorite Christmas music over the years, beginning with several tracks on Windham Hill Winter Solstice and Christmas samplers to their own albums like the haunting A Quiet Knowing Christmas. With Under the Wonder Sky, they've thrown the log on the fire of yet another near perfect seasonal recording. Joined by violinist Wendy Goodwin, Johnson & Dunning take the schlock out of Christmas, with inventive song selection and arrangements that fall between the moody and the pastoral. You won't find any sleigh bells on this CD. Although a bouncy rendition of "Greensleeves" opens the album, it's the second track, "Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus" that sets the tone. A traditional Christmas hymn based on "Gloria In Excelsis Deo," Brian Dunning trades off the melody with Wendy Goodwin in a song that is at once yearning and wistful. Many of the songs here are lesser known carols and hymns like "As With Gladness, Men of Old" and "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent." But even when they play a chestnut like "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear" Johnson, Dunning and Goodwin shear it of the corny sentimentality usually associated with that melody and turn it into a quietly classical chamber work full of atmosphere that seems to literally emerge out of a crystal night sky, wafting in luminous hues. Although "Away in a Manger" resists their attempts to turn it into a pastoral meditation, it's hard to go wrong with "Wexford Carol." They give the Irish tune a deceptive opening with Dunning stating the theme on a deep bass flute over an ominous drone but then it breaks into a lively rhythm suitable for wassailing. Jeff Johnson and Brian Dunning are wonderful composers and if this album has a flaw, it's that there aren't more of their original compositions on it. That's borne out by Johnson's lone contribution of the title track. Loosely based on "I Wonder as I Wander," Johnson orchestrates a pensive two-note piano bass line, then starts building up sparse, echoing sampled and electronic percussion, followed by Dunning's percussive flute. A slow build crests the hill and opens up on a rolling panorama of strummed guitar and Dunning's flute interweaving again with Goodwin's lilting violin. Brian Dunning's "As the Child Sleeps" uses a rapid arpeggio guitar riff from Tim Ellis to set the mood before it slips into a wistful ballad with Dunning playing low whistle. The album ends on a parlor music note in a trio as Johnson sits at an acoustic piano with Dunning and Goodwin on flute and violin. But even here, Johnson can't resist some electronic keyboard harmonizing of the sacred melody. Whether you celebrate Christmas with spiritual intent or just love the quiet mood and reflective atmosphere of the winter season, Under the Wonder Sky is a perfect soundtrack. |
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Mark Preston Mark Preston went to music school in Boston to study drumming but along the way, he became entranced by electronic music and the idea of creating fully realized compositions in his computer. He traded drum sticks for mouse clicks and in 2007 released his debut album, "…and it will rise with the sun." That album was good, but his new CD, Nature & Design takes a quantum leap. Much of the music is inspired by a cross-country trip he took, visiting national parks across the U.S. from Maine to Arizona. But Preston avoids the gift-store syndrome of nature themed albums and instead, taps into deeper emotions that transcend his sources. "Casco" could be about a forest landscape in Maine where Sebago Lake resides, but it plays more like an inner landscape of peace and joy, churning along its glitched, syncopated rhythm, skipping through its light-flecked melody. Since Preston is only in his mid-20s, his influences are still showing. So you could be forgiven a few times if you think you slipped an Album Leaf CD on by mistake. Songs like "Leaving the Tetons" with its mix of minimalist keyboards, glitching rhythms and Arvo Pärt-like strings, played by Dayla Stoerzbach, certainly owe a debt to that band. Mark is a composer who lets the electronics be the electronics. When he needs an acoustic instrument, he brings it in, including Josh Sturgeon, who plays guitar on "Sage Creek, SD," a jazz-funk track that betrays Preston's time spent at music school. Preston hasn't given up the drums completely. Look at his studio photos on-line and you'll see he has an electronic trap set. And I suspect that's what he's playing on the shifting rhythms of "Light At Certain Angles." But even his electronic grooves have a bounce to them, like the ping-ponging chatter of "Changing Colors," Nature & Design ends with a pensive composition called "The Great Sand Dunes: Alone at Night," It's a quiet piece of Harold Budd like piano over chirping crickets and sheer, ambient curtains of sound. It's a calming ending to an album that spins through its landscapes with the shifting patterns of a car cruising the open road of 90 West, which is also the name of a track on the album. Get lost in the patterns of Nature & Design, one of the most joyful albums of 2010 |
