Echoes Picks the Four Best Wendy Carlos CDs

I know I said I’d pick 5 essential Wendy Carlos CDs but when I came down to it, four of her recordings stand out as pinnacles of her art.

Beauty in the Beast
From the roar of Tibetan horns and the clangor of metal percussion that opens Beauty in the Beast, Wendy Carlos signaled a new direction in 1986.  Carlos is both profound and poignant, dissonant and disarming on Beauty as she fuses a global orchestra from her synthesizers.  “Poem for Bali” is the centerpiece of the album, an episodic, seventeen minute excursion as Carlos orchestrates the sounds and rhythms of a digital gamelan orchestra.  In addition to replicating the metallophones, gongs and flutes of the traditional gamelan, she creates her own hybrid sound designs, giving this work a surreal and sometimes harrowing tone, like a dream bent through funhouse mirrors.  But then there are pieces like “A Woman’s Song,” based on a Balkan melody.  The title track merges nightmare landscapes and a crazed carnival calliope with a haunting theme that sounds like a lament for the end of the world.  Beauty in the Beast, is an essential recording both of modern composition and synthesis and Wendy Carlos should plug into this circuit again.

Sonic Seasonings
Before there was Ambient music, in a time before the New Age, there was Wendy Carlos’s Sonic Seasonings, a double LP released in 1972.  Taking the form of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” Carlos orchestrated four side-long soundscapes designed according to producer Rachel Elkind, to be “part of the decor.” Using only her Moog synthesizer and environmental sounds, Carlos’s music is prototypical ambient music, pre-dating Brian Eno’s similar work by a few years.  She weaves gentle, often reedy synthesizer melodies through chirping birds on “Spring,” phase-shifted church organ drones across crystalline bells and wind on “Winter,” and she seems to simulate an alien space landing on “Summer,” mimicking nature with her synthesizer.  An added treat to this special double CD addition is a 40 minute, unreleased, two part suite from 1986 called “Land of the Midnight Sun.” Using her Synergy synthesizers, Carlos orchestrates slow motion melodies and over-lapping minimalist layers that recall Steve Roach’s Structures from Silence.

Switched-On Brandenburgs
Switched-On Bach would be an obvious choice, and the Switched-On Bach Box set would be the easy choice, but if we’re talking best and quintessential, I go with The Switched-On Brandenburgs.  It includes her Brandenburgs 3, 4 and 5 from  earlier albums and fills out the complete set of Bach’s six masterpieces.  Carlos’s renditions remain the platinum standard of classical synthesis,  not because she replicated the sound of a baroque orchestra, but because her own orchestra was so unique.  Her “instruments” huffed, wheezed, and clanked like an intergalactic music box. Yet, with Carlos’s performances, they illuminate the contrapuntal magic of Bach as if his intricate mazes were formed in mid-air.

A Clockwork Orange
The first synthesized score for a major film and still one of the best.  That descending glissando of doom into the electronic timpani on “Title Music from A Clockwork Orange” alone is one of the signature moments of modern music.  And then she takes her own theme and turns it into a baroque work on “Theme from A Clockwork Orange.” But there’s more, including Carlo’s underated composition, “Timesteps” and her reimaginings of Beethoven for a future dystopia.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

John Diliberto’s Personal Top Ten.

It seems like every year, annual year end lists are coming earlier and earlier.  Just as Christmas decorations start turning up in stores around the beginning of October, year end lists are arriving the beginning of November.  And of course,  Echoes has already launched its Best of Echoes 2009 Poll.  If you haven’t taken it yet, go to it and do it. You could win an iPod Nano and some CDs.
Amazon.com already has their lists out and our affiliate, WXPN, jumped the gun on me and requested my personal list.  So I was compelled to come up with something, hoping that nothing great comes out in the next 6 weeks. Unlike the Echoes list, which will arrive in a few days, I don’t restrict myself to Echoes material, although a lot of it is there. You can see my list along with the other hosts, on the XPN site.

