This Month's Pick:
Jami Sieber
Unspoken

(May 2008) Electro-Cellist goes global

The cello isn't your father's classical instrument anymore. It's not even Yo-Yo Ma's. A new generation of cellists is taking the most soulful of classical strings in new directions. You can hear it in rock acts like Loreena McKennitt, Rasputina, Apocalyptica and Cursive. Jami Sieber takes a quieter approach than most of them, joining cellists like David Darling, Zoe Keating, Rena Jones and Hans Christian from Rasa in creating an ambient chamber music. Jami has been a favorite on Echoes since her debut solo album, Lush Mechanique in 1994. Unspoken, her latest CD started out as a poetry and music project she released with Kim Rosen called Only Breath. I have to confess, when I hear the words poetry and music together, my ears glaze over. But on Unspoken, Sieber leaves the spoken words out and let's the poetry of her music speak. It's a richly textured album featuring Sieber's multi-tracked and looped cello, often joined by an ad hoc world music ensemble. "The River Between" is a spiraling dance centered on Sieber's cello and the bansuri flute of Steve Gorn, while the title track explodes in a serge of rhythm and a pulsing bass line from Kai Eckhardt (bassist with Stanley Clarke, Randy Brecker, John McLaughlin). Sieber has a wonderful sense of space, sending accenting cello arcs dipped in reverb through the stereo spectrum. While there are no words on Unspoken, Sieber brings some vocalise to bear, intoning an ethereal choir on the darkly brooding "Night Song" and exuberant chants on "The River Between." She also drops in a few solo cello pieces, just to show she can do it, but it's her looped and ensemble pieces that stand out. © 2008 John Diliberto

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(April 2008) A pastoral elegy for ancient corpses

Gerry O'Beirne The Bog Bodies and Other Stories I'm not sure where to begin with a new album by Irish guitarist and singer-songwriter Gerry O'Beirne. Do I start with the wonderful, multi-tracked instrumentals he's written for guitars, dobros and other stringed folk instruments? Or the macabre imagery of the title, The Bog Bodies and Other Stories? Let's get the macabre out of the way first. Bog Bodies are nearly perfectly preserved corpses dating back over 5000 years that have been discovered in bogs in northern Europe and the British Isles. They've got them in museums all over the place and they're very eerie to see. Here's a Wiki link with a picture: O'Beirne names two tracks for the bog bodies, "Oldcraoghan Man" and "Clonycavan Man." I don't know why O'Beirne picked that for an image, because his album is a beautiful, pastoral foray that manages to tap his Irish roots while actually sounding very Americana. Even though Bog Bodies is subtitled, Music for Guitar, that doesn't quite do it justice. On the "The Desert and Two Grey Hills," O'Beirne is playing 12 and 6 string guitars, slide guitar, Spanish guitar, ukelele, and using an e-bow. Staying strictly acoustic (does an e-bow count?), he takes a page from Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells doing the one-man orchestra thing. And like Oldfield, his songs are gorgeously lyrical. Gerry O'Beirne is a veteran singer-songwriter. His tunes have been covered by Maura O'Connell, Mary Black, and Cathie Ryan. He's also popped up as a folkie on A Prairie Home Companion. But on The Bog Bodies he shuts up and plays his guitar, along with just about anything else you can pluck and strum. Even though Gerry O'Beirne is Irish and hangs with Irish folk superstars like Kevin Burke, Andy Irvine, and the Waterboys, this album has more of a western americana feel. Especially when he's playing the National Steel Guitar, which seems to be the reborn instrument of the 21st century. O'Beirne plays it with a slide and it immediately calls up images of country blues and high plains, tapping into that Ry Cooder Paris, Texas vibe. Gerry O'Beirne's The Bog Bodies and Other Stories is our Echoes CD of the Month for April. Don't let the title scare you off. It's a beautiful album to welcome in spring. © 2008 John Diliberto

(March 2008) Iranian-American musician creates a global hymn

Jamshied Sharifi One In 2001, on the one month anniversary of 9-11, we sent out a call to musicians to submit music as part of An Echoes Requiem for 9-11. Jamshied Sharifi sat down and in a couple of days composed the most haunting and moving track we received. Simply called “Requiem,” it featured his wife and daughter singing in pygmy voices and Moroccan singer Hassan Hakmoun. Reworked slightly, with Seamus Egan from Solas on low whistle, it remains a poignant lament and it's now a powerful conclusion to his new album, One. From the first spiraling notes of Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo to the final notes of Requiem, it's evident that Jamshied Sharifi has picked up where he left off some ten years ago with his debut album, A Prayer for the Soul of Layla. That album brought musicians from many traditions together, calling out in spiritual chants, singing elaborate minarets of melody, all deployed over a lush, world fusion soundscape. Sharifi does it again, with many of the same singers, on One. We already knew Jamshied Sharifi's work before his solo album. He's composed soundtracks for Clockstoppers, Muppets from Space and Harriet the Spy. But those film credits don't really prepare you for the sound of Jamshied Sharifi's personal music. For that, you have to look to his work with the techno tribal group, Mo Boma. In fact, bassist Sküli Sverrisson and guitarist/percussionist Carsten Tiedemann from Mo Boma appear on One. They're part of a global cast laying down Sharifi's transcultural grooves and haunting moods, continuing the "One-World" view of this international musician born of an Iranian father and American mother in Topeka, Kansas. Jamshied Sharifi crosses global traditions, mixing instruments from Mexico, Africa and the middle east in percussively melodic arrangements with his keyboards and electronic wind instrument. In this exotic sound world, he creates a home for artists like longtime collaborator, Hassan Hakmoun, the Gnawa musician who prowls the sky with his desert cry and plucked sintir. Veteran mystical singer, Iranian-born Sussan Deyhim, graces a couple of tracks with her throaty, sensually imploring voice and singer-songwriter Paula Cole taps into a different, more ecstatic side on tracks like "A Charlotte Sky." Jamshied Sharifi's A Prayer for the Soul of Layla was our CD of the year in 1997. One might join it in 2008, but for now, it's the easy choice for our March CD of the Month. © 2008 John Diliberto

