During Tuesday’s Fresh Air, punk icon Iggy Pop had the following exchange with Terry Gross while talking about this many near-death experiences.
Iggy Pop: One time I did actually hear the trumpets and the celestial choir and all that stuff, and it was pretty insipid.
Later in the interview:
Terry Gross: You said during one of these near death experiences that you heard the celestial choirs and the music was insipid. Can you tell us more about what you heard. As a musician and a rocker it’s kind of interesting to hear.
Iggy Pop: It sounded like a Tangerine Dream album
Iggy Pop & Terry Gross: [laugh knowingly]
Iggy Pop: It was like ahhhoooohhhaaaahhhh, and boop-boop-boop. It was kind of like that. I don’t remember the melody.
I guess that makes Iggy’s rendition of “Autumn Leaves,” rendered like Leonard Cohen on Quaaludes, the sound at the doors of hell. You can hear it on his CD, Preliminaires.
With all due respect to the influential music Iggy has made, I’m wondering how much stock I should put in the perceptions and recollections of a drug-addled rocker in the throes of an overdose who used to cut his chest on stage while exposing himself.
Besides, what was he expecting at the gates of heaven, “I Want to Be Your Dog?”
The theme to the TV series, Heroes might be the shortest title music on television right now. It was created by Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin, and if you yawn, you might miss it.
Wendy Melvoin: You know what? We were absolutely blown away when they said they wanted 10 seconds. And how were we going to make something memorable at 10 seconds?
The theme to Heroesmay fly by quicker than Hiro jumps through time, but the rest of that show is a non-stop cinematic swirl that ranges from the orchestral to ambient, east to west, poignancy to rage.
You might remember Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin as Wendy & Lisa, the vamped up guitarist and keyboardist for Prince and the Revolution in the 1980s. Prince fired them in 1986 and after a few CDs that received mixed reception, the duo found themselves creating TV soundtracks and film scores. They can be heard on Showtimes Nurse Jackie, Foxes Virtuality and most notably, NBC’s Heroes.
A sonic signature to their score is the voice of Indian musician Shenkar, formerly known as violinist L. Shankar from the group Shakti.
Lisa Coleman: It’s when somebody’s power actually happens or when somebody discovers they have a power or when somebody will be running and then all of sudden, they can run really fast, like, “Whoa! What just happened?” We’ll do a Shenkar voice.
They recently released their own album, White Flags of Winter Chimneys and you can hear the influence of soundtracks in their own music.
Wendy Melvoin: It’s just a huge influence now on when we write a pop song. We were able to really pick apart each song like little mini-movies.
Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin’s soundtrack to Heroes has just been released and the latest CD by Wendy & Lisa is White Flags of Winter Chimneys. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.
Michael Whalen and Atomic Skunk-Free electronic music from very different musicians.
I’m not sure why these artists do it and not even sure I agree with the concept, but more and more musicians are letting out music as free digital downloads. Not just a song or two, but entire CDs worth of materiel. Here’s two more from electronic artists working at opposite ends of the spectrum in almost everyway.
Michael Whalen is the veteran. Haven’t heard of Michael? Well he only has well over 20 CDs released on labels like Narada and Hearts of Space. He’s scored numerous soundtracks, commercials and released albums from the meticulous space melodies of Nightscenes to commercial fodder. Michael can be squirmingly sentimental, bleeding his heart all over his synthesizers with titles like “Swimming in a Lovely Sea of You,” though to be honest, that track, from My Secret Heart, is actually a very deep ambient piano piece. Michael is working with a more complex harmonic language than most electronic musicians and he’s as much a player as a composer. Those elements give his music some added heft even in their most maudlin moments.
For the past two months you’ve been hearing selections on Echoes from an album by Michael Whalen called Tree of Life. It’s a 60 minute work of expansive, sometimes symphonic electronics. A none-stop trip through spacey freefalls, lyrical piano themes and sequencer interplay that may be his best work yet. Michael has a more original sound palette than most of his peers and it gives his music a depth and expression often lacking in composers at the prettier end of the electronic scale. As he often does, Michael sells his music short with trite imagery. He says Tree of Life is “designed for meditation, relaxation and yoga.” Don’t be fooled. It’s an album for imagistic exploration and mood elevation with some very intricate arrangements. AND IT’S FREE! Michael is releasing this as a free download at the highest quality. I don’t get it, but I did get download and you should as well. It’s on his website at www.michaelwhalen.com
Michael Whalen is a working musician with a great studio, lots of gear and an infrastructure that allows him to make commercial music as well as his more personal works like Tree of Life.
