Retro-California, Future Space & Joy Formidable On Echoes

Raygun Ballet – Big California

Today on Echoes it’s new music by Raygun Ballet.  This is the recording persona of John-Mark Austin.  He’s best known as an Academy Award winning CGI artist whose work includes Avatar among many others.  When he makes music, Austin explores a retro-futurism, pulling soundclips from the 50s that are usually looking forward to an age of jetpacks, flying cars and nuclear dreams.  His album, The World That Wasn’t, was not only some great electronic music, but a gas of visions of the future from the past. His new album looks at the promises of the Golden State,  It’s called Big California and we’ll hear a track from it tonight.

We’ll also hear a new project by Porcupine Tree bassist Colin Edwin called Endless Tapes.  He teams up with Italian multi-instrumentalist Alessandro Pedretti for an EP of roiling, deep moods that recalls his work with Jon Durant on Burnt Belief.

The Joy Formidable is a great alt-rock band from Wales that is usually pretty raging.  But earlier this year they put out an EP called The Silent Treatment that reveals a gentler side.  Surprisingly, we’re not playing the WIlliam Orbit remix but one of the more acoustic tracks.

We’re also going to hear from Gungor, a husband-wife duo from their album, I Am Mountain, and my palette is more than whetted by a single from Agnes Obel’s forthcoming CD, Aventine.  It’s all ahead today on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.   CD of the Month Club members will be getting Darshan Ambient’s Little Things 10 days before its released.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.

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

Think of the great artists you love on Echoes. Think of the informative interviews and exclusive live performances. Then, think of a world without Echoes. You can make sure that never happens by becoming a member of the Echoes Sound Circle.

Echoes is a non-profit 501(c3) organization just like your local public radio station. And all donations are tax deductible. You can support Echoes with a monthly donation that will barely disturb your credit card.

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

Celtic Returns, Prog on the Side, Experiment into Ambient

We’ve got a lot of new music from old friends today on Echoes.  Clannad, the legendary Irish band and one of the groups that launched the Celtic renaissance in the 1980s, returns with their first album in 15 years.  It’s called Nádúr,  Gaelic for nature, and it brings the core members of Clannad back together, including singer Moya Brennan, for those lush harmonies that have made songs like “Theme from Harry’s Game” so enduring.

Jeff Greinke’s career isn’t as storied as Clannad’s, but he’s been releasing ambient and experimental recordings since the mid-1980s.  He has returned with an album that is his most accessible and also most beautiful.  Scenes from a Train is a gorgeous and subtle album of ambient chamber music with Greinke using live, mostly acoustic musicians.  It’s the last song of the night so stay up for it.  But even if you don’t it’s in heavy rotation so you’ll be hearing it a lot.

Colin Edwin returns to the show.  He’s the bassist for Porcupine Tree and we heard him extensively earlier this year on the album he recorded with Jon Durant, Burnt Belief.  On a new EP he teams up with Italian drummer/multi-instrumentalist Alesandro Pedretti.  If you liked Burnt Belief, you’ll like the dark, throbbing but melodic moves of this self-titled EP, Endless Tapes.

Finally, Kitaro returns with a new album, Final Call.  It’s an ominous title and when I got that as the subject line in a promotional email, I thought I had missed out on something.  Kitaro has retired from his thus far four volume Sacred Journey of Ku-Kai trek to make an album that contemplates the state of the world.  You’ll hear all the Kitaro signatures here, but the cut we]’ll play tonight is a little different.  Kitaro has always been lumped in with space music, but he’s rarely used that iconic sequencer sound of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze.  But he does on a track called “Traveler.”

That’s just part of the trip tonight, on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.   CD of the Month Club members will be getting Darshan Ambient’s Little Things 10 days before its released.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.

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

Think of the great artists you love on Echoes. Think of the informative interviews and exclusive live performances. Then, think of a world without Echoes. You can make sure that never happens by becoming a member of the Echoes Sound Circle.

Echoes is a non-profit 501(c3) organization just like your local public radio station. And all donations are tax deductible. You can support Echoes with a monthly donation that will barely disturb your credit card.

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

Colin Edwin & Jon Durant’s Post-Apocalyptic Burnt Beliefs.

Hear the Echoes Podcast with Colin Edwin & Jon Durant

Porcupine Tree is among the most popular of the recent generation of Progressive Rock groups.  They’ve even enjoyed chart success.  Colin Edwin is their highly regarded bass player.  Jon Durant is much less well known, but he’ been putting out wonderful ambient-laced electric guitar albums for a couple of decades now.  The two musicians got together recently to record an album of guitar and bass duets that goes way beyond that description.  It’s called Burnt Belief.

Remember that Mayan thing, when the world was supposed to end on January 21 2012, the day the Mayan calendar ran out?  Apparently, that didn’t happen, but it did inspire an album by Jon Durant and Colin Edwin.  They timed the release of Burnt Belief for December 22,the day after the apocalypse.

“I’ve always been fascinated by what happens when people have a very deep seated belief and that belief is kind of proven wrong,” says bassist Colin Edwin. “And it was so bizarre because of course, when it fails to happen, the interesting thing is these people, they become even more entrenched in their beliefs.  You know, they kind of justify the fact that it hasn’t happened by saying that there’s something wrong with them and it will happen at a future date.  So I don’t think for a minute that the world is gonna end on Dec. 21, you know, of this year, next week, but for me it’s about kind of provoking the thought, ultimately the thought that I would like people to have about it is you know, what do you believe and why, you know. ”

Obviously the world didn’t end, but some of the music on Burnt Belief might be suitable for a post-apocalyptic time.

The project began in 2010 when guitarist Jon Durant asked Edwin to play on his CD, Dance of the Shadow Planets.  The collaboration worked so well they decided to record an entire CD together.

“When we worked together on Shadow Planets and he’s playing live in the room with us, it wasn’t the typical thing for me with all the guitar players I’ve had in the past,” exudes Edwin from his home outside of London. “They just want to solo on everything or play a really loud riff.”

Jon Durant joins in the mutual admiration exchange. “A great bass player isn’t defined by how many notes he can play,” professes Durant from his home outside of Boston.  “That’s not the sort of voice that would work in the context of my music.  And Colin really, he knows when to say nothing, which is important, when to just hit that one great note that just leaves you breathless, and when to add a melodic phrase and do so with real intention.

You can hear the complete interview with Jon Durant and Colin Edwin, including their talk about Middle Eastern music and Peter Gabriel’s Passion in the Echoes Podcast.

~John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

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Progressive Ambience with Porcupine Tree’s Colin Edwin & Jon Durant

What do you listen to when the world doesn’t end?  Hear one of the best albums of 2013 when we interview guitarist Jon Durant and Porcupine Tree bassist Colin Edwin about their CD Burnt Belief tonight on Echoes.
http://www.echoes.org/comingup.html#0117

Here’s a video from it.

~© 2012 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 The Ambient Zone – Just Music Café Volume 4 .  Sign up now and you’ll also get February’s CD of the Month, Ulrich Schnauss’ A Long Way to Fall.  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.