(February 2008) Four virtuosos reach six-string nirvana

International Guitar Night II It's a fingerstyle fantasy when International Guitar Night comes to town. They’re a touring group with a revolving cast of acoustic guitarists with one constant, founder Brian Gore. He's sacrificed much of his own career to make the world safe for acoustic guitarists: prior participants have included Peppino D'Agostino, Andrew White, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Andrew York from LAGQ. On this album, Gore corrals England's Clive Carroll, D'Gary from Madagascar and Miguel de la Bastide from Trinidad via Canada. You couldn't imagine a more stylistically diverse crew, but they all converge into a symphony of strings on IGN II. Clive Carroll follows in the finger style tradition of Davey Graham and John Renbourn, bringing a Celtic flair to his often complex excursions. Miguel de la Bastide is from a post Paco De Lucia generation of flamenco musicians, playing death-defying runs, counterpoints and rhythms on his nylon string guitar. Brian Gore is a highly melodic player, plugging into a sound between Leo Kottke and Windham Hill players like Alex De Grassi. The real find, however, is D'Gary. Hailing from Madagascar, he was on a mid-1990s collection called A World Out Of Time. His sound is part blues, part raga and part the cyclical plucking that recalls the valiha, a tube harp from Madagascar. D'Gary adds a rare vocal touch to IGN with his soulful song, "Betepo." But the rest of IGN II is instrumental with the four guitarists playing solos, duets, trios and quartets, often exchanging dagger licks on tunes like "Torrecillo del Leal" with Bastide and Carroll or "Swaddle Time Blues" with Carroll and Gore. But these musicians, while flashy, are never about flash and a trio piece by Gore called "Zen Scream" reveals the subtle intricacy they can conjure with Gore, Carroll and Bastide converging on this circular, vaguely country, melody. International Guitar Night is both the best guitar sampler you can imagine, and a coherent journey into the wonder of 6 strings times 4. It's our CD of the month for February 2008. © 2008 John Diliberto

(January 2008) A world fusion of exotic moods and scented textures

Paul Avgerinos Garden of Delight It's a journey into eastern exotica on Garden of Delight, the latest album from Paul Avgerinos. Avgerinos is a veteran musician and multi-instrumentalist who was trained at the Peabody Conservatory and worked as an orchestral bassist. That was before he heard Wendy Carlos's Switched-On Bach and decided to plug in. He's still wired, but now he uses his Connecticut studio as mission control for a world fusion sound that employs musicians from Turkey and the middle east as well as western players on instruments as technologically polarized as the Indian bansuri flute and Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI). The flute is played by Steve Gorn, who weaves his soul-drenched melodies like wisps of smoke curving off a candle. Listeners of New Age records in the 1980s might recall Kevin Braheny, who played synthesizers and EWI. He's changed his name to Kevin Braheny Fortune, but that distinctive EWI sound, part flute, part violin, returns here on tracks like "Night Blooms" and "Bird of Paradise," effecting middle eastern slides and arcs. Avgerinos creates an attractive, smooth surface that can actually detract somewhat from the subtle changes going on underneath. He uses Christine Yandell and Malika Zarra as ethereal choirs and sensual sirens, and plants gentle synthesizer pads across his compositions. Tracks like "Jasmine" could be a seductive walk into a harem while the opening "Rose of Heaven," featuring Avgerinos on nylon-string guitar, creates the perfumed aura of a temple. Turkish ney flute master Omar Faruk Tekbilek blows his serene, Sufi-inspired melodies across several tracks. He's joined by several other Arabic musicians on oud, violin and percussion, who lend some gravitas to the proceedings. Garden of Delight is an enchanting vision that reveals more each time you travel down its paths. © 2008 John Diliberto

(December 2007) Native Flute in an ambient west

Scott August Lost Canyons Scott August begins his latest CD with the pure tone of the Anasazi flute. According to his note, the flute design dates back to the 7th century. August's spare melody gradually becomes enveloped in elongated echoes and chimes which open up to the desert vista that is his latest album, Lost Canyons. August has always been a cut or two above most native flute players and his electronic arrangements around the flute are usually more than the rote synth sounds of his contemporaries. But he's taken it a step further on Lost Canyons. He’s a musician in the one-man band tradition of Mike Oldfield. He layers guitars, keyboards and all kinds of percussion into his compositions, moving from world fusion to airy ambiences. "Chasing the Sun" is an Ennio Morricone-style western landscape meeting Peruvian pan-pipes as August plays a triple barreled flute over a galloping rhythm and a slide guitar that scorches across the horizon. "Gentle Skies," on the other hand, is a gentle drift piece with no flute at all. But native flute is definitely the calling card for Lost Canyons. Scott August sets it in a vibrant global landscape of kalimba and udu drums on "Thunder on the Mesa" and lets it drift into ambient space on the title track. That piece also has udu drum and kalimba, but a completely different, more meditative mood. I've called August's arrangements electronic at times, but it's actually more of a matter of processing than synthesizing. There's very little synthesizer, instead, August sets his instruments in atmospheric ambiences and loops, letting them run through reverb and effects to create their own soundscape. On "Raven Dance" he employs subtle echo delays in a rhythm that works alongside the tabla and udu percussion grooves he orchestrates. Lost Canyons is a place where you won't mind losing your map. It's our December CD of the Month on Echoes. © 2007 John Diliberto

(November 2007) Electro-tone poems for the mind and body

Tom Middleton Lifetracks Lifetracks could be a career defining album for Tom Middleton. Among several other bands, he was the founder of the 90s ambient duo Global Communication, who laid much of the digital foundation for that decade's ambient and electronica music. Middleton has done a lot of side projects since then, but returns to his ambient roots on Lifetracks, a CD of tone poems that are as exuberant as they are evocative. Often sitting in a surging mid-tempo groove, Middleton sculpts soundscapes that are inspired by his world travels. I'm not sure how much a sense of place I get from them, but each track has a distinctive color and sonic signature while still merging into a cohesive CD flow. Lifetracks doesn't let up, from minimalist guitar groove of "Prana" to the free-floating send-off of "Enchanting." In between, Middleton sound checks many of his influences. There's the chilled Air-like Fender Rhodes and Moog squiggles of "Beginning of the Middle" and the X-Files sonar pings of "Shinkansen," named for the bullet train of Japan and every bit as propulsive. A couple of tracks, "Prana" and "Serendipity" reference the delayed guitar riffs of "Discipline" era King Crimson as well as the oft sampled"E2-E4" by Manual Gottsching. "Moonbathing," the track that started the project back in 1998, remains haunting and evocative with its slinky rhythm and melody built like a mosaic out of fragments of pings and piano. But it's challenged by songs like "St. Ives Bay," a seductive journey with a fretless bass line coursing through twittering synths, lush strings and delayed harp plucks. Minimalism is a strong influence on the album, and it's cited specifically on the Philip Glass-inspired "Sea of Glass" with its tooting soprano saxophone line against a cycling piano theme. Middleton makes all these influences his own in crafting an album of electronic vignettes and mini-symphonies that drift through your headphones like a film being scrolled through your mind. © 2007 John Diliberto

(October 2007)

