May Top 25 Echoes CDs

World Fusion, Dream Pop and Ambient Americana in Echoes Top 25 for May

The Echoes Top 25 for May continues a trend towards chilled out vocal music but the top three slots are held by three CD of the Month picks, one vocal, two instrumental.  Lyla Foy is a relatively new artist who used to record as Wall.  Her Mirrors the Sky album, the first under her own name, was a CD of the Month in March.  But surrounding her are two veteran Echoes artists, one of who goes back even further than the show.  Carl Weingarten’s beautiful chamber Americana journey, Life Under Stars is our current CD of the Month in June.   And leading the pack is Hans Christian’s Hidden Treasures, our May CD of the Month selection, an album of cross-cultural ecstasy.  You can read about all of those and hear tracks by following the links above.

Newcomers to the Echoes Top 25 include Stumbeleine, 9Bach, Phox, Hauschka, Ben Cosgrove and Michael Barry-Rec.  Here’s thecomplete list.

ECHOES TOP 25 FOR MAY 2014

1. Hans Christian – Hidden Treasures (Allemande Music)
2. Lyla Foy – Mirrors the Sky (Subpop Records)
3. Carl Weingarten – Life Under Stars (Mutiphase Records)
4. Tori Amos – Unrepentant Geraldines (Mercury Classics)
5. S. Carey – Range of Light (Jagjaguwar)
6. Eno & Hyde – Someday World (Warp Records)
7. 9Bach – Tincian (Real World)
8. Beck– Morning Phase (Capital)
9. v/a – Passages – Framed by Nova (Ultimae)
10. Stumbleine – Dissolver (Monotreme Records)
11. Ian Boddy & Erik Wollo – EC12 (DiN)
12. Thus Owls – Turning Rocks (Secret City Records)
13. Marissa Nadler – July (Sacred Bones)
14. Tom Kerstens’ G Plus Ensemble – Utopia – (Real World)
15. Phox – Phox (Partisan Records)
16. Erik Scott – And the Earth Bleeds (Erik Scott)
17. Hauschka – Abandoned City (Temporary Residence)
18. Michael Barry-Rec – Continuum (Michael Barry-Rec)
19. Ben Cosgrove – Field Studies (Ben Cosgrove)
20. Deepernet – Impossible Landscape (Spotted Peccary)
21. Ludovico Einaudi – In a Time Lapse (The Remixes) (Ponderosa Music & Art)
22. Jennifer Zulli – Goddess Rising (Jennifer Zulli)
23. Cinema 12 – Cinema 12 (Cinema 12)
24. Bluetech – Cosmic Dubs (Native State Records)
25. Sylvan Esso – Sylvan Esso (Partisan)

 

Chilled Cellos 2014

Rena Jones live on Echoes

When is a cello more than a cello? When it’s played by looping cellists who turn their strings into an orchestra. Or it’s in a cello rock band with three cellos.  Or it’s sonically processed in an electronic landscape.  You’ll hear that and more with Chilled Cellos. I’ve got several loopers including Matthew Schoening,  Jami Sieber and the Queen of Looping Cello, Zoe Keating. She used to play in the cello rock group Rasputina.

David Darling on Echoes

We won’t hear any Bach preludes, but I’ve got a guy who can whip them out whenever he wants, Yo-Yo Ma.  Instead though, we’ll hear him with the Silk Road Ensemble.  Ambient Chamber Music is a perfect home for cello and we’ll hear one of the godfathers of that sound, David Darling.  His cello has 8 strings.  We’ll also hear singing cellists with Dom La Nena, Jorane and Linnea Olsson.  And they’re twofers since they loop as well.

Tune in to Echoes tonight for Chilled Cellos.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Support Echoes by becoming a member of the Echoes Sound Circle.

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Join the Echoes Sound Circle and keep the soundscapes of Echoes flowing!

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club. and get  Lyla Foy’s Mirrors the Sky, the April CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR
Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

 

 

Hammock From Abyss to Revelation.

