Enter A State of Ameritronica with Euphoria Tonight on Echoes

Hear Euphoria Interviewed Tonight on Echoes.

E4 Instrumental was the number two album this month in the Echoes Top 25.  So we’ll be revisiting our interview with Ken Ramm, the founder of the band.  Ken Ramm played in rock bands as a kid and spent a lot of time composing the soundtrack for the soap opera, “As The World Turns.”  But in the mid-1990s he had the idea of putting his guitar in a different musical environment. He took country-blues slide guitar, and put it on top of electronica grooves and ambiences. It took him a few years, but in 1999 he put out his first album as Euphoria. The lead song from that disc, “Delirium”  became something of an underground hit, turning up in TV shows and Nissan commercials.  After a seven year hiatus, he’s just released a pair of albums, E4 Instrumental and E4 Vocal that present two directions for Euphoria.  I go to the fork in the road with Ken Ramm and singer Robyn Dell’Unto of Eurphoria tonight on Echoes.

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.

Moby Talks About Innocents Tonight on Echoes

Hear Moby Interviewed Tonight on Echoes.

I don’t know if Moby intended it this way, but Innocents sounds like the conclusion of a trilogy, joining Wait for Me and Destroyed, his two previous albums.  As on those recordings, Moby plays the ambient song-smith, crafting odes of haunting and poignant beauty, making a music that sounds like it’s rooted in an earlier, more rustic time, except it’s electronic. The songs in this trilogy are more personally reflective than those on albums like Play, and Moby has become less reliant on sampling and more engaged in building upon a lineage of songwriters that goes back to Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and Neil Young.

In fact, “Almost Home” would not have sounded out of place on Young’s After the Gold Rush, except of course, for the synthesizer accents and ambient effects.  Damien Jurado sings this lament in a falsetto that echoes Neil Young’s pitch-challenged charm, and Moby’s sonic landscape recalls the lonesome wails of Crazy Horse.

Moby & drum machine wall – Echoes Interview.

Jurado is among a cast of singers who appear on Innocents, many of whom wrote their own lyrics.  Cold Specks turns up on two tracks. With a  Norah Jones-like sultriness, she intones late-night reflections on “A Case for Shame.”  Non sequiturs like “Cut off your nose to spite your face, slowly send your palms away,” turned into a searing meditation on existence . Cold Specks gets a dark blues sound on “Tell Me” reinforced by Moby cutting and pasting an insistent refrain and layering her voice in this forlorn, but powerful piece.

Skylar Grey is a singer associated with Eminem and she has the ethereal, smoke-filled voice Moby favors, as evidenced by  previous singers like Kelli Scarr.  Over a slo-mo groove draped in synth pads, and against a gospel loop sample pleading to “look over yonder, the sun done gone,” Grey sings “The Last Day,” a hymn about death an a life lived without being. “You Only just discovered the sun, on the last day,” she sings with resigned regret.  It’s the only song where Moby also uses the found-vocal strategy of Play.

A life unfulfilled is a theme for many of Moby’s songs. You’ll find it in lyrics he wrote for longtime collaborator Inyang Bassey on “Don’t Love Me,” a mid-tempo electro-barrelhouse song about a woman mistreated by a lover.  It’s also in yet another of Moby’s cautionary tales about heroin, “The Perfect Life,” sung with Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips. The album ends with a song as bleak as any Moby has ever written: “The Dogs.”  He sings this one  himself, mourning the turns of life and what sounds like a failed relationship.

Moby could probably play a lot of these songs sitting at an acoustic piano or plucking a guitar, but that’s not his way.  These songs are spun through ghost echoes, shadow delays, draped in synthesizer pads and punctuated with disembodied sounds.  Few can do more than Moby with some simple chords of  synthesizer strings.