ALBUMS
ARTIST – ALBUM
1  Moby – Wait For Me
2  Jon Hassell – Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street
3  Bill Frisell – Disfarmer
4  Loner – Western Sci-Fi
5  Solar Fields – Movements
6  IAMX – Kingdom of Welcome Addiction
7  Ablaye Cissoko & Volker Goetze – Sira
8  Phil Keaggy & Jeff Johnson – Frio Suite
9  Mandrake Project – A Miraculous Container
10 Aerosol – Airborne

SONGS
ARTIST – SONG
1  Moby – Wait for Me
2  Loner – Already Numb
3  Morgan Doctor – Show Me How
4  IAMX – Think of England
5  The Horrors – Do You Remember
6  Inbar Bakal – Song of Songs
7  Mandrake Project – And Five Makes Twenty
8  Baaba Maal – Tindo Quando
9  The Decemberists – The Rake’s Song
10 Great Northern – Houses

Let us know your three favorite CDs in the Echoes 2009 Poll.

You can go here to vote in the WXPN Year End Poll.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Gong-The Original Psychedelic Space Gypsies at 40.

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Gong’s music.

The voyage of the original Star Trek ended in 1969, but another band of space travelers called Gong launched that year and they’re still wandering the galaxies. Gong is a free-wheeling psychedelic band that wraps itself in its on myth, namely, that we’re in contact with mystical, acid drenched beings from the Planet Gong. It’s never quite clear whether the band treat this as fact or metaphor.  Like Sun Ra, they seem to live the life and speak the jargon, whether on-stage or off.   Gong’s founder is the 71 year old Australian guitarist, Daevid Allen.  Speaking backstage at Nearfest 2009 in Bethlehem, Allen articulates the ethos  of Gong.

Daevid Allen:  Well Gong has an ongoing story to it.  So that is kind of a backbone and guide.  It really is a teaching story–in the old Sufi sense– it’s meant to be a story.  But we never wanted it to sound serious because then everyone embraces it as a religion– a terrifying prospect.  So we made it as silly as we possibly could, so that most people wouldn’t take it seriously.

Daevid Allen @ Nearfest Photo: Gino Wong

Needless to say, psychedelics played an important part in Gong’s creative process.

Daevid Allen: It’s almost like channeling because we were consciously saying there are more intelligent beings than us that wish to work through us.  And the acid was really a way of getting rid of our egos so that that could come through as purely as possible.

Gong’s best known work is the Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy. It tells the tale of Zero the Hero while careening from space to jazz to rock, minimalism and beyond.  It also marks two signature sounds of the band, heavenly glissando guitar and deep space echo.  Gong guitarist Steve Hillage.

Steve Hillage: If you’re doing music that has a philosophic connection to the universe and space.   there is nothing better than creating this unearthly spatial environment with all the unearthly reflections.

Allen & Hillage @ Nearfest Photo: Diliberto

Both Daevid Allen and Steve Hillage claim to be teetotalers now, but they’ve just released a new album called 2032 that’s in the spirit of 1972. What that means is, Gong is still making a joyful, hallucinogenic music full of cosmic whimsy and sonic exploration.  Forty years later, Gong is still traveling the spaceways and currently touring Europe. I’ll have an interview with them next week on Echoes. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Gong’s music.

Read review of Gong’s 2009 Nearfest performance.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Gong’s music.

Electronic Music Icons Play Live in Philadelphia.

Ian Boddy & Mark Shreeve of ARC

In case you haven’t been following all things electronic, the English synthesizer duo, ARC is making their first US appearance ever on November 14th at St. Mary’s Parish Hall on the Penn campus in Philadelphia as part of The Gatherings series.

Mark Shreeve and Ian Boddy are from the second generation of space music artists, musicians who got turned onto electronic music listening to Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Jean-Michel Jarre.  I remember in 1980 and 81 playing Mark Shreeve’s cassette-only releases,  Phantom,  Embryo and Ursa Major on WXPN’s Diaspar and Star’s End shows in Philadelphia.   In 1982, when Kimberly Haas and I  interviewed him in London for Totally Wired,   he was making his music in one end of his living room while his girlfriend watched TV at the other end.  He told me about Ian Boddy, who I hadn’t heard yet but who would become a favorite during the Echoes era. Shreeve has gone on to release several albums since then, as a solo artist, with his band Redshift and with ARC.