Japancakes Giving Machines Japancakes has been around for a while, but their new CD, Giving Machines, is their most coherent statement to date. This was a band originally formed to play one melody for 45 minutes, but they've apparently found a lot more since then. Based in Athens, Georgia, they're the descendants of a city rife with eclecticism and guitar-centric music--think R.E.M.--but they've expanded that frontier in a mixture of alt-rock, country music and classicism. The opening track, "double-jointed," establishes the parameters with minimalist cycling guitars, high plains pedal steel guitar and Beatlesque strings. The pedal steel guitar playing off the strings on "Lalita" is a brilliant collaboration that evokes country roads in a cinematic array, as the pedal steel becomes a string section in itself. The reedy synthesizer lines they deploy throughout the album give it a strangely nostalgic hue. Powered by insistent rhythms, Japancakes hang in a ground between ambient chamber music and ambient rock with touches of Penguin Café Orchestra whimsy. "Recovering Australia" is like a country air out of Ireland that will leave you breathless and in tears. Like many guitar-centric bands, shoegazer music is part of Japancakes’ make-up and the Cocteau Twins loom large in their pantheon. They acknowledge the influence directly, covering a later Cocteaus song, "Heaven or Las Vegas," turning it into an alt-country jam. A lot of people have an immediate negative reflex when you mention country, but Japancakes taps into a particularly atmospheric strain of Americana that places them alongside masterworks like Bill Frisell's Nashville and Moodswings' Horizontal. And despite all the name dropping in this review, Japancakes produce a singular sound out of these influences on an album that never hits a wrong note. © 2007 John Diliberto

(September 2007)

Jeff Oster True It was exactly two years ago that Jeff Oster's debut album, Released, was picked as an Echoes CD of the Month. For his second album, the fluegelhorn and trumpet player expands and goes beyond the themes of that album. Co-produced again with guitarist and Windham Hill founder, Will Ackerman, True maintains many of the characteristics of Released with sophisticated electronic looping, harmonized and multi-tracked fluegelhorn lines and textured, ambient arrangements. The opening track "Saturn Calling" sets the pace with a quietly heroic, surging groove that alternates with pensive, wind blown fluegelhorn cries. After the ambient loops and textures of his first album, you can hear Oster's jazz fusion and progressive rock tendencies leaking out. From the opening track, you can hear the jazz voicings in his harmonized trumpet lines, but the loops and delayed U2/The Edge guitar sets a mood you won't find in jazz. There are some gorgeous arrangements like "Violet," which features Patrick Gorman (sounding remarkably like Will Ackerman) on acoustic guitar, while also playing electric guitar textures. With swirling cello from Eugene Friesen and one of those open plains piano breaks by Philip Aaberg it's a plangent elegy topped by Oster's yearning horn. A couple of tracks take the smooth jazz slide, notably "Serengeti" with its cool lounge rhythm, but it’s redeemed by one of Samite's transcendent vocal choirs. I would not have put the funky "Once In A Blue Moonlight," with its R&B wordless testifying vocal from Melissa R. Kaplan, on this album, but a trio with Ackerman and Aaberg, the ruminative "On One Knee," gently gets the album back on track. With its illusory edges and blurring of electric and acoustic textures, much of which is provided by sound designer Brian Carrigan, True is deftly sequenced. It accommodates dark film noir moods on "This Place" along with the jubilant, uplifting "Mumbai," a triumphant ode with a surging drum loop, Kaplan's wailing wordless vocals and Oster's clarion fluegelhorn cries sounding the charge. Jeff Oster has been true to the promise of his debut album and True is our Echoes CD of the Month for September. © 2007 John Diliberto

(August 2007)

Russel Walder Rise We travelled all the way to New Zealand for our August CD of the Month but it was worth the trip. Russel Walder should be familiar to longtime Echoes listeners, as half of a duo with pianist Ira Stein in the 1980s and early 90s. They recorded a few albums on Windham Hill and Narada, and had a minor New Age hit called "The Underground." They even appear on the very first Echoes Living Room Concert CD, 1990's A Door in the Air. But none of that quite prepares you for the ambient fourth world chamber music journey of Rise. The album opens with a short mind-clearing track called "Undressed." It's not a song so much as a gateway into the album, shedding clothes and wiping away the sound of the world with chirping flutes and backwards tapes. Once purified, the journey begins. "Gift of Fire" is a dark, syncopated march with an almost military groove and surging string pads. Walder's oboe cuts through and it's instantly recognizable, a sound that is both keening and soulful, weaving the voice of the renaissance with Middle Eastern bends and slurs. Walder alternates rhythmically heavier tracks with spacious meditations. "Standing-Falling" sounds like one of those ECM recordings made in a church while "Divine in Me" has a hymnal feel that recalls Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings." There's an epic feel to tracks like "Long Revealing" with its Middle Eastern overtones and trancey, Peter Gabriel "Passion" style groove. In addition to his searing oboe work, Walder also picks up the Armenian duduk which he plays on the darkly emotional "The World Goes Through My Mind." For those who might have been thrown off by the smooth jazz of his last album, Pure Joy, Rise will truly be a revelation. © 2007 John Diliberto

(July 2007)

David Helpling & Jon Jenkins Treasure David Helpling and Jon Jenkins are both veterans of ambient electronic music. Although we've been waiting eight years for a new album by David Helpling, his 1999 release Sleeping on the Edge of the World remains an Echoes favorite with its seductive melodies and rhythms. Jon Jenkins last graced us with his subtle and exotic orchestral electronics on Beyond City Light a couple of years ago. Treasure is a deceptive recording as collaborations go. Just when you think you have a melody or groove nailed as coming from Helpling, an element slips in that makes you think, no, Jenkins must have created this moment. You can never be sure on a CD that revels in the sonic sleight of hand of moody atmospheres that morph like cloud drifts and intoxicating melodies played on instruments that are just on the edge of conventional timbres, but have something slightly off. But while Helpling is a sonic chameleon, his ringing guitar lines do add a comforting touchstone when you can recognize it on tracks like "The Knowing." My ears instantly go to the more rhythmic, quietly affirming tracks like "Grand Collision," "Treasure," and "The Knowing." These compositions emerge wraithlike out of swirling atmospheres and textures to quietly thundering percussion. But the texture works provide their own charm, like the siren-like loops of "Beyond Words" or the cinematic expanse of "The Frozen Channel." That song actually began life as a soundtrack and the genesis of this project. Treasure isn't something you discover, following the map to where X marks the spot. Instead, it's an album you'll cherish like a treasure, a secret, personal gift of lush, sonic immersion that carries a message from another world. © 2007 John Diliberto

After the Night Falls Before the Day Breaks (June 2007)

Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie After the Night Falls and Before the Day Breaks It's been more than 20 years since pianist Harold Budd's first full collaboration with guitarist Robin Guthrie's former group, the Cocteau Twins, on The Moon and the Melodies. Primed by their atmospheric collaboration on the score to Mysterious Skin, they pick up where they left off, sans the voice of Elizabeth Fraser, on a pair of matched CDs, After the Night Falls and Before the Day Breaks. Guthrie lays down his signature deep-echo guitar arpeggios and shimmering electric glissandos while Budd drops piano notes, each placed with the elegance and thought of a Zen garden. The latter, whose 2005 retirement appears to have been greatly exaggerated, has lately been stripping away the electronics and making an introspective solo piano music, often born from melodic fragments and languid improvisations. It's nice to hear them framed by Guthrie in an electric gossamer where melodies flutter like tattered cobwebs in the echoing wind. So it's not surprising that some tracks have a tendency to vaporize. Songs with a bit of grounding like "Seven Thousand Sunny Years," with its spare rhythm track and refracting guitars, tend to hold up a little better, while "My Monochrome Vision" wanders into the drone zone. Of the two albums, After the Night Falls is more structured and formed, although Budd and Guthrie do wait until the last track of Before the Day Breaks to unleash a welcome slice of contrasting aggression with "Turn on the Moon." Together, these CDs have more than enough moments of sublime melancholy and deep ruminations to provide a soundtrack for that long lonesome film in your mind. © 2007 John Diliberto