![]() (October 2010) An auspicious debut from a soulful musician |
Todd Boston He's also doing live looping. He'll lay a guitar line down and just as you're getting lost in the melody, a new theme comes in, played in real time while the original melody continues in a loop. That makes Alive a lot more than your standard finger-style solo guitar album. Boston creates deep meditative pieces that swirl with melody, from the refined strains of "Harmony" with Boston weaving flute melodies through his guitar filigree to the gentle sound of "The Brightest Night," where he plays a simple solo line, plucking harmonics against a back drop of bass and crickets. "Midnight Dreaming," is a caravan crossing, with Kannan's tabla groove loping underneath Boston who first plays guitar and then brings in the bansuri flute. Calling this album meditative might be misleading. Much of it is buoyant, like "Just The Beginning" with its Celtic trilling once Boston hits the solo run. The folk-like refrains of "Skipping" sound like an Appalachian folk song with Indian percussion. Boston isn't afraid to toss anything into the mix, including some country slide guitar on “3AM.” Todd Boston is getting into a different sound on Alive. You can hear his roots, but he has a more pastoral feel than Shakti, especially when cellist Matthew Schoening guests on the luxurious expanse of "Twilight." There's also a more expansive approach to melody than you'll find on most Windham Hill records. Todd Boston is now working with Windham Hill founder/guitarist Will Ackerman, but I'm not sure how much that can improve upon Alive, an auspicious debut from a soulful musician. |
![]() (September 2010) Cinematic music |
David Helpling and Jon Jenkins |
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Carmen Rizzo Rizzo has a penchant for sultry singers. Shana Halligan from The Supreme Beings of Leisure and Bitter:Sweet sings of haunted love on "Until You Find Another," with a hint of Billie Holiday in her aching voice. That jazz reference is amplified by Gabriel Johnson who adds a moody, Mark Isham-style trumpet solo. Over a percolating electronic back-beat and surging textures, January Thompson's voice echoes through a song of lost love and promise, "Passing By," while Norway's Kate Havnevik takes a dance floor beat and does a diva turn on "This Life." The most uplifting song may be "Bring the Mountain Down" with Grant-Lee Phillips, a singer-songwriter whom Rizzo has produced. The song borrows lyric inspiration from the story of Hanuman, the Hindu Monkey God. But with Phillips' soulful vocal rendition over Rizzo's lush lounge moods, it becomes sensual as much as spiritual. Often, an Echoes CD of the Month is made for low lights and internal ruminations. Looking Through Leaves is contemplative as well, as long as you’re doing it driving down the highway with the windows open and the stereo cranked. |
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Erik Wøllo On songs like “Life in Technicolor,” groups like Coldplay try (with the help of Jon Hopkins) to attain the same kind of timeless, shifting mood that is Erik Wøllo's stock in trade. And like them, he brings a minimalist’s sense of austerity and design to expansive synthesizer orchestrations like the heroic strains of “The Traveler.” It’s that perfect Wøllo mix of ping-ponging electronic rhythms and melodic pads that sweep in searchlight patterns. With all the electronics, it’s almost easy to forget that Wøllo is a gifted guitarist. Most of the music is generated from a guitar or guitar synthesizer. He can make his six strings sound like an electronic symphony and on the highly ambient tracks that conclude the album, like "The Mental Trail" and "Full Circle," it sounds nothing like a guitar at all with their glacial motion and vast, horizon-like textures. But on pieces like “First Arrival” he can also pull out twanged liquid leads. Erik Wøllo manages to synthesize influences from Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd to Steve Reich and modern electronica. But as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music, he’s truly morphed these sounds into something that is wholly his own. Step through Erik Wøllo’s Gateway and you’ll see his world revealed. © 2010 John Diliberto |