A few years ago when we traveled to London to record a living room concert with ARC, we discovered that Mark Shreeve’s living room isn’t like most of his neighbors in the pleasant middle class borough of Southgate, London. They have couches, easy chairs, maybe a telly.  But Shreeve’s living room looks like a synthesizer museum.  Along one wall is an Oberheim Expander, Arp 2600, VCS3  and the centerpiece of his recent music, a vintage Moog Modular Series 3 synthesizer.

There’s been a movement over the last 15 years among electronic musicians to use old analog synthesizer sounds.  Usually they get these timbres through computer programs called soft synths or virtual synthesizers, but Mark Shreeve prefers the original.

“I mean, it’s a real pain to use,” he groans. “It’s a pain to maintain, it’s difficult to operate, it’s always going out of tune, but in the end, nothing sounds like that big Moog.  Nothing in the synthesizer world can put out bass like that machine can, not even a Mini-Moog can.”

Mark Shreeve Wrestling Moog

Mark Shreeve is a burly man with longish, light brown hair and wearing a black, untucked shirt.  As his arms stretch across the width of his Moog synthesizer it seems like he’s trying to wrestle it down to the ground.  It doesn’t have a keyboard.  Instead, Shreeve twists knobs and moves patch cords to manipulate sound and patterns.

Ian Boddy @ Echoes

The sound he gets is awe-inspiring.  Giant thudding bass lines that start somewhere around Jupiter and end at in your groin trawl under his compositions as cyclical melodies and free-form solos emerge.  You can hear that sound on all of Mark Shreeve’s albums over the last decade, including his recordings with Ian Boddy as ARC.

Along with Shreeve, Boddy is one of the grand old men of English space music.  Like Shreeve, he’s been recording electronic music since the late 1970s. Tall, lanky, with graying hair pulled back in a pony tail and a thick north country accent, he share’s Shreeve’s love for all things analog.

“It’s got a kind of out of control feel,” he enthuses. “A lot of the modern digital instruments you know exactly what it’s going to do each time, and certainly live when you’re playing loud, I always liken the Moog in full flight, it’s like a steam train coming straight towards you, you cannot get out of the way,  it’s got a certain element of danger to the sound.

Ian Boddy has played in the U.S. several times and he runs the DiN label, one of the best and most artfully curated electronic music labels. When Mark Shreeve and Ian Boddy started their duo called ARC, they were looking for a more modern electronic sound, apart from the retro-space sequencer style.

“When we started Arc it was to be a more rhythm based,” admits Shreeve. They’ve moved away from that a bit, although the title track from their album, Blaze, has a drummer and sounds like the “Dragnet” theme in space.

When Mark Shreeve and Ian Boddy ascend the altar at St. Mary’s Church as ARC, they are sure to engage in the kind of music communion that resulted in albums like Arcturus, Blaze, Fracture, Octane, and Radio Sputnik.  Be sure to bring your seat harness and maybe a parachute.  It’s taken nearly 30 years to get Mark Shreeve here.  Who knows when he’ll be back. For more information and advance tickets, go to The Gatherings

ARC will be recording a live session for Echoes on Friday.  Look for that to air in December or January.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Baaba Maal

To hear an audio version of this blog with Baaba Maal’s music, go here

Senegalese singer Baaba Maal emerges out of the griot tradition, African story-tellers who usually accompany themselves with the kora.  Legendary griot, Mansour Seck was his childhood friend and mentor, but Baaba Maal is a modern griot.

Baaba Maal:  Of course I think all of the new African musicians are still connected to this old role of playing music but telling the people, the messages are in the African language and they’re trying to change African life on the continent.