Innocents includes the requisite moody Moby instrumentals too. “A Long Time” is one of the few songs that harkens back to his dance roots.  There is a vocal on it, but the words are indecipherable and buried in reverb and delays, making this sound more like an instrumental track that would sit well in the EDM rave of your mind.  He should have segued it into the syncopated groove of “Saints” with Steve Sidelnyk’s march-to-Mordor drums and Inyang Bassey’s anguished shouts.

Wait for Me, Destroyed and Innocents are trilogy of elegies for Moby, looking back on his life and the people he’s lost.  A track on the deluxe edition CD is aptly called, “Everyone Is Gone.” Sadness rarely sounds as beautiful as it does with Moby.

Hear Moby interviewed tonight 1/28, on Echoes.

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.

Moby Talks About Innocents Tonight on Echoes

Hear Moby Interviewed Tonight on Echoes.

I don’t know if Moby intended it this way, but Innocents sounds like the conclusion of a trilogy, joining Wait for Me and Destroyed, his two previous albums.  As on those recordings, Moby plays the ambient song-smith, crafting odes of haunting and poignant beauty, making a music that sounds like it’s rooted in an earlier, more rustic time, except it’s electronic. The songs in this trilogy are more personally reflective than those on albums like Play, and Moby has become less reliant on sampling and more engaged in building upon a lineage of songwriters that goes back to Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and Neil Young.

In fact, “Almost Home” would not have sounded out of place on Young’s After the Gold Rush, except of course, for the synthesizer accents and ambient effects.  Damien Jurado sings this lament in a falsetto that echoes Neil Young’s pitch-challenged charm, and Moby’s sonic landscape recalls the lonesome wails of Crazy Horse.

Moby & drum machine wall – Echoes Interview.

Jurado is among a cast of singers who appear on Innocents, many of whom wrote their own lyrics.  Cold Specks turns up on two tracks. With a  Norah Jones-like sultriness, she intones late-night reflections on “A Case for Shame.”  Non sequiturs like “Cut off your nose to spite your face, slowly send your palms away,” turned into a searing meditation on existence . Cold Specks gets a dark blues sound on “Tell Me” reinforced by Moby cutting and pasting an insistent refrain and layering her voice in this forlorn, but powerful piece.

Skylar Grey is a singer associated with Eminem and she has the ethereal, smoke-filled voice Moby favors, as evidenced by  previous singers like Kelli Scarr.  Over a slo-mo groove draped in synth pads, and against a gospel loop sample pleading to “look over yonder, the sun done gone,” Grey sings “The Last Day,” a hymn about death an a life lived without being. “You Only just discovered the sun, on the last day,” she sings with resigned regret.  It’s the only song where Moby also uses the found-vocal strategy of Play.

A life unfulfilled is a theme for many of Moby’s songs. You’ll find it in lyrics he wrote for longtime collaborator Inyang Bassey on “Don’t Love Me,” a mid-tempo electro-barrelhouse song about a woman mistreated by a lover.  It’s also in yet another of Moby’s cautionary tales about heroin, “The Perfect Life,” sung with Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips. The album ends with a song as bleak as any Moby has ever written: “The Dogs.”  He sings this one  himself, mourning the turns of life and what sounds like a failed relationship.

Moby could probably play a lot of these songs sitting at an acoustic piano or plucking a guitar, but that’s not his way.  These songs are spun through ghost echoes, shadow delays, draped in synthesizer pads and punctuated with disembodied sounds.  Few can do more than Moby with some simple chords of  synthesizer strings.

Innocents includes the requisite moody Moby instrumentals too. “A Long Time” is one of the few songs that harkens back to his dance roots.  There is a vocal on it, but the words are indecipherable and buried in reverb and delays, making this sound more like an instrumental track that would sit well in the EDM rave of your mind.  He should have segued it into the syncopated groove of “Saints” with Steve Sidelnyk’s march-to-Mordor drums and Inyang Bassey’s anguished shouts.