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Hammock Hammock is Nashville-based guitarists Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson. They've made their money writing country and Christian music but their hearts reside in the shoegaze sound of 80s bands like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. They were in an underrated Christian alt-rock band called Common Children that emerged from that sound. But Byrd and Thompson decided they liked the instrumental side of things and formed Hammock, releasing their first album, Kenotic, in 2005. They immediately established a penchant for recordings full of densely reverbed, layered and distorted guitars. After drifting off into the drone zone on their previous album, Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow, Hammock have returned to the more dramatic, melodically entrancing sound of their 2007 CD, Raising Your Voice....Trying to Stop an Echo. They've also returned to elliptical Zen koan titles. Their new CD is called Chasing After Shadows...Living with the Ghosts. Hammock's music justifies that poetic imagery. Each song is like a symphonic tone poem, but rendered in electric colors, assertive grooves and shimmering, sustain-laden guitars. They build from modal repetition: a simple guitar arpeggio is repeatedly deployed through reverb, delays and sheets of dappled distortion that moves with inevitability toward a grand crescendo. Although Hammock create an orchestra of sound with their guitars, they also use strings, which give their music a hymn-like quality on "In the Nothing of a Night" and "The Whole Catastrophe." It's as if Estonian sacred minimalist composer Arvo Pärt plugged in, tripped out and found the spirit. Guitars have rarely sounded so celestial as they do with Hammock. Long sinuous sustains, orchestral pads that shimmer in cosmic reverb and melodies that seem to be carved out of a night sky make Chasing After Shadows.... an immersion experience. Hammock's guitar orchestra can be heard on their latest album Chasing After Shadows...Living With the Ghosts. It's the Echoes CD of the Month for May. © 2010 John Diliberto |
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Robert Rich In many ways, Ylang picks up on the intoxicating melodies and rhythms of his 1990s albums, Propagation and Seven Veils. You can hear the sinewy flute melodies, the throbbing hand drum rhythms, and one of Rich's signature sounds, the lap steel guitar. He doesn't play the lap steel with aloha Hawaiian sweetness or country and western twang. Instead, it's a siren cry, like Jimi Hendrix sent into infinite sustain on tracks like "Ambergris." With his electronic processing and analog synthesizers, Robert Rich can forge the darkest, most sonically warped sounds around, but there is a melodicist lurking in this experimenter. He lets it out on Ylang whether it's the smoke-like flute undulations of "Translucent" or the Keith Jarrett-inspired piano of "Attar." Ylang, like most Robert Rich albums, trawls the dark side like a midnight stalker. The rhythms are often foreboding and the melodies seem to come from a dark tribal rite, as alien insects, created electronically by Rich, scutter through the sound field. But Robert Rich also has a touch of exotica. Think Les Baxter getting his Ph.D. and spinning through a time warp of 30 years of technology and world music knowledge. That exotica provides a key to Robert Rich's surreal orchestrations that sound like ancient ritual music from another planet. |