Now in his mid-fifties, but looking more like his mid -30s, Baaba Maal has worked with producers like Brian Eno and it was Baaba Maal’s band that inspired the creation of Afro Celt Sound System.  On his new CD, Television, he teams up with singer Sabina Siouba and keyboardist Didi Gutman from the dance group, The Brazilian Girls.

Baaba Maal: What I was looking for was the sound of drum and bass but also the electronic effects that I can’t get from the African instruments sometimes because the African instruments were not built to bring the sound of the wind, the sound of the desert or the sound of anything you hear which is not coming from the music.

Baaba Maal at Echoes

Along with the effects laden guitar of producer Barry Reynolds, Baaba Maal wraps these sounds around gorgeous duets with Sabina Sciubba.

Baaba Maal:   Sabina is a great singer for me because when she sings you can hear a culture, you can hear some pictures you can feel some colors, because she traveled a lot and she speaks like me a lot of different languages.

They sing lyrics that engage in social change and political commentary, but they sing them in several different languages from Pular to Portugese.  But even though the lyrics aren’t understood by western listeners, he feels the voices get the message across.

Baaba Maal:  Yeah, I think the voice can be leading people to an atmosphere where they can feel what I want to talk about.

Baaba Maal didn’t even see a television until he was in his late teens, but it’s a metaphor of social change and communication on his new CD.  Television is out on the Palm Pictures label.  I’ll have an interview with Baaba Maal on Monday’s Echoes.  This has been an Echo Location, soundings for new music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Phil Keaggy & Jeff Johnson’s Frio Suite Tops Echoes Top 25 for October.

October was a strange month for Echoes.  We spent two weeks running down the listeners 200 CDs for 20 Years of Echoes. Great shows.  Not a lot of current music, but we made up for it by playing almost exclusively new music in our regular shows.

Topping the list is our October CD of the Month, Phil Keaggy  & Jeff Johnson’s Frio Suite, an album that’s sounding deeper and more immersive everytime I listen to it.  Jeff Johnson is a master of keyboard orchestration, in fact, raising the bar for electronics in an ambient chamber music setting.  And Phil Keaggy is simply a wonder on guitar, mixing acoustic and electric guitar, merging styles into his own mult-stringed arrangements.  You can read a review of this CD, here.

Right behind them is Airborne by the Danish electronica artist, Aerosol.  I wrote about this earlier, but this album of spacious shoegaze moods and electro atmospheres is still entrancing us at Echoes.

There’s lots of new entries on the list including Baaba Maal’s collaboration with The Brazilian Girls, Television.  It’s a grooving but atmospheric work full of glitchy electronics and the ultra-lounge cool of singer Sabina Sciubba.  DJ Spooky pops in there with the sampledelica of The Secret Song and pianist Christopher O’Riley rises to #11 on the strength of his new cover-tunes album, Out of My Hands.

You can see the complete Echoes Top 25 for October.   It also has links to reviews, Echo Location profiles, and more.

Look next month for Robin Guthrie’s Carousel to top our November list.   Members of the already have this album.  You can join them Echoes CD of the Month Clubhere



John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

1980s Shoegaze Guitar Icon Unfolds an Instrumental Opus

You can hear an Audio version of this blog with Robin Guthrie’s music.

You can read a complete review of Carousel here.

As a member of the legendary new wave band, the Cocteau Twins, Robin Guthrie established a guitar sound that is still being imitated today from bands like My Bloody Valentine to electronic artists like Ulrich Schnauss.  It sounds like it results from stacks of processors and computer programs, but sitting in his home in France, Guthrie says,  in his thick Scottish accent, that it’s much simpler than that.

Robin Guthrie: Well, I know that I can pick up pretty much any old guitar and plug it into you know, an overdrive, a chorus, and a delay and I can make it sound like me.

Since the Cocteau Twins broke up in 1998, Robin Guthrie has released a string of instrumental albums propelled by his ringing, melancholy themes and deep atmospheres.  His music is at once modern and nostalgic with tracks like “Sparkle” calling up the sound of 60s guitar bands like The Shadows.