Atomic Skunk, on the other hand, is more typical. He’s an indie-musician, although he’s gigged on the San Francisco rock scene as guitarist Rich Brodsky for over 20 years including playing in a Grateful Dead cover band, Buffalo Roam. Although he plays a sampled guitar with Midi-guitar, he made most of Binary Scenes album working strictly within a computer and the Ableton Live program. The music is sometimes free-floating deepspace like “Suspended Ascent 1″ but he often infuses electronica grooves as the album moves from gentle pastoral guitar-strumming ambiences like “China Box” to cyclical bell-tones that recall Klaus Schulze’s “Crystal Lake” on “Chronoswamp,” but updating those retro sounds with glitched stutters. Those are two of our favorite tracks on Echoes along with “A Winter’s Gift.” The name Atomic Skunk kind of stinks (yuck-yuck), but the music on Binary Scenes, except for a couple of audio verité soundscapes, is mostly note perfect ambient, full of mood, unusual dreamstate shifts and psychedelic edges. You can buy a high-quality download, but he’s also offering it as a free download mp3 at 128k.
I haven’t seen the documentary, which just opened at a film festical, but some interesting tidbits are gleaned from the trailer and an interview with the director, Dianna Dillworth.
Who’d have thought that the sound of King Crimson, Tangerine Dream and the Moody Blues was born in the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, which apparently provided the source materiel for the original Chamberlain and Mellotron tapes.
There’s also a hilarious YouTube promo film for the Mellotron from the early 1960s.
Best Chamberlain/Mellotron Songs and/or Albums:
The Beatles “Strawberry Fields” Magical Mystery Tour The Beatles use of mellotron flutes on Strawberry Fields helped paved the way for this instrument and revealed that the Mellotron was’t a replacement for the orchestra, but a whole new soundworld unto itself
The Moody BluesDays of Future Passed Like The Beatles, the charm of the mellotron in their music was that it didsn’t sound like an orchestra. IN fact, their actual orchestral arrangements sound sappier now than they did 40 years ago, but the mellotron arrangements sound timeless. Tangerine Dream “Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares” Phaedra The Mellotron is all over this album and other TD releases from this era. They took the mellotron out of the orchestral mode and sent it to textural space.
King CrimsonIn the Court of the Crimson King What can you saw about this quintessential mellotron recording, creating the orchestra of doom on the title track and pastoral fantasies on “I Talk to the Wind” and “Moonchild”
Popol VuhAguire I can’t tell you how many musicians I’ve talked to who cite the opening of Werner Herzog’s Aguire-The Wrathe of God with the conquistadors descending into the mist shrouded Amazon valley to the strains of Popol Vuh’s haunting score Future Sound of LondonThe Isness I suspect they used samples off of lots of other records with mellotrons, but this trip into post-electronica psychedelia resounds with flutes and strings redolent of a great acid trip, coutesy of the Mellotron. Richard BurmerMosaic Richard actually used a Chamberlain of much of his debut album, a masterpiece of sampled orchestral exotica where the smokey, atmospheric sound of the Chamberlain adorned lovely tunes like Ave Plaedelio and fever dreams like “The Serum.” Sam PhillipsCruel Inventions You wouldn’t think of this singer-songwriter as a mellotron exponent, but producer and then husband T-Bone Burnett brought the Chamberlain in to create slightly surreal beds for Phillips often tortured songs.
This is off the Ambient list, a very cool blog called Live Ambient Scene . Much of their materiel is generated from another site called Ambient-Art-Lounge. It’s all in German, but they’ve got a host of live performances, videos, video art and more. Interestingly, a lot of it seems like actual “live” ambient performance with improvised jam sessions as opposed to laptop jockies staring into screens. You can check out the numerous videos or dial up some of their long audio streams. They have tons of videos on their site, but here’s one of them off of YouTube.
Gong is the legendary space rock group that began life after Daevid Allen, an Australian, was denied entry into England with his band, The Soft Machine.
The group has existed off and on for over four decades with many incarnations including a long stint in the 1980s when Allen wasn’t involved at all. Allen created a fantasy world where bandmembers had pseudonymns and portrayed the mythology of Zero the Hero, Planet Gong and the Octave Doctors. It was cosmic, whimsical and often dadaesque. Allen was the one who recognized the possibilities of Syd Barrett’s glissando guitar style and expanded it into the spectacular spacescapes on albums like You as well as a nice pure glissando guitar solo recording called Twenty-Two Meanings. Talk to Steve Roach, Ozric Tentacles, Robert Rich, or Ian Boddy and you’ll find musicians influenced by Gong.