(May 2007) Dead Can Dance singer and Gladiator soundtrack composer creates cinematic hymns

Lisa Gerrard The Silver Tree It's been a decade since Lisa Gerrard's last solo album, The Mirror Pool, but we've had much music from her in that time, including two albums with Pieter Bourke and Patrick Cassidy, Duality and Immortal Memory. It's her soundtrack work, however, that informs The Silver Tree. Gerrard has composed scores to films like Gladiator, The Insider and Whale Rider that draw upon her ability to channel ancient spirits and explore darker emotional terrain. Much of that emerges on The Silver Tree. Echoes of her theme "Now We Are Free" from Gladiator turn up in "Serenity" and "The Sea Whisperer." Both sound like the wind-swept ghosts of Irish laments blown over the hills of Tara. Gerrard rarely taps the dramatic orchestral side of soundtracks. Only the ten minute long suite, "Towards the Tower," attains that epic, cinematic sweep. In 2005 Lisa recorded a beautiful overture as a demo for the movie "Constantine." With mood swings from dark textures to dramatic crescendos, "Towards the Tower" sounds like it could be from the score to that supernatural thriller.But most of Gerrard's songs are like hymns, sometimes literally like "Abwoon," the Lord's Prayer sung in Aramaic, while other times on a more abstract level, with her channeled dialect on "In Exile" and "Come Tenderness." Her backings are simple: tremulous arpeggiated guitars, a whisper of the Armenian double-reeded duduk, a hint of the Chinese hammered dulcimer called the yang ch'in, some gentle synth-string pads. While a few tracks, like the bluesy dirge "Spaceweaver," immediately get your attention, most of The Silver Tree requires extended listening. Its roots grow deeper and branches broader with each sounding, and that's why it's our Echoes CD of the Month for May. © 2007 John Diliberto

(April 2007) A synthesizer guitarist creates a space music opus Hear sample tracks

Mark Dwane 2012 Mark Dwane is a musician with a penchant for mystical, mythical and science fiction imagery. His second album was Angels, Aliens and Archetypes, The Atlantis Factor was a tone poem to the mythical lost city, and on The Nefilim he rendered an electro-symphony for an alien race of angels that seeded the gene pool of earth. Now, 2012 takes its title from the Mayan calendar, and the year that marks the end of the 12th Baktun, a cycle about 400 years long. From his first CD, 1988's The Monuments of Mars, Dwane has wed this imagery with a cinematic music that paints the sky in electronic colors and drives the grooves with interlocking sequencers and percussion. Dwane stands apart from most electronic musicians because he's not a laptop jockey or keyboard player. He's primarily a guitar player and his songs are built around electric and acoustic guitars, and most notably, his MIDI-guitar or guitar synthesizer. He uses this device to bring an orchestra of sounds to his strings. "Skywatchers" is quintessential Mark Dwane, with a surging, filtered electronic rhythm sequence demarcated by strumming acoustic guitar and topped by swelling string-like synthesizers and some of Mark's own patented sounds like an echoing glissando trumpet choir. While many electronic musicians have given up the art of the solo, Mark Dwane whips it out, with a melodic lead that builds off his kinetic grooves. As a guitarist, Dwane has a melodic gift and dramatic sensibility that set him apart. On a song like “Baktun Cycle,” plucked strings play off each other in a contrapuntal loop, while guitar strums emerge into a chordal solo.Dwane makes effective use of environmental ambiences on songs like "The Sacred Tree" as very electronic sounding birds create stereo glissandos across his flute melody, blending into the echoes and rustles like a neon-lit jungle. The sound of rain mimics an electronic rainstick on one track and accompanies electronic droplets on another. While so many electronic musicians have headed off into the drone zone of sonic abstraction, Mark Dwane is an artist who still believes in the power of melody, the grandeur of a big crescendo and the stories held within a dramatic turn. He brings it all together on his ninth CD, 2012, our Echoes CD of the Month for April 2007. © 2007 John Diliberto

(March 2007) A country sound, with a chamber music aesthetic...earthy and real Visit Eric's MySpace page to hear sample tracks

Eric Tingstad Southwest Southwest was definitely the right direction for Eric Tingstad to turn in discovering a new musical path. Tingstad is best known as the guitar half of his duo with oboist and ocarina player Nancy Rumbel. They've been plying their pastoral chamber music since the mid 1980s, but Tingstad clearly had some other sounds in mind when he went southwest. From the opening track, Sunrise at Four Corners, it's obvious this isn't another acoustic chamber work as Terry Lauber's pedal steel articulates an open plains melody. While there are echoes of old country rock bands like Poco and New Riders of the Purple Sage, Tingstad's southwestern chamber music also embraces native sounds. "Voices of the Ancient Ones" has native chants from Petra Stahl and the native flutes of Gary Stroutsos creating canyon echoes. Tingstad mixes flat-picking guitar and fingerstyle on this disc, with tunes like "The Last Caballero" sounding like an old folk tune, but with a resonance that comes from glorified memory, making it feel bigger, fuller, and richer than the original probably ever was. Nancy Rumbel hasn't been left behind. She plays on several tracks, her oboe articulating the soulful refrain of "Kiva" against Stahl's chants. The pedal steel anchors this album in country, but this ain't line dances and spilled beer. Tingstad has taken a country sound, touched it with his chamber music aesthetic, and added just enough trail dust to make it earthy and real. © 2007 John Diliberto

(February 2007) Celestial evocations inspired by the night skies in the land of the midnight sun

Erik Wollo Elevations It's hard to resist picking an Erik Wollo album as a CD of the Month. We've done it once or twice when CDs have been released in close proximity, but every album could be a CD of the month no-brainer. We picked Wind Journey in 2001 and Blue Sky, Red Guitars in 2004. His music captures everything I think of as quintessentially Echoes: evocative, enveloping ambiences, soaring, heart-baring melodies, and kinetic, propulsive grooves, all orchestrated in electro-organic sound. Just about all of his CDs are perfect and Elevations is no exception. Wollo has always been a master of mixing deep churning textures with synthesized and acoustic elements. It's like folk music for the electronic village. Tracks like "The Wanderer" are cinematic adventures, surging forward on insistent, tribal rhythms that have a loping, behind the beat feel, chords that play out like slow sunrises and a lead guitar line that sings in harmonic sustains. Songs like "Evolution" are like electro-symphonies, morphing through minimalist moods, guitar exposition and crescendos into the heavens. It's easy to characterize Wollo's music as coming from the frozen north of Norway with its blasted landscapes and long winter nights. But indeed, Elevations overflows with chilly scenes of winter and implications of Norse mythology and heroic vistas. It's music that has epic dimensions, but with a minimalist's restrained elegance. Elevations lives up to its title, which is why we picked it as our February 2007 CD of the Month.   © 2007 John Diliberto