He’s also been a busy collaborator. In the last two years, Robin Guthrie has put out albums with former Ultravox singer John Foxx and several works with keyboardist Harold Budd, including the acclaimed diptych, After the Night Falls and Before the Day Breaks (CD of the Month picks in June, 2007).  His new album, Carousel, is a bit different.

Robin Guthrie: I kind of thought that I’ve done a couple of down tempo things recently with Harold and stuff and I wanted to, you know,  put a little bit of bones into it and make it a little bit noisier than just having a real soft floaty thing.

Robin Guthrie is one of the significant guitar stylists of the last 30 years.  He’s not a flash player, 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.

He can get a bit frustrated by the historical baggage of the Cocteau Twins.  There are even Cocteau Twins festivals that are like Star Trek conventions.  Guthrie doesn’t go.

Robin Guthrie (unexpurgated): I’m 47 years old and I’m still living with this fucking ex-Cocteau Twins bracket fucking everywhere I look.  Quite honestly, it’s starting to piss me off, you know?  It’s so fucking disrespectful.  No, it’s really quite rude of people to just continue to do that instead of actually paying a little attention to what I’ve actually been doing in the last 12 years or whatever.

If they were paying attention, they would’ve heard a string of often transformative recordings that alter the room around you,  painting a new world from the inside out, all of it colored in the translucent shades of Robin Guthrie’s guitar.

Robin Guthrie’s new CD is called Carousel.  It’s out on Darla Records and it’s the Echoes CD of the Month for November. I’ll be featuring it on Monday’s show 11/2/09.  This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.  You can read a complete review of Carousel here.   You can also hear an Audio version of this blog with Robin Guthrie’s music



John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

FIVE CDS FOR AN ICON OF ECHOES: BRIAN ENO

Listeners recently voted for the 20 Icons of Echoes and topping the poll by a wide margin was Brian Eno.

Brian Eno In Studio

A few years ago I did a blog called 3 Degrees of Separation from Brian Eno.  Actually, for most musicians, that’s usually one or two degrees at most.  Brian Eno seems to have been everywhere, and if he’s not, his immediate collaborators are.  Roxy Music, Fripp & Eno, Ambient music, Obscure Records, John Cale, David Bowie, Cluster & Eno, No New York, Harold Budd & Brian Eno, Jon Hassell & Brian Eno, U2, Coldplay, Paul Simon, Baaba Maal, Geoffrey Oryema, 801, and the list goes on.  They are all projects Eno has engaged in or artists he’s recorded with, produced, and championed over the last four decades.  It seems that many of the most interesting music movements of the last 40 years have had a little of Brian Eno in them.   But he’s also produced seminal works, which, years after their release, are still beloved.  That’s why he was on top of my personal list and I suspect why he topped our 20 Anniversary Listener Poll for 20 Icons of Echoes.  For essential Eno reading, I suggest On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times fo Brian Eno by David Sheppard.  Or listen to our profile of Eno tonight 10/26 and this weekend on Echoes.

You can see the complete list of 20 Icons of Echoes here.

You can also download a podcast of our Brian Eno Profile/Interview.

To accompany our broadcast of Brian Eno: #1 Icon of Echoes tonight, here’s a list to get you in that Eno state of mind.

5 Essential Brian Eno Albums.

ONE
Another Green World
This is the album where Brian Eno began using his Oblique Strategy cards, conceived with artist Peter Schmidt.  When a creative impasse was reached, Eno would pull out a card and follow its instructions or philosophy, even if the card said “Emphasize the flaws” or “Do nothing for as long as possible.” He relates a  story about Oblique Strategies and “Spirits Drifting” in the Eno interview that runs tonight.  But despite the John Cagian aspect of Oblique Strategies, Eno arrived at an album that brought the worlds of song and ambience together. Instrumental tracks like “Zawinul/Lava” (named for Weather Report keyboardist Joe Zawinul) and “Becalmed” are haunting mood pieces with slow-drip atmospheres.  His songs range from the raging crosscut guitar of “Skysaw” to another one of his oddly affecting exercises in unsentimental nostalgia, “Golden Hours.”  If you have only one Eno album, Another Green World is it.  It has the seeds of virtually everything he’s done since.