Wait for Me, Destroyed and Innocents are trilogy of elegies for Moby, looking back on his life and the people he’s lost.  A track on the deluxe edition CD is aptly called, “Everyone Is Gone.” Sadness rarely sounds as beautiful as it does with Moby.

Hear Moby interviewed tonight 12/9, on Echoes.

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.

Euphoria in Echoes Podcast.

Hear Euphoria Interviewed on Echoes Podcast

Ken Ramm played in rock bands as a kid and spent a lot of time composing the soundtrack for the soap opera, “As The World Turns.”  But in the mid-1990s he had the idea of putting his guitar in a different musical environment. He took country-blues slide guitar, and put it on top of electronica grooves and ambiences. It took him a few years, but in 1999 he put out his first album as Euphoria. The lead song from that disc, “Delirium”  became something of an underground hit, turning up in TV shows and Nissan commercials.  After a seven year hiatus, he’s just released a pair of albums, E4 Instrumental and E4 Vocal that present two directions for Euphoria.  I go to the fork in the road with Ken Ramm and singer Robyn Dell’Unto of Eurphoria on Echoes Podcast

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.

Euphoria, the Band, on Echoes

Hear Euphoria Interviewed Tonight on Echoes.

Ken Ramm played in rock bands as a kid and spent a lot of time composing the soundtrack for the soap opera, “As The World Turns.”  But in the mid-1990s he had the idea of putting his guitar in a different musical environment. He took country-blues slide guitar, and put it on top of electronica grooves and ambiences. It took him a few years, but in 1999 he put out his first album as Euphoria. The lead song from that disc, “Delirium”  became something of an underground hit, turning up in TV shows and Nissan commercials.  After a seven year hiatus, he’s just released a pair of albums, E4 Instrumental and E4 Vocal that present two directions for Euphoria.  I go to the fork in the road with Ken Ramm and singer Robyn Dell’Unto of Eurphoria tonight on Echoes.

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.

Moby’s Innocents Echoes CD of the Month.

Moby Scores Echoes CD of the Month Hat Trick with Innocents.

Hear Moby’s Innocents Featured Tonight on Echoes.

I don’t know if Moby intended it this way, but Innocents sounds like the conclusion of a trilogy, joining Wait for Me and Destroyed, his two previous albums.  As on those recordings, Moby plays the ambient song-smith, crafting odes of haunting and poignant beauty, making a music that sounds like it’s rooted in an earlier, more rustic time, except it’s electronic. The songs in this trilogy are more personally reflective than those on albums like Play, and Moby has become less reliant on sampling and more engaged in building upon a lineage of songwriters that goes back to Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and Neil Young.

In fact, “Almost Home” would not have sounded out of place on Young’s After the Gold Rush, except of course, for the synthesizer accents and ambient effects.  Damien Jurado sings this lament in a falsetto that echoes Neil Young’s pitch-challenged charm, and Moby’s sonic landscape recalls the lonesome wails of Crazy Horse.

Moby & drum machine wall – Echoes Interview.

Jurado is among a cast of singers who appear on Innocents, many of whom wrote their own lyrics.  Cold Specks turns up on two tracks. With a  Norah Jones-like sultriness, she intones late-night reflections on “A Case for Shame.”  Non sequiturs like “Cut off your nose to spite your face, slowly send your palms away,” turned into a searing meditation on existence . Cold Specks gets a dark blues sound on “Tell Me” reinforced by Moby cutting and pasting an insistent refrain and layering her voice in this forlorn, but powerful piece.

Skylar Grey is a singer associated with Eminem and she has the ethereal, smoke-filled voice Moby favors, as evidenced by  previous singers like Kelli Scarr.  Over a slo-mo groove draped in synth pads, and against a gospel loop sample pleading to “look over yonder, the sun done gone,” Grey sings “The Last Day,” a hymn about death an a life lived without being. “You Only just discovered the sun, on the last day,” she sings with resigned regret.  It’s the only song where Moby also uses the found-vocal strategy of Play.