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Ludovico Einaudi On his latest album, Nightbook, Ludovico Einaudi brings avant-garde edges to rhapsodic piano works. Think George Winston remixed by The Orb, with a bit of 50's exotica, and 60's sci-fi electronics. On tracks like "In Principio" he nods to Harold Budd and Brian Eno, expanding the concept of solo piano with haunting glitched echoes and fractured reverb. It's like unearthing a digital artifact and seeing its image through a cracked lens. In the 1970s, he might have been called a minimalist, in the '80s a New Age artist and in the 90s an ambient musician. But Einaudi is all of that and more. He brings an emotional precision and a cerebral play to his music that probably comes from his studies with Italian avant-garde icon, Luciano Berio. Listen to the calibrated emotions of "Reverie," a wistful track for piano, vibes and cello that seems like the last wave goodbye. Ludovico Einaudi has an electro-ambient trio called Whitetree that includes electronic musician Robert Lippok. He's all over Nightbook, playing electronic sounds that don't glisten and groove like chromium clockwork. Instead, they wheeze and whisper like busted steam pipes and dream voices. "Bye Bye Mon Amour" is an ecstatic interplay between Einaudi's piano and Lippok's electronics. "The Planets" is his miniaturized, ambient take on the Gustav Holst theme. But Einaudi's planets sound more like lost transmissions and doppler echoes from the solar system. Nightbook isn't all reverie and melancholy. Percussion drives "Lady Labyrinth" as Einaudi pounds out left hand chords against a subtly syncopated beat, like the score for the last charge into the breach. Ludovico Einaudi has some 20 albums out in Europe where he sells out venues like the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican Centre in London. But Nightbook may be the best introduction to the range of this artist. It's thoroughly modern music but with a texture and depth as if written on old frayed and singed paper. It's the Echoes CD of the Month for March. |
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Nakai, Eaton and Clipman A member of the Navajo and Ute tribes, Nakai took the Native American flute off the reservation and out of the hands of traditionalists when he released his album Canyon Trilogy in 1989. He added electronic effects to his flute and then took it global, playing with orchestras and pianists, Japanese world fusion groups and electronica artists. Regardless of the setting, it all sounds like R. Carlos Nakai. The trio heard on his latest album, Dancing Into Silence, is where Nakai seems to do his best work. He's been recording with William Eaton for over 20 years. Eaton builds and plays hybrid stringed instruments that resemble ancient artifacts from the planet Pandora in Avatar. He's the orchestrator and atmospheric controller on the album, weaving synth textures, ringing harp strings and twangy guitar riffs like a space troubadour. The third member is Will Clipman whose percussion rig includes pony drums based on Native American designs, hang drums, African djembes, Irish bodhrans and anything else that will rattle or bang. They've recorded several albums together, but Dancing into Silence takes them into a terrain of pure intuitive improvisation. Although the concept was to leave preconceived songs off the album, these three artists have so much melody pouring out of them and are so attuned to each other after years of playing together, that every track sounds like a through- composed work. Nakai dips his flutes in and out of the mix, at times floating free, at others pulling the ensemble behind him in an epic theme. His vocable chants are calls from the edge of consciousness. Through deft segues between tracks, Dancing into Silence morphs from ethereal ballets to throbbing percussion trances. The aerated performances seem to hover above the ground like a desert mirage, but behind that mirage are three musicians in communion, bathed in a world of reverb, united by the rhythm of the earth. The album’s title speaks to both the joyful attunement one can hear in the making of this album, and the attainment of a quieter, more serene space after listening. |
![]() (January 2010) listen to samples |
Jimmy Wahlsteen Wahlsteen has all the post-Michael Hedges guitar approaches down, including two-handed tapping, playing percussion on his guitar and more. But this isn't a simple guitar-picker's anthem. The Swedish born musician grew up as a fan of Kiss, and has spent the first part of his young career playing on pop music sessions. He brings a keen melodic ear and arranging sensibility to his music. A song like "Suffice to Say" could be a pop ballad, with its song structure and use of electric guitar accents. Wahlsteen can burn the house down with technique, which he does on "The Urge to Gossip," a jazzy romp complete with horns, but he can also wax pastoral on "Carry Me," a gentle song backed by a string trio Wahlsteen doesn't credit it on the album, but you can hear subtle processing effects in his playing. He introduces “Rapid Eye Movement” with a delay sound reminiscent of U2's The Edge and on “You've Gotta Run Real Fast to Stand Still,” he uses shimmering harmonics and electric guitar shadings that exhibit his open ended approach to finger-style guitar. The title of the CD comes from the street on which Jimmy Wahlsteen lived in New York City, 181st Street. That's where he wrote most of an album on which he does it all, even picking out the cut you'll like best. It's called "It's your Favorite." Jimmy Wahlsteen's 181st Songs is our favorite for January and it's the Echoes CD of the Month. |