TWO

Music for Airports
The blueprint for ambient music, Music for Airports is built out of layered loops of melodic fragments played on acoustic and electric piano, synthesizer and voice.  Deceptively simple in concept, it yields incredible depths of sound with a surprising melancholy for such a “functional” concept.  When Bang on a Can recorded an acoustic version of this album in its entirety, they cast a light on the complex relationships and tantalizing sound design of Eno’s original work.  Listening back to this, it also made me appreciate Discreet Music more, especially the title track.

TWO

Apollo-Atmospheres & Soundtracks
This is arguably the most perfect album that Brian Eno has made.  And since Eno isn’t a musician who strives for perfection, it’s a real rarity.  Written for a documentary about the Apollo space missions, Eno, along with his brother Roger and producer Daniel Lanois, crafted a set of melodically charged mood pieces, that weren’t ambient, but had that yearning, never-ending melancholy of works like the Pachelbel “Canon.”  Using synthesizers, piano and lap steel, each piece is a sublime gift that holds together better than any other Eno album besides Music for Airports, which, after all, only had four pieces.  In 12 tracks, Eno and company leave you breathless, from “An Ending (Ascent), the most haunting of Eno works to “Always Returning.”  I hadn’t thought of it until now, but in using Lanois playing lap steel guitar, Eno may also be responsible for creating the Ambient Americana subgenre.  “Deep Blue Day” was used in Trainspotting when Ewan MacGregor dives into the filthy toilet.

FOUR

Fripp & Eno-No Pussyfooting
We forget that this album actually preceded Eno’s better known ambient works.  I could make an argument for the follow-up, Evening Star, as equally essential, but I’m going with No Pussyfooting for the innocence and purity of it’s concept and the accent on Robert Fripp’s endlessly undulating sustained guitar leads.  It’s just two tracks, “The Heavenly Music Corporation” and “Swastika Girls,” played live, the former just with guitar and the later with guitar and synthesizer.  Using a tape-loop system similar to Terry Riley’s in “A Rainbow in Curved Air,” Fripp and Eno would play, their signal recorded on one tape machine which then looped to a second machine which played those notes back into the first deck accompanied by further improvs from the musicians which proceeded to get layered up.  While Fripp has captured the magic of this technique, now updated to digital looping systems, on several albums and performances, subsequent Fripp & Eno recordings after Evening Star always sounded like sketches and outtakes.    Recently released, the new edition of No Pussyfooting contacts additional half-speed versions of “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” and reverse versions of both tracks

FIVE

Here Come the Warm Jets
Brian Eno’s solo debut was somewhat calculated to play off the reputation he’d build with Roxy Music so it was based around songs with something like a pop structure.  But Eno was already bending and twisting those structures into new forms.  “Baby’s On Fire” revealed his lacerating lyric sensibilities and one of Robert Fripp’s most shredded guitar solos.  But Eno was also revealing a more introspective, almost nostalgic side with the affecting bittersweet “Some of Them Are Old” and the reverie of “Some Faraway Beach.”  But then there’s the hallucinogenic sprawl of “Driving Me Backwards” that puts the angst that’s always in Eno’s music smack in your face.

These are only five albums out of around 30 that Brian Eno has made, not including his productions.  But they are the ones that continue to resonate, many of them some 37 years after they were produced.
John Diliberto
((( echoes )))

The Listeners Have Spoken with their

20 Favorite Echoes Artists.

The results are in from our 20th Anniversary Listener Poll and we’ve got your 20 favorite Echoes artists for 20 years of Echoes.