In a world of dance beats, rapid fire sequences and songs devolving into little more than hooks, Hammock takes a deeper, darker more textured approach.  They are the Mark Rothko of ambient music with sheets of sound shifting beneath each other like tectonic plates, but with the hint of melody and the feel of spirits rising toward the heavens. Oblivion Hymns lives up to its foreboding name in this extended tone poem to the end of life.

Hammock is operating in a classical dimension. The references to Arvo Pärt are obvious, but you might find their tone more heavily reflected in the “sacred minimalism” of the recently departed English composer, John Tavener. Inspired by the Russian Orthodox Church, Tavener’s music aspired to the heavens through the use of orchestras and choirs.  Hammock’s Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson achieve the same effect with Dali-stretched guitars and whole-note string pads, moving slowly through a shrouded landscape.

Darkness is only a superficial impression of Oblivion Hymns . Within their circumscribed sound world, Hammock creates uplifting, moving themes that are more edge-of-the-world than end-of-the-world.  Children’s choirs are deployed on a couple of tracks, notably on the gentle lament, “Then the Quiet Explosion” and “I Could Hear the Water at the Edge of All Things”

This is a follow-up to their 2012 opus, Departure Songs.  That was a monumental album, but could become oppressive over the course of its two CD length.  Maybe because of the children’s choir, Oblivion Hymns feels more hopeful, promising transcendence more than demise.

Hammock’s heavily processed guitar sound remains at the center of their music, but when an instrument like the piano turns up on “Holding Your Absence,” with spare, pensive chords it seems to wrap their ambient electric swirl around it, pulling all the elements together.

The cover of Oblivion Hymns is a Rorschach of ink blots by Amy Pleasant, and like the cover, you can read many things into Hammock’s music.  You might find yourself descending into the abyss, or after hearing the concluding vocal hymn, “Tres Domines,” sung by Timothy Showalter, you might see heaven’s gate.  But I keep finding myself rising up, floating through a celestial expanse, which might be the same thing.

With Oblivion Hymns Hammock’s Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson have created a magnificent and important work that will become a reference point for those working in ambient classical and post-rock modalities, and those looking for music that takes us beyond.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Hammock’s Oblivion Hymns is our January   CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

2013 Rewind: Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll

Start 2014 Off Right with a Reprise Broadcast of The Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll Results tonight 01/01/2014

What do you get when you take a contemporary avant-garde composer, psychedelic folkies, Indian sitarists and Japanese electronic musicians.  Apparently you get the soundscape of Echoes or at least the music listeners thought was the best aspect of that soundscape.  Listeners have voted and today we’ll hear the results of the Best of Echoes 2013.

A few comments:
Both listeners and Echoes staff picked the same number one album, Ludovico Einaudi’s In A Time Lapse, the listeners by a very wide margin.

Nine tracks from 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2013 made it to the listener poll.

Five CD of the Month Picks made it to the Listener Poll (Nine made it to 25 Essential Echoes CDs)

It’s the 2013 Poll, but there is music on it dating back from one to forty  years: Dead Can Dance’s In Concert, essentially there 2012 #1 album, Anastasis done live, Steve Roach’s Rasa Dance, a collection with tracks dating back to the 1980s, and Tubular Beats, a remix of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.

And who would’ve thought that a band who had a #2 hit single, would be on an Echoes list? We didn’t play Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” but the album it came from Random Access Memories, came in at #9.  Top Ten on Echoes has to be better than #2 on Billboard, right?