I’ve had some of my most amusing interviews with Allen, including one at KALX in Berkeley in 1980 where midway through the interview Allen went into a spontaneous rant, ran out of the studio down the hall and I think out the door, still rapping, before returning to the studio just as his rant concluded.
I saw the Pierre Moerlen version of Gong a few times and a Daevid Allen led edition with Bill Laswell on bass at the Zu Manifestival of Progressive Music in the 1978. At that concert, Allen essayed Gong’s Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy and right when the line, “Cops at the door” from “Perfect Mystery” was recited, the police actually pulled the plug on the power. In the dark, Allen led the audience in chant from You.
With the deaths of drummers Pip Pyle and Pierre Moerlen, and legal problems besetting synthesist Tim Blake, it’s impossible to have anyone’s quintessential version of Gong appear, but this Nearfest edition will be the closest in quite some time. It includes Allen, guitarist Steve Hillage, Gilli Smyth, Miquette Giraudy and Mike Howlett, all core members, augmented by Chris Taylor and Theo Travis.
Gong spun off many bands including the American-based Gongzilla, but the best is Steve Hillage who has taken the promise of Gong and truly transformed it with his System 7 and Mirror Systemprojects.
Gong will join two other bands from the 70s, Supersister and PFM and relatively new bands like D.F.A, Cabeza de Sera, Quantum Leap, Beardfish and Oblivion Sun at this year’s Nearfest, June 20 and 21st at the Zoellner Arts Center in Allentown, PA.
Note to Nearfest organizers. This is so obvious, I bet you’re already on top of it. Since you’ve already got Hillage and Giraudy there as part of Gong, why not book them as System7/Mirror System for their own set. Seeing Gong will be a wonderful exercise in nostalgia, great music that many of us will see performed live for the first time by its originators. But Hillage and Giraudy are making music for the 21st Century, music that truly progresses from the prog-styles of the 70s. Let’s put some progress in Progressive Rock.
Having just played a track from Popol Vuh’sDas Hohelied Salomos on WXPN’s Highs in the 70s: Progressive Rock show, I was thrilled to discover a new Popol Vuh video up on YouTube. It’s a track of the “classic” PV line-up with singer Djong Yun, guitarist Daniel Filschesher, oboe player, Robert Eliscu and PV founder and pianist, the late-Florian Fricke. It’s footage from WDR, West Germany TV of a live take on “Kyrie from the Hosianna Mantra album. I posted another video up in an earlier blog.
By the way, thanks to all the folks who called in to WXPN Saturday during the show, leaving great requests and fond memories from the days of Diaspar.
This weekend I’ll be guesting on Highs in the 70s: Progressive Rock on WXPNin Philadelphia. It’s among a series of irregularly scheduled retro shows they run. It’s going to be an 8-hour marathon, from 10AM til 6PM on Saturday, January 3. I’ll be in for the first half, Chuck Van Zyl from Star’s Endwill be on in the second half and the whole thing is being run by WXPN’s Dan Reed and his cohort, Biff Kennedy.
These progressive rock retroscursions are always an interesting exercise for me. I was a progressive rock zealot in the 1970s and that music informs much of what I listen to today and play on Echoes. It keeps coming up in unusual situations with musicians you might never suspect citing progressive rock acts from the 1970s as influences. Ulrich Schnauss can name Tangerine Dream tracks just from the opening applause. Toby Marks of Banco De Gaia lifts mellotron samples inspired by Genesis.Steve Roach had a poster of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans in his studio. The Album Leaf references Neu!, The Dandy Warhols pay homage to Can and everyone bows at the altar of Pink Floyd.
It’s been about 30 years since I last spun Progressive Rock on WXPN’s Diaspar show and I don’t go back and listen to a lot of this music now. Certain artists, like Steve Tibbetts, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno remain in my music life, while others like Genesis, Nektar, and Tangerine Dream have diminished in relevance. I still enjoy it when I hear it. I just don’t feel compelled to hear it.
But I’ll be inundated with it for a few hours this Saturday. Outside of the odd fundraising retro-special on PBS, this may be the widest exposure that Progressive rock has had in the US in about 25 years. At least, I’m not aware of any major market radio station with an audience of over 300,000 dedicating a lot of time to progressive rock. I don’t know what music I’ll actually get to, but I’ll have a bag with recordings from Hawkwind, Mike Oldfield, Vangelis, Steve Hillage, Can and many more.