(January 2007) Chamber rock duo create a dream guitar masterpiece

Hammock Raising Your Voice...Trying to Stop an Echo From the opening cascade of glissando-guitars and falsetto vocal wail, Hammock sets themselves up in the ambient guitar band landscape populated by Sigur Ros, Explosions in the Sky and Robin Guthrie.  But this duo from Nashville, Tennessee is etching out their own sound that owes as much to shoe-gazer bands like Slowdive as the sacred minimalism of Arvo Part.  Although the first two tracks are vocals and despite the title, Raising Your Voice is predominantly instrumental.  Echoes listeners will appreciate track three, "Losing You," where Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson layer guitars, keyboards and an undertow of percussion into waves of sound that crescendo like the Red Sea parting.  Raising Your Voice... is a densely layered album on which  Hammock swings between paisley dappled beauty and serrated drones.  Overtones merge into ground shuddering chords and heavenly melodies as ethereal vocal choirs morph out of the clashing sustain.  Tracks like "Clouds Cover the Stars" are immersions in cloud distortion while "Floating Away in Every Direction" emerges from that distortion on shimmering winds of vapor.  Raising Your Voice... Trying to Stop an Echo is a massive artistic statement.  A Gravity’s Rainbow of ambient chamber rock, it defies the iTunization of the world.  You want to hear the whole thing, slipping it on, cranking up the volume and riding it into an infinite sunset.  ©2007 John Diliberto

A caravan journey of exotic moods and middle eastern modes (December 2006)

Loreena McKennitt An Ancient Muse It's been nearly ten years since Loreena McKennitt has put out a CD of new music. When we interviewed her in 1997, shortly after the release of The Book of Secrets, she was getting ready to take a breather. But when her fiancé died in a boating accident the next year, her short breather turned into nine years. The exhalation can be heard in An Ancient Muse, which picks up where The Book of Secrets left off, almost without missing a beat. The CD brims with exotic moods and middle eastern modes as she continues her fascination with that region where east and west converge. Hurdy gurdys, kanouns, percussion and bouzoukis dominate the landscape framed by Brian Hughes' morphing guitars and McKennitt's keyboard orchestrations. Her harp appears on only one track, "The English Lady and the Night," the most Celtic song on the disc, in which she adapts the words of Sir Walter Scott. Songs like "The Gates of Istanbul" and "Caravanserai" are classic McKennitt story songs, painting romantic pictures of life in the desert and poems of spiritual ecstacy. McKennitt shies away from writing lyrics about her personal life, rather, An Ancient Muse’s songs are about seeking peace and religious tolerance, with clear contemporary echoes of war in the east. The caravan journey of An Ancient Muse is one of hope and possibilities, all couched in McKennitt's global music utopia. ©2006 John Diliberto

A world of ethno-ambient dreams and exotic textures (November 2006)

Desert Dwellers Down Temple Dub: Flames It's a world of ethno-ambient dreams and exotic textures on the second CD from a virtual band called Desert Dwellers. They’re something of an ad hoc group, with members in California and New Mexico who got together for a DVD project and wound up turning it into a full-on ensemble project. The results are Down Temple Dub: Waves, and its follow-up, Flames, which is our November CD of the Month. Desert Dwellers follow in the Trance-Indian grooves of artists like the Midival Punditz and Loop Guru, mixing Indian and Middle Eastern exotica into surreal and flowing soundscapes powered by the chilled grooves of electronic percussion, acoustic tablas, digital loops and raga cycles. The group was gathered together by Craig Kohland of Shaman's Dream, but it’s taken on a life of its own with Trevor Walton (a.k.a. Trevor Moontribe or DJ Treavor), Amani and Rara Avis. Flame supposedly remixes earlier music from Amani and Walton. The results are a seamless descent into a sonic jungle where nature and technology, environment and ambience converge in rhythms that dance through your head and textures that swirl like windblown mosaics through melodies that seem transfigured by time. I especially love the way the ambient sounds, like wind, waves, bird and crowd sounds, merge into the music, creating harmonies with the flutes and synthesizers. There's a hint of soul-jazz funkifying with an old Wurlitzer electric piano on tracks like "Temple Dragons" that adds a spontaneous touch to an otherwise very carefully crafted music. These pilots of cyberspace tune in a rich, global confluence, making a music that is soulful and sensual, electronic and timeless. ©2006 John Diliberto

A Native American flute master casts windblown melodies in electronica spaces (October 2006)

R. Carlos Nakai Reconnections R. Carlos Nakai follows up his justly acclaimed collaboration with Keola Beamer, Our Beloved Land, with Reconnections, another CD that stretches his wings. It’s his second album with electronic artist Cliff Sarde, who spent his early days making forgettable fuzak records, but has had an awakening later in his career. With R. Carlos Nakai, he creates deep atmospheres, slightly glitchy grooves and shadows trails with Nakai's flute. Although many of the rhythms have a Native drum feel, most are coming from Sarde, who manages to be tribal and electronic at the same time. With more of a groove than just about anything Nakai has recorded, Reconnections is nevertheless a chilled record, full of exotic atmospheres. Many of those come from William Eaton, who pulls out his arsenal of mutated instruments including the lyra-harp guitar, spiral clef guitar, and koto-harp guitar. He gives Nakai a pan-global sound and his raga-rock sitar solo on "Crystal Radiance" is a beautiful time warp. Tracks like "Prairie Fire" are driving trance grooves while "Native Urban" sounds more urban cowboy with Eaton's slide harp guitar and Sarde's gritty groove. Randy Wood guests on one track, singing variations of a Round Dance song in a voice that flows in serpentine bends and swoops. Whether ruminating on the evocative "Zone," which sounds like a Lakota melody with a Celtic lilt, or driving through the waves of sound and rhythm on "Dreaming Worlds," R. Carlos Nakai ties it all together with solos that evoke birds and coyotes, untrammeled desert winds and canyon echoes. © 2006 John Diliberto

An Australian guitarist taps Americana strings (September 2006)

Tommy Emmanuel The Mystery On the opening track, "Cantina Senese," guitarist Tommy Emmanuel shows he can blow your socks off and leave them shredded in the breeze with a tune that's a cross between country and flamenco. After that, he shows his sense of roots with "Gameshow Rag/ Cannonball Rag" playing ragtime guitar with a hint of Django Reinhardt's hot jazz. Once he's established his chops, however, he deploys them across a CD's worth of evocative ballads, complex odysseys and a few contemplations that reveal why he's among the most respected and popular of contemporary acoustic guitar players. That trip begins with "The Mystery," a minimalist-tinged elegy with a melody that seems ever hopeful as it keeps unfolding itself like a country origami. "Lewis & Clark" is the album's masterwork, a haunting theme of the American west that takes a journey not unlike Lewis and Clark's, full of spectacular vistas and unexpected turns. While Emmanuel can dazzle you with the best of them, it's his more restrained songs that really speak to the soul, including delicate reveries like "The Mystery" and "The Diggers' Waltz," the latter based on the military "Taps." Emmanuel is a somewhat sardonic personality and while that's not apparent in his music, it is a sensibility that keeps his lovely themes from being cloying and sweet. All except the one vocal tune, "Walls," sung with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Watkins. It's the lone dip in the road of an otherwise extraordinary album of instrumental acoustic guitar music that sets the standard, again. © 2006 John Diliberto