BEST OF ECHOES 2013 LISTENER POLL

1. Ludovico Einaudi – In a Time Lapse (Ponderosa Music & Art)
2. Moby – Innocents (Mute)
3. Dead Can Dance – In Concert (PIAS America)
4. Sigur Ros – Kveikur (XL Recordings)
5. Ulrich Schnauss – A Long Way to Fall (Domino Records)
6. Agnes Obel – Aventine (Pias America)
7. David Bowie – The Next Day  (Columbia)
8. Ólafur Arnalds – For Now I Am Winter (Mercury Classics)
9. Daft Punk – Random Access Memory (Columbia)
10. Bombay Dub Orchestra – Tales from the Grand Bazaar (Six Degrees)
11. David Helpling & Jon Jenkins – Found (Spotted Peccary)
12. Darshan Ambient – Little Things (Spotted Peccary)
13. Anoushka Shankar – Traces of You (Deutsche Grammophon)
14. Steve Roach – Rasa Dance: The Music of Connection (Projekt)
15. Arborea – Fortress of the Sun (ESP Disk Ltd.)
16. Kitaro – Final Call (Domo Records)
17. Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp Records)
18. Mike Oldfield – Tubular Beats (Eagle Rock Entertainment)
19. R. Carlos Nakai & Will Clipman – Awakening the Fire (Canyon Records)
20. Tom Griesgraber & Bert Lams – Unnamed Lands (Inner Knot)
21. Mazzy Star – Seasons of Your Day (Ingrooves)
22. The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars (Sensibility Recordings)
23. Pat Metheny – The Orchestrion Project (Nonesuch)
24. Bill Frisell – Big Sur (Sony Masterworks)
25. Pat Metheny – Tap: John Zorns’s Book of Angels, Vol. 20 (Nonesuch)

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Nine of the CDs in this list were Echoes CDs of the Month, and the other three could’ve been on this list. Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club now and you can put David Helping and Jon Jenkins’ Found under somebodies Christmas tree.  It’s our December  CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

GIVE THEM THE GIFT OF TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

John Diliberto’s Top 10 CDs 2013

This was one of the hardest lists ever to compile.  It’s different from 25 Essential Echoes CDs of 2013, which is our picks of the best music played on Echoes.  And it’s also different from The Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll results.   These are my picks from all the music I heard in what turned out to be an epic year for new music.  And in an epic year, these are the albums that rose to the top of the top for me.

1- Pat Metheny – Tap: John Zorn’s The Book of Angels, Vol. 20
Metheny takes fragmentary themes from composer John Zorn’s “Book of Angels” series and orchestrates them into expansive, electro-symphonic works.  The fact that it features some of Metheny’s most unbridled and psychedelic guitar playing in years is just a bonus.

2- Rhian Sheehan –  Stories from Elsewhere
On his 7^th album, Stories from Elsewhere,  Rhian Sheehan created one of the most sublime shadings of ambient chamber music since Harold Budd’s Pavillion of Dreams.  It’s a magical CD of soaring strings, surging rhythms, childlike music boxes and ambient expanses that sounds both familiar and timeless. It was a CD of the Month in May.

3 – Olivier Libaux – Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age
I don’t know if I could’ve gotten behind an album more than I did Olivier Libaux’s sublime covers of music by alt-metal band Queen’s of the Stone Age.  Part of the New Wave/Punk cover band Nouvelle Vague.  Libaux stepped out on his own to record the albums with singers including Emilianna Torinni and Inara George. He accomplished a melancholy re-imagining of this alt-metal band’s music. It was a CD of the Month in July.

4 – Ludovico Einaudi –  In a Time Lapse
In a Time Lapse is a defining album on which pianist/composer Ludovico Einaudi pulled out all the stops, synthesizing a 21^st century classicism that is all-embracing in its musical influences, and all-enveloping in its emotional sweep. It was Echoes CD of the Month in March,

5 – Moby   Innocents
Moby completes a trilogy of atmospheric, introspective songs that began with Wait for Me and Destroyed.  A CD of the Month in November,  Innocents is the most soothing melancholy.

6 – Ólafur Arnalds   For Now I Am Winter
Both sophisticated and edgy, Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds inhabits his own sonic universe, balancing emotions and mood on a laser’s edge of strings echoing out of frozen skies and electronics trawling the substrata.  For Now I Am Winter is his most mature work to date and a CD of the Month in April.

7 – Ulrich Schnauss A Long Way To Fall
A wonderfully melodic, groove driven album of synthesizer wonder as Ulrich Schnauss explores childhood memories with electronic dreams.  The title track will leave you breathless.  It was an Echoes CD of the Month in February.

8 – Mree   Winterwell
Serene dream pop from a 19 year old musician who comes from a singer-songwriter tradition but creates Enya like choirs with her voice on this lush and powerful album.