So if you want to take a trip to the fantasyland of prog, tune in to WXPN at 88.5 FM or on-line at http://xpn.org
The Best of Echoes 2008 Listener Poll is over and the results are in. You can hear them tonight on Echoes and you can see them below. Bombay Dub Orchestra’s3 Cities, the November Echoes CD of the Month topped the poll and it led a list of eclectic music from across the Echoes spectrum. I don’t know that there were any surprises.
Six of the selections were CDs of the Month. Fourteen of the artists appeared on the show with interviews, performances or both.
Echoes listeners were a bit ahead of the curve. Many year end lists will have Ludovico Einaudi’sDivenire on their selections. But we had that in 2007. Instead, you selected his Live In Berlin CD, which isn’t even out in the US yet.
Your love of Urlich Schnauss continues, voting in Stars, which is only an EP, with only one track played on Echoes. Will Ackerman made a surprise showing at #3 with his understated Meditations CD, which is only available at Target.
There were only 5 albums on the list from major labels. Sixteen CDs came from small independent labels ranging from Lotus Spike to Six Degrees. Four CDs were self-released.
Thanks for voting. If you’re looking for CDs to add to you collection or iPod, you couldn’t find a better place to start, except maybe the 25 Essential Echoes CDs of 2008 You can also read more about this year’s music with 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2008: A study in confluence
THE BEST OF ECHOES 2008 LISTENER POLL
1
Bombay Dub Orchestra
3 Cities
(Six Degrees) read a review
2
California Guitar Trio Echoes
(Inner Knot)
3
William Ackerman
Meditations
(Compass Productions)
4
Sumner McKane
What A Great Place to Be
(Don’t Hit Your Sister Records) read a review
5
Ottmar Liebert
The Scent of Light
(Spiral Subwave Records Int’l) read a review
6
David Arkenstone
Echoes of Light and Shadow
(Gemini Sun Records)
7
R. Carlos Nakai
Talisman
(Canyon Records)
8
David Gilmour
Live in Gdansk
(Sony)
9
General Fuzz
Soulful Filling
(Self Released)
10
Ludovico Einaudi
Live in Berlin
(Ponderosa Italy)
11
Ahn Trio
Lullaby for My Favorite Insominac
(Sony BMG)
12
Fripp & Eno
Beyond Even (1992-2006)
(DGM)
13
Hammock Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow
(Darla Records)
Digitonal Tops the 25 Essential Echoes CDs of 2008
The Echoes Listeners Pollis still open for less than a day, but here are the CDs we thought were essential for the year as judged by me (John Diliberto) and the Echoesstaff. It’s not based on the most played CD, CDs of the month or any other “objective” criteria. These are the CDs, out of the 2000+ we received, that consistently inspired us over the year. Some years, it’s difficult to find 25 CDs that warrant being on the list, but this year, even more than a great year like 2007, the dividing line between the first and 25th choice has never been thinner. 2008 was just a great year for music.
I write more extensively about the 25 Essential Echoes CDs in an article on the Echoes website. It’ll have lots of links to soundfiles, pics and features on these artists.
Sumner McKane's What A Great Place To Be
For now, let me say that Digitonal’s Save Your Light for Darker Days floored me from the start and became deeper with each listening. It was the most sophisticated, intoxicating, inventive and emotive album of the year and defined that meeting of classical chamber and ambient music. It was nearly a toss-up between that and Sumner McKane’s What a Great Place to Be. Like Digitonal, it was a CD of the Month and an album of deeply moving, but strangely nostalgic psychedelic Americana.
Be sure to make you own list and vote in the Echoes 2008 Listener Poll. There’s only a day left. You’ll be entered into a drawing to win all 25 of the top listener selections. Without giving anything away, I can assure you that many of the Essential titles will be in the listener poll.
I guess that makes Iggy’s rendition of “Autumn Leaves,” rendered like Leonard Cohen on Quaaludes, the sound at the doors of hell. You can hear it on his CD, Preliminaires.
Atomic Skunk
Gong will join two other bands from the 70s, Supersister and PFM and relatively new bands like D.F.A, Cabeza de Sera, Quantum Leap, Beardfish and Oblivion Sun at this year’s 
This weekend I’ll be guesting on Highs in the 70s: Progressive Rock on 
You can also read more about this year’s music with 