An avatar of ambient guitar returns with his first solo CD in 14 years (August 2006)

Michael Brook RockPaperScissors During the course of the last 14 years, Michael Brook has scored and worked on films like Affliction and Black Hawk Down, collaborated with world music giants including Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Djivan Gasparyan, and produced singers like Julia Fordham and Jorane. That explains why he hasn't put out a solo CD since his 1992 ambient guitar manifesto, Cobalt Blue. On his CD, RockPaperScissors, he orchestrates his multiple experiences into one sweeping cinematic excursion. The opening "Strange Procession" sets the tone, an overture of sorts that includes strings, choirs, crushing rhythms alternating with elegiac moods, including mournful violin from Lebanese musician Claude Chalhoub. And of course, some scintillating guitar. But unlike Cobalt Blue, which was a showcase for Brook's Infinite Guitar, an instrument he invented to give him unending sustain across all six strings, RockPaperScissors highlights his abilities as an arranger who can draw upon as vast a musical experience as any musician living today. Among those experiences is the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan turning up on a track called "Pond," intoning a melody he and Brook recorded in the early 1990s. But most of Brook's collaborators are very much alive, including Chalhoub who plays on several tracks, Richard Evans, Brook’s secret weapon on bass, guitar, and keyboards, and singer Lisa Germano. She offers a haunting, fragile song on "Want." Two other vocal tracks are somewhat less successful, but that doesn't detract from sublime instrumentals like "Tangerine" or the surreal "Lightstar," which combines 60s style guitar instrumental with a Bulgarian choir. As a soundtrack composer and collaborator, Brook has mastered the art of emotional nuance and he brings it to bear on the magnificent vista of "Silverized," mixing gothic choirs with spaghetti western atmospheres. While the focus is on the arrangements, Brook reveals again why he's one of the most distinctive guitar stylists of our era, weaving in heart-tugging violin-like swells, blistering punctuations and on the King Crimson-like "Doges," ripping, hallucinogenic leads. RockPaperScissors is an eclectic album, but a unified, definitive statement from Michael Brook. © 2006 John Diliberto

A global music of the electro-imagination from England's leading ethno-techno artist (July 2006)

Banco de Gaia Farewell Ferengistan I was on a trip through England a few years ago driving all over the southwest through Cornwall, Dartmoor and Somerset and as I traveled in the car we'd listen to CDs of the musician we were on our way to interview. As it happened, most of them fell clearly in the New Age camp and as we journeyed from one artist to another, I started feeling musically constipated, until we headed out to see Toby Marks of Banco de Gaia. Slipping in CDs like Big Men Cry, Igizeh, Last Train to Lhasa, and The Magical Sounds of Banco de Gaia, it was like the floodgates had opened. My wife and I sighed with relief as Banco propelled us through the countryside on surging grooves and delirious melodies. "Obsidian" became a locked-in-your-head favorite after this trip. I feel the same way with the latest Banco de Gaia CD, Farewell Ferengistan. It's an edgier recording than we usually select for a CD of the Month, but taken as a whole, Farewell Ferengistan is a breathless trip through middle eastern grooves, ululating chants and singers, sci-fi voice clips and often ecstatic melodies. Toby Marks doesn't place limits on his music. Instead, anything is possible and everything usually happens. How else to explain the 50s style backbeat on "Ynys Elen?" Yet Banco de Gaia holds it together through insistent, four-on-the-floor grooves and hallucinogenic breakdowns that defy cliche. He's the electronica artist with probably the deepest connection to Pink Floyd, mixing minimalism, spoken snippets and environmental sounds (the latter courtesy of Nigel Shaw's Dartmoor Journey). And like the Floyd, there's often socio-political comment just beneath the surface. A short atypical vocal tone poem, "The Harmonious G8," featuring singers from each G8 country, pretty much lays out Marks's political stance. But Banco de Gaia doesn't preach. He grabs you and makes you smile, even in his bittersweet moments.                                                                                    © 2006 John Diliberto

Ambient pianos in sacred space (June 2006)

Jeff Johnson A Thin Silence ECM Records used to have a slogan, "the most beautiful sound next to silence." Jeff Johnson approaches that aesthetic on a new CD called A Thin Silence. We've known Johnson's music for years through his Celtic inflected work with flutist Brian Dunning and his many orchestral-electronic CDs like Prayer for St. Brendan. But nothing prepared us for this album of ambient piano and orchestrations. A Thin Silence taps into modes of contemplation and spirit. For Johnson, that's inspired by the story of the prophet Elijah and his position as a Selah worship leader. Selahs are meetings of silent contemplation, prayer and music. But just as you don't have to be a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church to appreciate the music of Arvo Pärt, you don't have to follow Johnson's Christian faith to be submerged in these deep atmospheres. All the music starts on piano, as Johnson plays out sparse melodies and echoing chords that recall the pioneering work of Harold Budd. He surrounds them with atmospheres that shift and rustle like distant voices calling out from the edges of consciousness. Tracks like "Bright Sadness" bring in electric guitars from Tim Ellis, tolling a mournful refrain against sparse percussion loops while "Heaven's Door" seems to open up to new vistas as Johnson again brings in a quietly serging percussion track against shimmering, slow motion glissandos. Only the last track, a vocal tune called "Circle Me," is amiss. Johnson just can't stop himself from singing sometimes. But he also can't stop himself for making one of the most serene albums of the year. Jeff Johnson's A Thin Silence is our June CD of the Month. © 2006 John Diliberto

A one man opus from a classical country bassist (May 2006)

Edgar Meyer Edgar Meyer Edgar Meyer's self-titled album is one of the most deceptively beautiful CDs of the year. And like Edgar Meyer himself, it's easy to take for granted. He's a virtuoso bassist who is as comfortable playing and composing for symphony orchestras as he is jamming with Bela Fleck or Jerry Douglas. He was cited as a genius by the MacArthur Foundation, but he even wears that honor with modesty. His new album appropriately bears his name as the title, because Edgar Meyer is the only musician on it. But this isn't some acoustic bass vanity piece. Meyer overdubs himself on piano, da gamba (a violin like-precursor to the double-bass), dobro, banjo and probably a few other things in music that runs a gamut from country to classical and points totally off the track. Simple tunes like the piano and bass duet "First Things First," reveal Meyer’s intimate side, while "Roundabout" is an explosion of minimalist keyboard figures, bluegrass breakdowns and bass that alternates from violent pizzicato to elegiac arco bass lines. His romp through “Woody Creek” is a joy, but his deep, legato melody on "Whatever" plumbs the deepest melancholy. And so it goes throughout the album as Meyer creates a musical fantasy of classical country chamber music. In addition to the double-bass, Meyer is clearly a master on piano and somehow plays the banjo and dobro with equal aplomb. But this isn't an album about virtuosity. It's an exploration of Edgar Meyer's deep immersion in music, a synthesis of his experiences blown into a landscape unfettered by boundaries, demands or expectations. It's an album of discovery and almost architectural spaces as Meyer constructs his world. More than anything, Edgar Meyer makes music that just makes me smile, as if we're discovering these connections, spaces and vistas right alongside him. © 2006 John Diliberto

