AN ECHOES CHRISTMAS

Celebrate Christmas with the Soundscape of Echoes.
On Christmas Eve it’s An Echoes Night Before Christmas
On Christmas Day enjoy An Echoes Christmas
&
Hear An Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings on Demand for Free at Echoes On-Line

As a special gift to Echoes Listeners you can stream our Celtic Sonic Seasonings show with Moya Brennan and Jeff Johnson, Brian Dunning & Wendy Goodwin for FREE all day December 24 & 25

And if that’s not enough, on-line subscribers can dial up a six hour Wordless Echoes Christmas stream.  You can try it for $2.99 at Echoes On-Line.

For an Echoes Night Before Christmas hear seasonal music from Mree, Sarah McLachlan, and Camera Obscura.  We’ll hear a new Christmas song from SHEL and a guitar orchestra rendition of The Nutcracker from Stephen Bennett that is stunning. We’ll hear an electronic classic from Ralph Lundsten’s “Nordic Nature Symphony #3” and an electronic Christmas from Geigertek.

And just when you think it’s all over, end your Christmas day with An Echoes Christmas. It’s more Christmas sounds from Ólafur Arnalds, R. Carlos Nakai, Agnes Obel and more.

And for those hours when Echoes isn’t on. stream An Echoes Celtic Sonic Seasonings for free on demand all day on December 24 & 25..

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 and Under the Wonder Sky albums and a few Windham Hill collections.

So sit back 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 streaming now for free.

And for an all-instrumental Christmas with no spoken interruptions, dial up Christmas Echoes at Echoes On-Line.  Six hours of uninterrupted non-shopping mall seasonal bliss.

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

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Echoes Top 25 for December

We’re a little late, but here’s the Echoes Top 25 for this past December. Perhaps surprisingly, only one seasonal title on there, Loreena McKennitt’s A Midwinter Night’s Dream, although a couple of our Sonic Seasonings performers, including Lisa Lynne & Aryeh Frankfurter and Sumner McKane ranked high. New additions include some great electronica albums by Motionfield, Pan Electric and Ishq, Ian Boddy, and Kaya Project, whose And So It Goes will top the January list as our CD of the Month. 

ECHOES TOP 25

DECEMBER 2008

1.	John Gregorius	Heaven and Earth	Spotted Peccary
2.	Sumner McKane	What A Great Place to Be	Don’t Hit Your Sister Records
3.	Lisa Lynne & Aryeh Frankfurter	Two Worlds One	Lavendar Sky Music
4.	General Fuzz	Soulful Filling	Self Released
5.	Marconi Union	A Lost Connection	MU Transmissions
6.	Digitonal	Save Your Light for Darker Days	Just Music
7.	Peter Kater & Dominic Miller	In a Dream	Point of Light Records
8.	Motionfield	Optical Flow	Somnia
9.	Ian Boddy	Slide	DiN
10.	Saul Stokes	Villa Galaxia	Binary/Stokesmusic
11.	Pan Electric and Ishq	About Time	Absolute Ambient
12.	Loreena McKennitt	A Midwinter Night’s Dream	Quinlan Road/Universal Music
13.	California Guitar Trio	Echoes	Inner Knot
14.	Bombay Dub Orchestra	3 Cities	Six Degrees Records
15.	Kevin Kendle	Winter	Eventide Music Ltd.
16.	The Ministry of Inside Things	Ambient Elsewhere	Synkronos Music
17.	Kaya Project	And So It Goes	Interchill
19.	Vidia Wesenlund	Night Light	Self Released
20.	Jerry Douglas	Glide	Koch Records
21.	The Glimmer Room	Home Without the Journey	Neu Harmony and A-Frame Media
22.	Bill Frisell	History, Mystery	Nonesuch Records
24.	Michael Diamond	Chroma Zone	Diamond Sound Productions
23.	Anja Lechner and Vasillis Tsabropoulos	Melos	ECM Records
25.	Sevara Nazarkhan	Sen	Real World

John Gregorius’s Heaven and Earth was the Echoes CD of the Month for December 2008   Read the Review!

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Celtic Christmas Music

Aine Minogue, Loreena McKennitt and Enya do a  Celtic Christmas

(You can hear an Audio Version of this blog with music excerpts from these albums.)

Celtic music and Christmas go together as well as Handel‘s Messiah and Christmas. If you want to tap into that contemplative, fireplace, snowflakes and Christmas tree mood, there’s nothing like a good Celtic aire to get you there.

A new CD by the Irish Singer Enya is called  And Winter Came.  Surprisingly, it has only two carols on it, one of them being Enya’s Gaelic version of “Silent Night” which she’s recorded before. But instead of releasing an entire album of carols, she’s written original tunes for the season that drip in sentimentality wrapped in the velvet cocoon of her vocal choirs.

All the Enya hallmarks are here from the swooning choruses to the pizzicato synth strings. And there’s even another song in the tradition of “Orinoco Flow” called “Trains and Winter Rains”

Another Celtic Diva, Loreena McKennitt enters the Christmas fray with A Midwinter Night’s Dream. Much of it reprises music from her “A Winter Garden” EP from 1995 including original songs like “Snow.” Celtic sounds abound, but she also takes some traditional carols and spins them through her Moroccan mixer.

Aine Minogue is an Irish harpist and singer. She touches a different side with a DVD called Winter: A Meditation. She takes songs from across her catalog that evoke the mystery of the winter season and marries them to beautiful slow mo nature scenes and vaguely ritualistic tableaus. Aine says that songs like “The Grove” draw a lot of inspiration from Druid myths, where it’s believed many Christmas traditions have their origins.

Aine Minogue: The groves were very precious and holy to the ancient Druids and it centers around the idea of creating a sacred space to invite in the other world, particularly at the power times of the year like the winter solstice.

Aine Minogue will be playing live on the Echoes Sonic Seasonings show along with Sumner McKane, Lisa Lynne and Aryeh Frankfurter and Tim Farrell. Check your local station for times. This has been an Echo Location, soundings for new Christmas music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))