Brian Eno #1 Icon of Echoes

The list skews heavily towards older acts.  Of the 20 artists, only four began recording during the Echoes years.  Moby and Mark Dwane launched their first recordings the same year that Echoes took off.  Afro Celt Sound System was a defining sound of Echoes at the turn of the millennium.  Ulrich Schnauss is the only true modern artist on the list.  Ten of the artists began in the 1980s and the remaining six began in the 1970s, or in the case of Tangerine Dream, the 1960s.  Brian Eno, always present it seems, neatly bookends the list in that Harold Budd at #20 came to international prominence collaborating with Eno, and Eno himself tops the list.  Electronic music is well-represented.  In addition to Eno, there’s Steve Roach right behind him at #2, Patrick O’Hearn at #3, Tangerine Dream at #4 followed down the list by Moby, Vangelis, Robert Rich, Mark Dwane, David Arkenstone and Ulrich Schnauss.  Windham Hill effectively stands in for acoustic and solo guitar music in general with entries from founder Will Ackerman as well as George Winston and Michael Hedges.  Lisa Gerrard actually makes the list twice: as a member of Dead Can Dance at #10 and as a solo artist at #17.  Click here to see the complete list of 20 icons of Echoes.  You can see my personal choices here.

Throughout the next few months we’ll be profiling the  20 icons of Echoes, beginning tonight 10/26 with Brian Eno.



John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

The Perils of  Growing Up Echoes with Urban Nature

Ramesh and I both grew up listening to Echoes and I remember being a teenager and listening to Echoes as I’d fall asleep at night.  And so being exposed to Windham Hill and I’d go into the record store and get their Best of Windham Hill and it would be Will Ackerman and De Grassi and Michael Hedges and George Winston and all these different players on there.  And I really loved that instrumental music that  was very ambient and it was different than what I was used to listening to.  And I feel that the show Echoes and all those different artists really inspired and influenced my approach to music over time.  -Todd Boston

Todd Boston is one half of the duo, Urban Nature.  We’ll be hearing an interview with them on Tuesday and in December there will be a Living Room Concert.  But right now, in this Echo Location, find out what happens when you grow up listening to Echoes.  You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Urban Nature’s music, here.

ECHO LOCATION: URBAN NATURE

More than 40 years after it’s release, George Harrison’s raga derived hymn, “Within You With Out You”  is still influencing musicians like guitarist Todd Boston.

Todd Boston:  I think it was the Beatles who brought me to Indian music.  I did a college paper on the song Within You Without You And I think that was one of the first pieces of music that really grabbed me that had some traces of Indian music and then I kept just going deeper and deeper into it.

Todd Boston wasn’t even born when The Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers came out.  The guitarist grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, as did percussionist Ramesh Kannan.  His parents were born in Mumbai And Madras and he has even deeper roots in Indian music.

Ramesh Kannan:  My mom is an amazing Carnatic vocalist and she’s been doing that her whole life and she’s the one that influenced me to learn tabla when I was 8-years old and my musical path kind of got dictated in that way from her.

The two musicians met in San Francisco, where they formed their east-west duo called Urban Nature.  Todd Boston has studied Indian music extensively, including a couple of years at the feet of the late Indian sarod master, Ali Akbar Khan.

Todd Boston:  What appealed to me was something that I had a harder time finding in Western music and in popular music in the United States which was, you know, what somebody might call a spirituality to it or a depth.  You know, I’ll just define it as a depth to the music.  There’s a saying from India that says “Nada Brahma” which means “Sound is God.”

Urban Nature is influenced by jazz guitarist John McLaughlin’s iconic band Shakti, as well as Windham Hill guitarists like the late Michael Hedges.  They play acoustic based music, but whip out electric guitars and digital loops, and they think of their album, Coming Home,  as somewhere between a meditation CD and a Pink Floyd concept album.

Ramesh Kannan: You know, we talked back and forth about like where does it fit, where does fit and is it meditation music?  Is it world fusion music?  What is it?  And that way of thinking wasn’t getting us anywhere.  We’re like, “let’s just make a record, a creative album that can explore everything that we are right now with this.

Urban Nature’s latest CD is called Coming Home.  I’ll have a more extensive interview with the duo next Tuesday 10/27/09.  This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))