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Electronic instrument builder finds the melody (April 2006)

Saul Stokes Vast Rarely has an experimentalist sounded so haunting and soulful. A willful explorer, Stokes makes his own electronic instruments which often create unpredictable sounds, even for the inventor. And he likes that. But on Vast, Stokes reins in his sonic experiments, welding them together with controllers and computers, building structure out of chaos, and resolving it all in an album that shares a Mobyesque sense of joy and melancholy. Even when sounds are poinging and boinging like a spaceship factory, you can hear that many of his themes come from playing the piano and even humming around his house. Every track on Vast is a kinetic excursion. Sometimes they're mysterious and foreboding like "Lighthaus" and sometimes exuberant in their celebration of sound like "Bursts & Blooms." While Stokes' earlier CDs, Fields and Zo Pilots were often constructed live, with Vast he's taken his music into the computer zone and the results are structured journeys that sometimes follow dream logic, and sometimes seem as carefully conceived as a roller coaster ride. The first piece, "Chrome Garden," is an electro-symphony of startling shifts and turns, landscapes moving on the inner eyelids as doors open, floors drop out and windows pop up on new vistas. Resolutely electronic, Stokes uses none of the cliches to which we've become accustomed in electronica. His rhythms seem drawn from life more than pre-programmed machines and his sonic palette exults in distortion, odd filtering and resonances. It all comes together in a CD that is charming and imposing at the same time. It was the obvious choice for our April CD of the Month. © 2006 John Diliberto

India, electronica and orchestra meet in a virtual east-west symphony (March 2006)

The Bombay Dub Orchestra Indian fusions abound these days. In fact, we were a bit reluctant to pick this album as a CD of the Month so close on the heels of Rasa's Temple of Love album from February. But with this two-CD set, Garry Hughes and Andrew T. MacKay have come up with an exotic east-west journey that defies expectations. Echoes listeners should know Garry Hughes from a pair of electronic albums in the 1980s on the defunct Audion label, Ancient Evenings and Sacred Cities. Besides scores of pop music projects, in the 1990s he collaborated on the first Euphoria album, providing the electric grooves and moods for Ken Ramm's slide guitar on tracks like "Delirium." Bombay Dub Orchestra is another collaboration, this time with Andrew T. Mackay, an orchestral arranger and conductor (not to be confused with Andy MacKay of Roxy Music). Working with a 28 piece Bombay string section and Indian classical musicians from Bombay and London, Hughes and MacKay have composed a seamless mesh of electronic and acoustic orchestrations that results in a global symphony. Rather than the cheesy Bollywood arrangements mixed with rote electronica rhythms you might expect, they've orchestrated seductive trip-hop grooves and intricate rhythm mosaics in a neo-classical soundscape. Things get a little dubbier on the second CD, a disc of re-mixes that explore further dimensions in this music. The slow-mo skank of "Rare Earth: Forest of Thieves Mix," is especially intoxicating while "Feel: The Diamond Cake Mix" is the track that most lives up to the "Dub" of the Bombay Dub Orchestra, with throbbing bass and melodica. But it's in the virtual Indian dreamscape that the Bombay Dub Orchestra leaves its haunting echoes. © 2006 John Diliberto

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(February 2006)

Rasa Temple of Love With yoga studios sprouting on every corner, Vedic chants of India have been growing in popularity over the years. The west first heard these songs in the 1960s when the Hare Krishna sect started popping up on urban streets, banging tambourines and chanting "Hare Krishna." In 1970, George Harrison revealed a different sonic possibility when he produced an album by the Radha Krsna Temple that spawned the FM hit, "Govinda." Harrison added orchestra, sitars, and percussion to chants that were previously sung barely in tune with spartan instrumentation.Rasa were among the first to take this concept further. Their early albums were highly rhythmic affairs with Hans Christian's percussion loops driving orchestrations of synthesizers, sarangi, nyckelharpa, and cello. Floating over it all was singer Kim Waters, whose serene voice provided easy entry into these Hindi sacred hymns. Kim Waters pitches her smokey alto between the sacred and the sensual, articulating the Sanskrit texts in gentle and embracing waves. TEMPLE OF LOVE continues this theme, though on an even more contemplative level. Perhaps coming off his solo album of classical cello works, LIGHT & SPIRIT, Christian has opted for a more placid soundscape that recalls classical adagios as much as Indian ragas. Songs like the opening "Jaya Radhe" have lovely, Samuel Barberesque adagios in the middle while "Sundara Mor" evokes ECM jazz reveries with slow-drip vibraphone and swooning cello. "Parama Karuna" is a heaven-sent lullaby that drifts into the ether over a slow, languid drone.But Rasa doesn't completely leave the grooves behind. "Doya Koro" and "Om Purnam" get into slow trance rhythms with Christian mixing electronic loops and Indian hand percussion.There actually is a Temple of Love, in fact, a bunch of them in Khajuraho, India and they are full of erotic carvings and stories of love won, lost and spurned. What could be a better soundtrack for the month of Valentine's Day? © 2006 John Diliberto

(January 2006)

Bluetech SINES AND SINGULARITIES They make a trippy, sensual brand of electronica in the San Francisco Bay Area, and nowhere is that more evident than the sounds of Bluetech. Bluetech is the recording persona of Evan Bluetech (nee Bartholomew). With his laptop computer he made his new CD, Sines and Singularities, a delirious ascent into ambient architecture. Without being a dance album, SINES AND SINGULARITIES is full of movement where sinuous flows of aerial limbs sculpt three dimensional patterns in space. Bluetech sounds resolutely modern, while simultaneously recalling sounds from old Pong games and Casio VL-Tone synthesizers. It's all fodder for melodic, glitch-gilded contortions carried on dub-tinged grooves. From the hipster electro-bop of "Condensation" to the pastoral reverie of "A Garland of Stars" featuring cellist Rena Jones, Bluetech has meticulously shaped an album that's giddy in its exhilaration and cosmic in its aspirations. © 2006 John Diliberto

(December 2005 )