9 – Bleeding Rainbow   Yeah, Right
This Philadelphia based band created a garage-rock psychedelic ecstacy that often attained the epic mixing shoegaze guitars with motoric grooves and heroic girl-group choruses from singer Sarah Everton.  I’m still trying to figure out why Savages got so much hipster attention and this album slipped away.  Play it loud and you’ll wonder why as well.

10- Sigur Ros  Kveikur
Sigur Ros kick out the jams on this album of delirious, roiling textures and Jonsi’s falsetto melodies of prayer.  This is one of the Icelandic groups more aggressive outings which is saying a lot for a band that has no restraints in their electric storm.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  David Helping and Jon Jenkins’ Found is our December  CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

GIVE THEM THE GIFT OF TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Echoes Top 25 for December 2013

Here’s the last Top 25 list for 2013.  And like our 25 Essential Echoes CDs and The Best of Echoes Listener Poll, it reveals just what a great year 2013 was.  There are seven Echoes CD of the Month picks on it including December’s selection, David Helpling & Jon Jenkins’ Found.  That’s unusual, but that’s because of the Best of show and the 12 CDs of the Month for 2013 show.  But there’s a couple of CDs there that easily could’ve been CDs of the month, notably, Jeff Johnson, Brian Dunnings & Wendy Goodwin’s Winterfold, a wonderful album of atmospheric winter pastorals, Bombay Dub Orchestra’s Tales from the Grand Bazaar, a CD that get’s into a serene, ambient chamber music sound but with eastern edges and subtle dub grooves, and Azam Ali & Loga Ramin Torkian’s Lamentation of Swans, a deep dive into Persian atmospheres with a lush merging of extoci strings, throbbing percussion and synthesizer atmosphere’s all topped by the sensual wordless vocals of Azam Ali.  And next Month’s CD of teh Month is here as well, Hammock’s Oblivion Hymns. Here‘s the list.

ECHOES TOP 25 FOR DECEMBER 2013

1. David Helpling & Jon Jenkins – Found (Spotted Peccary)
2. Moby – Innocents (Mute)
3. Jeff Johnson Brian Dunning & Wendy Goodwin – Winterfold (Ark Records)
4. Olivier Libaux – Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age (Music for Music Lovers)
5. Tonight Sky – Tonight Sky (Tonight Sky)
6. Moya Brennan – An Irish Christmas (BFO Records)
7. Ólafur Arnalds – For Now I Am Winter (Mercury Classics)
8. Tom Griesgraber and Bert Lams – Unnamed Lands (Inner Knot)
9. Divine Matrix – Hydrosphere (AD Music)
10. Akara – The World Beyond (Merkaba Music)
11. Euphoria – E4 (Instrumental) (Euphoria)
12. Hammock – Oblivion Hymns (Hammock Music)
13. Bombay Dub Orchestra – Tales from the Grand Bazaar (Six Degrees)
14. Ulrich Schnauss – A Long Way to Fall (Ulrich Schnauss)
15. Brad Hoyt – Far Away from Every Day (Harp Guitar Music)
16. Juliette Commagere – Human (Aeronaut Records)
17. Ludovico Einaudi – In a Time Lapse (Ponderosa Music & Art)
18. Azam Ali and Loga R Torkian – Lamentation of Swans (Terrestrial Lane Productions)
19. Mary Fahl – Love & Gravity (Mary Fahl)
20. Eklipse – Electric Air (The End)
21. Frankie Rose – Herein Wild (Fat Possum Records)
22. Lotte Kestner – The Bluebird of Happiness (Saint Marie)
23. The Piano Guys – A Family Christmas (Portrait)
24. Courtney Barnett – A Sea of Split Peas (House Anxiety)
25. Grails – Black Tar Prophecies Vols 4-6 (Temporary Residence)

See 25 Essential Echoes CDs and The Best of Echoes Listener Poll

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club now and you can put David Helping and Jon Jenkins’ Found under somebodies Christmas tree.  It’s our December  CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

GIVE THEM THE GIFT OF TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Jherek Bischoff on Echoes Podcast

Jherek Bischoff & Ukelele

Hear about Jherek Bishoff’s strange life and idiosyncratic music in the Echoes Podcast.