![]() (December 2009) listen to samples |
Michael Spriggs Neurasenia is a word Spriggs says he heard from his doctor to describe an essential state of existence or beingness. I can't find that anywhere, but maybe Spriggs' music is the definition. Neurasenia is a CD full of gentle melodies, lovely arrangements and pastoral moods that seem to emerge from some deeper yearning in this musician that goes beyond the confines of country. It's a music that wants to travel like "Waterfall," a track that sits between country and Kabul, with Middle Eastern percussion and a country violin. He uses his guitars as an orchestra, mixing acoustic, electric and synthesizer guitar. The title track is a cinematic excursion down an imaginary highway. A picked acoustic guitar cycle is punctuated by sweeping chordal strums that are underpinned by a muted violin pad, creating a steady-state momentum brushed by sudden turns. On "The Wind When you Leave," he plays a spare acoustic guitar that leaves synthesizer trails in its wake, swirling like eddies behind a slowly rowed boat. Even though he's inspired by the electronic landscapes of Steve Roach, Spriggs has a pop composer’s sense of form as he spins dreamy landscapes awash in melody, all tinged by a bit of country twang. As if Spriggs wasn't enough of a Nashville oddity, on the final track, "Xu Moon" he plays the guzheng, a Chinese zither similar to a koto. On this meditative ambient track, he improvises on the instrument over the course of 10 minutes, starting out atmospheric before converging on a looping rhythm as guitar and guzheng play counterpoints to each other. Michael actually sent me an early version of Neurasenia seven years ago. I'm glad it's finally seeing the light of day. It was an easy pick as the final CD of the Month for 2009. |
![]() (November 2009) listen to samples |
Robin Guthrie You've heard Robin Guthrie before. He was the guitarist with the Cocteau Twins during their entire existence from 1981 to 1998, defining an elegiac dreamworld along with singer Elizabeth Fraser. Guthrie created an archetypal guitar sound noted for its use of distortion, delays and reverb that continues to influence musicians including My Bloody Valentine, Ulrich Schnauss, Hammock, and Moby. On Carousel, Guthrie takes this sound and expands it into a series of drifting, paisley dappled tone poems. While many of his adherents have drifted into the drone zone of pure electric ambiences, Guthrie never leaves melody or rhythm, or at least pulse, behind. Tracks like "Delight" and "Search Among the Flowers" unfold in cascading patterns rippling through the layers of his processed guitar matrix. Guthrie is a thoroughly modern musician, yet there's a wistful, nostalgic sensibility in an album that seems autumnal in its mood. It comes through on "Sparkle," which recalls the twangy sound of 60s guitar bands like The Shadows via Twin Peaks. But there's also an older, distinctly British pastoral sensibility from this musician who grew up in Scotland and now lives in France. Titles like "The Girl with the Little Wings" and "Waiting by the Carousel" suggest a mature, reflective sound that seems appropriate from a 47-year-old musician with children. It's a personal, contemplative music that happens to be psychedelic and moody. Robin Guthrie is one of the significant guitar stylists of the last 30 years. He's not a flash player, with ripping pyrotechnic leads and guitar shredding distortion. Instead, his sound is an electric orchestra, layering shadings, harmonies, and melodies within melodies that unfold across his compositions. If you have to pick one Robin Guthrie album to get, Carousel is it. |