A life unfulfilled is a theme for many of Moby’s songs. You’ll find it in lyrics he wrote for longtime collaborator Inyang Bassey on “Don’t Love Me,” a mid-tempo electro-barrelhouse song about a woman mistreated by a lover.  It’s also in yet another of Moby’s cautionary tales about heroin, “The Perfect Life,” sung with Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips. The album ends with a song as bleak as any Moby has ever written: “The Dogs.”  He sings this one  himself, mourning the turns of life and what sounds like a failed relationship.

Moby could probably play a lot of these songs sitting at an acoustic piano or plucking a guitar, but that’s not his way.  These songs are spun through ghost echoes, shadow delays, draped in synthesizer pads and punctuated with disembodied sounds.  Few can do more than Moby with some simple chords of  synthesizer strings.

Innocents includes the requisite moody Moby instrumentals too. “A Long Time” is one of the few songs that harkens back to his dance roots.  There is a vocal on it, but the words are indecipherable and buried in reverb and delays, making this sound more like an instrumental track that would sit well in the EDM rave of your mind.  He should have segued it into the syncopated groove of “Saints” with Steve Sidelnyk’s march-to-Mordor drums and Inyang Bassey’s anguished shouts.

Wait for Me, Destroyed and Innocents are trilogy of elegies for Moby, looking back on his life and the people he’s lost.  A track on the deluxe edition CD is aptly called, “Everyone Is Gone.” Sadness rarely sounds as beautiful as it does with Moby.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.  This month,  CD of the Month Club members will be getting Moby’s  Innocents. 

SPECIAL FOR THIS MONTH
New and Renewing Echoes CD of the Month Club members will also got Bombay Dub Orchestra’s magnificent new album, Tales from the Grand Bazaar.

Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and hear what you’ve been missing.

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.

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.

Alvin Lee Goes Home R.I.P.

Alvin Lee Founder & Guitarist of Ten Years After Passes

I remember watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson around 1969.   I think it was Steve Lawrence, or another of those loungey Vegas entertainers Carson loved back then, was on the show talking about hanging out with this group Ten Years After.  He was shocked how this nice looking kid with perfectly coiffed flowing blonde hair would open up his mouth and sing like a growling Mississippi bluesman.  He said they sat in the hotel room watching Count Basie on TV while the band distorted the color on the set, probably much like this album cover.  Gee, I wonder what they were doing.

Ten Years After Undead

At the time, I’m not sure I knew but I had already been introduced to Ten Years After with their eponymous debut album  and converted with Undead, their ferocious live album.  Ten Years After was a band that was always better live than on record.  Just witness that iconic performance of “I’m Going Home” in the Woodstock film.  It made Ten Years After rock stars and Lee’s peace symbol-stickered red Gibson guitar a rock symbol.

Most people remember TYA from their 1971 hit, “I’d Love to Change the World.”  It was a beautiful slice of late-psychedelic, Pre-Progressive pop that also showed a more tender side to this speed demon guitarist.

How much did I love Ten Years After? In a year or so span between 1969 and 1970 I saw them four times.  Once at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969 and three times at the Commodore Ballroom in Lowell, Massachusetts where I’d have my elbows on the stage while sweat poured off  Lee as he scorched his guitar in furious improvisations.  Every time they blew me away.  They were always a band that was about the music with Alvin Lee flailing like mad hornet on his guitar.   Leo Lyons had scraped the finish completely off the upper side of his bass guitar from coming off the strings so hard.

Alvin Lee

I never followed Lee after Ten Years After broke up in 1973, but he was still out there making records and touring even while a Lee-less Ten Years After toured the nostalgia circuit.  He passed away on March 6 following complications for what is reported to be a routine surgical procedure.  Born in 1944, he was 68 years old. The death notice was posted on his website.

Alvin Lee is going home.

~John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.  With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like In A Time Lapse   Club members will get this album 10 days before release.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club  and see what you’ve been missing.

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.

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.