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 (June 2010)  |
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 |
 (May 2010) |
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 |
 (April 2010) |
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. |
 (March 2010) |
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. |
 (February 2010) |
This Month's Pick: 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. |
 (October 2009) |
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. |
 (September 2009) |
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 |
 (August 2009) |
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 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 |
Erik Scott 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 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. |