There’s a lot of chamber music being written lately by rock musicians.  Ólafur Arnalds, Johann Johannsson, Rhian Sheehan all started out as pure rock musicians, often punk musicians.  So did Jherek Bischoff.  He’s played with people like Amanda Palmer, but on his own he makes a chamber pop music that includes vocalists like David Byrne, and pure contemporary chamber music that sounds more like Arvo Part.  He has two albums out, Composed and Scores: Composed Instrumentals, and he makes a lot of his music with a ukulele.  At the Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit in Asheville, North Carolina this fall, I talked with Jherek Bischoff about his retro sound.

Jherek is moving into new directions in his music and some of it is up on youtube.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club now and you can put David Helping and Jon Jenkins’ Found under somebodies Christmas tree.  It’s our December  CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

GIVE THEM THE GIFT OF TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Jherek Bischoff’s Chamber Pop & Deep Listening.

Jherek Bischoff & Ukelele

There’s a lot of chamber music being written lately by rock musicians.  Ólafur Arnalds, Johann Johannsson, Rhian Sheehan all started out as pure rock musicians, often punk musicians.  So did Jherek Bischoff.  He’s played with people like Amanda Palmer, but on his own he makes a chamber pop music that includes vocalists like David Byrne, and pure contemporary chamber music that sounds more like Arvo Part.  He has two albums out, Composed and Scores: Composed Instrumentals, and he makes a lot of his music with a ukulele.  At the Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit in Asheville, North Carolina this fall, I talked with Jherek Bischoff about his retro sound.

Jherek is moving into new directions in his music and some of it is up on youtube.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club now and you can put David Helping and Jon Jenkins’ Found under somebodies Christmas tree.  It’s our December  CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

GIVE THEM THE GIFT OF TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll

What do you get when you take a contemporary avant-garde composer, psychedelic folkies, Indian sitarists and Japanese electronic musicians.  Apparently you get the soundscape of Echoes or at least the music listeners thought was the best aspect of that soundscape.  Listeners have voted and today we’ll hear the results of the Best of Echoes 2013.

A few comments:
Both listeners and Echoes staff picked the same number one album, Ludovico Einaudi’s In A Time Lapse, the listeners by a very wide margin.

Nine tracks from 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2013 made it to the listener poll.

Five CD of the Month Picks made it to the Listener Poll (Nine made it to 25 Essential Echoes CDs)

It’s the 2013 Poll, but there is music on it dating back from one to forty  years: Dead Can Dance’s In Concert, essentially there 2012 #1 album, Anastasis done live, Steve Roach’s Rasa Dance, a collection with tracks dating back to the 1980s, and Tubular Beats, a remix of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.

And who would’ve thought that a band who had a #2 hit single, would be on an Echoes list? We didn’t play Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” but the album it came from Random Access Memories, came in at #9.  Top Ten on Echoes has to be better than #2 on Billboard, right?

BEST OF ECHOES 2013 LISTENER POLL

1. Ludovico Einaudi – In a Time Lapse (Ponderosa Music & Art)
2. Moby – Innocents (Mute)
3. Dead Can Dance – In Concert (PIAS America)
4. Sigur Ros – Kveikur (XL Recordings)
5. Ulrich Schnauss – A Long Way to Fall (Domino Records)
6. Agnes Obel – Aventine (Pias America)
7. David Bowie – The Next Day  (Columbia)
8. Ólafur Arnalds – For Now I Am Winter (Mercury Classics)
9. Daft Punk – Random Access Memory (Columbia)
10. Bombay Dub Orchestra – Tales from the Grand Bazaar (Six Degrees)
11. David Helpling & Jon Jenkins – Found (Spotted Peccary)
12. Darshan Ambient – Little Things (Spotted Peccary)
13. Anoushka Shankar – Traces of You (Deutsche Grammophon)
14. Steve Roach – Rasa Dance: The Music of Connection (Projekt)
15. Arborea – Fortress of the Sun (ESP Disk Ltd.)
16. Kitaro – Final Call (Domo Records)
17. Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp Records)
18. Mike Oldfield – Tubular Beats (Eagle Rock Entertainment)
19. R. Carlos Nakai & Will Clipman – Awakening the Fire (Canyon Records)
20. Tom Griesgraber & Bert Lams – Unnamed Lands (Inner Knot)
21. Mazzy Star – Seasons of Your Day (Ingrooves)
22. The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars (Sensibility Recordings)
23. Pat Metheny – The Orchestrion Project (Nonesuch)
24. Bill Frisell – Big Sur (Sony Masterworks)
25. Pat Metheny – Tap: John Zorns’s Book of Angels, Vol. 20 (Nonesuch)