Tristeza A Colores A new breed of instrumental guitar band has emerged in the last few years, and they don't pay homage to the Guitar Gods paradigm. Instead, they create intricately arranged, cinematic landscapes that value interplay and textural shifts more than flashy solos. Bands like Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai and Lanterna are part of this sound, but one of the first of the current generation is Tristeza. They formed in 1997 with guitarists Christopher Sprague and Jimmy LaValle, bassist Luis Hermosillo and James Lehner on drums. LaValle has since left the band to work with his group, The Album Leaf, but the other members have continued, adding keyboardist Sean Ogilvie and guitarist Alison Ables. On A COLORES, Tristeza takes a slightly more atmospheric and elegiac approach to their sound, sculpting compositions with meticulously enfolded layers that seem to reveal new facets with each listening. With the twin guitars hocketing simple figures back and forth, they have echoes of surf music and minimalism with electric twang and insistent grooves. Ogilvie's keyboards, mostly a retro Fender Rhodes and an old synthesizer, definitely lend a more atmospheric air to the band. A COLORES has been in my car CD player for a couple of months now, so the imagery in my mind is linked with driving, movement, shifting scenes and enveloping sound. The thing is, Tristeza gives me that when I'm not driving as well. © 2005 John Diliberto

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(November 2005 )

Ulrich Schnauss Far Away Trains Passing By You don't always get a second chance to acknowledge a musician, but I feel like we just got one with Ulrich Schnauss. His last album, A Strangely Isolated Place, should have been an Echoes CD of the month when it was released in America late last year. The album went on to become a favorite here. We missed the boat then, but not this time. Far Away Trains Passing By is actually his first album. It was released in Europe in 2001, but it's been out of print and is being issued in the U.S. for the first time. It's lost nothing in the intervening years. Ulrich Schnauss is a German electronic artist who is influenced by forebears like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, but unlike so many retro-space artists, doesn't sound like he just emerged from their dusty studios after a 30 year seclusion. Instead, Schnauss is keyed into contemporary electro rhythms, a bit of New Wave romanticism, and melodies that have that infinite, never-ending sound of a Pachelbel Canon. Like Brian Eno, Schnauss has perfected a balance between quiet yearning and joyful heroism in his music, with sweeping major chord progressions that are triumphal without being ostentatious, heroic without being pompous. Although his music is rhythm-centered, with crackling snares and electro-glitches, it's ultimately the melody that draws you in, tuned on glistening, bell-like timbres and space-organ sustains. The re-issue of Far-Away Trains comes with a bonus CD that includes 6 tracks pulled from various Schnauss side projects and tracks that didn't make the original album. Although there are Far Away Trains Passing By, expect frequent stops on the soundscape of Echoes. ~John Diliberto

(October 2005 )

Sumner McKane North Ever since Ry Cooder laid down his lonesome slide guitar on the laconic soundtrack to Wim Wenders's movie, PARIS, TEXAS, there has been a strain of ambient Americana music emerging throughout the country. It includes producer Daniel Lanois's cosmic cajun country, Lanterna's surf-spaghetti ambient-westerns and Bruce Kaphan's pedal steel guitar in space. Sumner McKane has been traversing the same terrain for several years now from his home in Portland, Maine and NORTH is easily his most accomplished work yet.McKane is one of those guitarists who makes it seem simple, but his easy-going fingerstyle on electric and acoustic guitars is deceptive. He's an orchestrator of guitar, creating lush filigree and sometimes searing leads.For NORTH, he's assembled a small, sympathetic ensemble of drums, bass and occasionally violin. "Careful it Doesn't Look Safe Yet" is typical, with double acoustic guitars laying down rivulets of sound while McKane's electric fades in and out in phantom sustains. McKane's "day job" is playing in a Country & Western band and you can hear that influence here in the plaintive fingerstyle picking and pedal-steel-like sustains and bends he brings to his electric guitar.Track after track on NORTH, McKane paints a uniquely American landscape, a travelogue for a cross-country trip from pristine New England winters to the wide-open expanses of the plains. © 2005 John Diliberto

(September 2005 )

Jeff Oster Released Jeff Oster spent his youth playing in bar bands, then opted out into the lucrative world of financial advising. All the while, he spent his free time playing in an Oakland funk group. None of that will prepare you for Jeff Oster's debut album, Released. Echoes listeners have been getting a taste for this CD since last year when Oster put out a 4 song EP. All four of those tunes appear here on a disc that elaborates on the themes of that little EP teaser. Oster plays trumpet, an instrument not usually associated with ambient music, which may explain why he usually employs the more mellow flugelhorn. Exhibiting amazing restraint, Oster eshews the usual smooth jazz rhythms and funk designs of artists like Chris Botti and instead turns his focus on moods and atmospheres. Some tracks are wistful and pastoral like the title track, which is mostly just Oster and guitarist Will Ackerman, who also produced the album. Others chart darker terrain like the mysterious, foreboding sound of "Behind the Veil," which features fractured programmed rhythms pulsing behind vocal fragments and ethereal choirs from Happy Rhodes. She appears on the tribal electronica of "Haleakala" as well, a track co-written by Philip Aaberg, who brings his acoustic piano ruminations to bear on "Fool's Gold." He sounds a lament from the edge, along with Oster's hymn-like harmonized trumpet lines. Now in his 40s, it's taken Jeff Oster a lifetime to arrive at his debut album. And Released is worth the wait. -John Diliberto

(August 2005 )

R. Carlos Nakai & Keola Beamer Our Beloved Land Amidst all the Don Ho, hula dancing cliches and sweet Hawaiian slack key guitar, it's easy to forget Hawaii's tribal heritage. Slack key guitarist Keola Beamer taps into that spirit when he teams up with Native American flute player R. Carlos Nakai on Our Beloved Land. Though most of the tunes are Hawaiian in origin and largely arranged by Beamer, he lets Nakai take them out into the deepest southwest desert, tumbling them through canyon echoes and ancient chants of his own. Despite their physical and cultural separation, it's difficult to tell where Hawaii ends and mainland Native America begins. Beamer's wife, Moanalani Beamer, swirls an oeoe (gourd whistle) on "Ka Honua-The Earth" that sounds like it comes up out of a canyon gorge. Nakai and Beamer's voices, despite intoning different sounds, come together as one. The rhythms, played on percussion instruments from Hawaii, the southwest and Africa are trance-like and ceremonial.Keola Beamer has a deep tenor voice that turns Hawaiian chants into soulful melodies on tracks like “Waipi'o Paka'alana" and "Nani Hā'upu-Beautiful Hā'upu." You don't have to understand the Hawaiian lyrics to comprehend the wistful, deep yearning in the song. Nakai's flutes act like an answering echo to Beamer's pleas and have never sounded more atmospheric and chameleon-like. You can hear Nakai mimicking the voices and sounds of animals as he blows them into melody against Beamer's plaintive acoustic guitar. And Beamer gets into the act when he picks up the nose flute on "Lapule-'Sunday'" as the two duet over a rainforest recording. The title, Our Beloved Land, is overly sentimental, but the music cuts right to the core. Emerging from Our Beloved Land is like stepping out of a deep dream. ~John Diliberto

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