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Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy But both musicians are united by their born-again Christian backgrounds and that's how they got together at a Laity Lodge meeting on the Frio River in Texas. They've combined to make an album unlike anything either has done, yet it draws from the core of their music. Composed in their separate studios in Nashville and Washington state, Frio Suite is a CD of intricately painted landscapes, much of it inspired by the Frio River and the photography of Kathy Hastings, which adorns the album. She takes macro photos that have a painterly look, making for often surreal, abstract images of real life objects and settings. Johnson and Keaggy create the same sort of detailed, close-up music that draws you into its patterns. "Of Time & Frio," a nicely detailed, almost folk-jazz track opens the CD with its light, gentle airs. But that's a deceptive beginning for an album of deep moods and exploratory themes. Johnson and Keaggy's compositions could be reflecting the landscape of the Frio River in Texas or Hastings' detailed macro-photos, but they play less as environmental ambiences and more as interior journeys. Take "Ride the Stone Waves." Johnson orchestrates a shifting, textured backdrop that includes gamelan sounds, ghost synthesizers and plaintive piano while Keaggy plays acoustic and electric guitars, deploying his intricate melodies while dropping Pink Floyd-like echoes, fuzz chord punctuations and some sinewy fretless bass. Jeff Johnson's sound design has never been more inventive, with often minimalist loops, Balinese cycles and ephemeral synthesizer scrims. He remains a font of pensive, turning-to-dusk melodies. Within Johnson's ambiences Phil Keaggy sounds like twenty different guitar players, offering country twang, folky picking, spacey ambiences and jazz-inflected changes. But it all coheres into a chamber orchestra of the imagination. From the first piano notes to last guitar strum, Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy have created a nearly perfect album of deeply moving chamber music on Frio Suite. It's our CD of the Month for October. |
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Fernwood On their debut Almeria, they established the template for a global Americana music, mixing banjo and bouzouki, sitar and mandolin into a soundscape that's as sweet as a country fiddle tune and as beguiling as a raga. In a way, they're the American version of Iceland's Amiina, creating a gentle, slightly surreal sound like a music box with Indian tines being cranked in the Ozarks. Sangita takes a while to work its charms. Melodies are embedded in an intricate interplay of strings, like the strumming mandolins of "Mistral,” which are topped by a melody that alternates between sitar and fiddle. Indian ambiences, Appalachian picking and an elegant European nostalgia converge on "Cimarron," which sounds like a Nino Rota soundtrack for Fellini, played by a bluegrass band. Sangita is like an undiscovered musical tributary, a meeting of the Ganges River with the Swanee River. It's a CD full of sonic details and plaintive melodies. Sangita is our CD of Month for September. © 2009 John Diliberto |
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Chris Bocast and MJCatalin Working in a virtual, transcontinental mode with Cătălin Pîntea, a.k.a. MJCatalin, Bocast has found a meeting ground between dynamic compositions and ambient designs, a place where echoes of progressive rock are heard in electronica grooves.From the opening track, "To Cross the Sea of Clouds,” Bocast and MJCatalin establish the strategy of Stratagem. An ostinato bass line, ricochet filtered snare hits and a looping sequencer groove link up to an electronic drum loop while sweeping chords push the piece forward, It gradually opens up to Bocast's crying e-bow solos. After that, just sink into the world these two musicians orchestrate.MJCatalin is a Romanian drummer and electronic artist and he mixes both modes here. "Song of the Dodo," a lament for the extinct bird, is driven by his kinetic groove which sounds acoustically played until sound effects start streaming off his drum hits. Ironically, many of these tracks are sampled from their own works as each artist lifted from the other as well as cannibalizing their own recordings. A hidden track, "Zbor Indepartat" actually began as "Return of the Far Fleet" from Bocast's previous solo CD, Through the Airlock. MJCatalin added grooves and changed the piece completely. A track called "Nocturne" actually began as an MJCatalin piece called “That Magic Light.” Both tracks are reborn under Bocast and MJCatalin’s virtual ministrations. MJCatalin supercharges Bocast's soundscapes with swampy, churning rhythms, while Bocast adds harmonic complexity and melodic flights to MJCatalin's electronica loops. You can hear the roots of both artists in 80s synth pop (Bocast played in Tokyo Vogue) with songs like “Mr. X,” but there's also a progressive side to these musicians that emerges on the dynamic, shifting scenes of "The Hidden Face of Eva" and "Caelestis Caravel." Stratagem is an album of cinematic sweep. It's our CD of the Month for August. |