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Nine of the CDs in this list were Echoes CDs of the Month, and the other three could’ve been on this list. Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club now and you can put David Helping and Jon Jenkins’ Found under somebodies Christmas tree.  It’s our December  CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR

GIVE THEM THE GIFT OF TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

An Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings

Christmas begins today with An Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings
with
Moya Brennan
and
Jeff Johnson, Brian Dunning and Wendy Goodwin

Aisling Jarvis, Moya Brennan, Cormac De Barra in Echoes Living Room

I don’t know how Celtic music came to signify winter, but  slow aires and Celtic harps seem to exemplify a quieter and more atmospheric side of the Winter season.  We’ve dipped into that sound on Sonic Seasonings several times over the years and we’re doing it again.

Last week we recorded our seasonal live performance show, recording two concerts in 24 hours on opposite coasts.  You can hear them tonight on an Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings.

This year we have two artists returning.  On Monday afternoon, December 9, with fresh fallen snow on the ground, Moya Brennan came to the Echoes living room with her long time partner, harpist Cormac De Barra and her daughter Aisling Jarvis.  In a testament to time, I first interviewed Moya backstage at the TLA Theater in Philadelphia in 1993 when she was pregnant with Aisling.  And at the time, Moya spelled her name Máire Ní Bhraonáin.

Moya is acclaimed as the singer of Clannad, the Irish band that was part of the Celtic renaissance that began in the 1970s.  That band reformed this year for the album, Nadur, but Moya has been solo for the last 15 years.  This past year she released the album, Affinity with Cormac De Barra under the banner of Voices & Harps.  She also re-released her album, An Irish Christmas with bonus tracks.  We’ll hear this trio in a weave of harp strings and heart-rending harmonies when they play live on An Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings.

Jeff Johnson, Wendy Goodwin, Brian Dunning recording Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings

Immediately following Moya’s show in our southeastern Pennsylvania living room, Jeff Towne and I hopped on a flight to Seattle and the next day, December 10, we were in the home studio of keyboardist Jeff Johnson where he’d gathered his Celtic trio of flutist Brian Dunning and violinist Wendy Goodwin.
Jeff Johnson is a veteran of Celtic cross-over and devotional albums with dozens of CDs out on his own Ark Music label as well as Windham Hill and Hearts of Space Records.  Brian Dunning has been with him on many of those

Goodwin, Johnson, Dunning, Diliberto

recordings.  He has a connection to the early Celtic renaisance as a member of the band Nightnoise which included guitarist Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and his sister, singer and keyboardist Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill.  Mícheál, who died in 2006 had been a member of the legendary and influential Bothy Band.  They are joined by Portland-based violinist Wendy Goodwin who released her solo debut, Place of Refuge last year. Collectively, the trio released a gorgeous CD, of pastoral, ambient winter chamber works called Winterfold this past fall and it’s in the Echoes Top 25 for 2013
The trio crammed into Johnson’s studio and played beautiful arrangements of music from this album and drew from tracks that have appeared on Johnson & Dunning’s A Quiet Knowing albums and a few Windham Hill collections.

So sit back tonight and enjoy the best Christmas music you’ll hear this year; a sound that will take you out of the shopping malls and into your heart on An Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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