![]() (July 2009) A poignant song cycle that reveals its secrets over repeated listening listen to a review listen to samples |
Moby You can hear echoes of Moby's previous work throughout Wait for Me. Although there's only one track, "Study War," that has the archival voice samples Moby made famous on Play, his lyric phrasing has that sense of old gospel and blues, sampled and cut. "Pale Horses,” a song contemplating death, recalls the wistful scratchy sampled vocals of Play, but are actually sung by Amelia Zirin Brown in a voice that’s tired beyond her young years. And she does it again on the gospel hymn cadences of "Walk With Me." The title track is another song that seems to contemplate eternity of a lost soul. It's sung by Kelli Scarr, who has a fragility that breaks over the waves of Moby's ghost rhythms, minimalist piano figure and sonic scrims. She sings "I'm gonna ask you to look away, I lost my hands and it hurts to pray," like a half-remembered nursery rhyme, a paean to lost youth, a contemplation of the end. On a couple of tracks, Moby sings in a voice that's less than perfect, but like Brian Eno, it's an instrument that conveys what's needed. He's heartbreaking on "Mistake," falling somewhere between David Bowie and Lou Reed in a song of regret, singing "You never felt this lost before, and the world is closing doors/I never wanted anything more." Despite desperate lyrics, it's the only rocking tune on the CD. For all its synthesizers and processing tricks, Wait for Me is strangely quaint in its sound design, like a vision of the future from the past, covered in dust and cobwebs and attaining a deeper meaning through its archival status. © 2009 John Diliberto |
![]() (June 2009) A contemplative chill in down-tempo electronica Listen to a review |
Tosca Tosca's No Hassle is electronica's answer to "Don't Worry, be Happy," a soundtrack to "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream." It's our Echoes CD of the Month for June. |
![]() (May 2009) An ambient accomplice of Brian Eno creates pastoral music for strings Listen to a review |
Leo Abrahams
Abrahams brings us back home on the album’s closer, "Daughter of Persuasion," a haunting piece that culminates in grinding hurdy-gurdy and distorted guitars over an insistent groove. It's back to the world, but the world looks better now. Like The Penguin Café Orchestra in the past or Ludovico Einaudi in the present, Leo Abrahams taps a vein in music that is ultimately more profound than its pleasant, quaint surface. He pulls off a rare feat, making music that looks wistfully to a simpler time, but is touched with a modernist’s hand. The Grape and the Grain is the perfect Echoes CD of the Month for May. |
![]() (April 2009) Drummer creates other musical worlds Listen to a review |
Morgan Doctor’s Other Life is a CD of transcendent ecstacy and subversive melody and it's our Echoes CD of the Month for April. |
![]() (March 2009) Chilled cellos and melancholy moods Listen to a review |
David Darling
David Darling recorded his first solo album, Journal October in 1979. Thirty years later, Prayer for Compassion, like Darling himself, gets deeper and reveals more shadings and nuances with each listening. It's our Echoes CD of the Month for March. |
![]() (February 2009) A rocking bassist takes the ambient instrumental path Listen to a review |
Besides Sonia Dada, Erik Scott is best known for playing with Alice Cooper in the early 1980s and Flo & Eddie (singers from The Turtles and Frank Zappa) just before that. None of that really prepares you for the sensitivity and depth of Other Planets. Erik Scott's Other Planets is a bass player's album, if your idea of a bass player's album includes haunting moods and heartbreaking melodies. It's our February CD of the Month on Echoes. |
![]() (January 2009) Listen to a review |
Kaya Project's ethnic brew is all-embracing, from the bluesy "Jamming with Marco" to the ethno-techno excursion of "Obsidian Beats." That's tough to do on an album that goes from Klezmer clarinet to country picking, raga sarangi to electronica grooves. Sometimes that's all on one track, but Kaya Project make it sound like one happy global party. We take it for a spin as the first Echoes CD of the Month for 2009. |