Hear Karl Hyde & Leo Abrahams talk about Edgeland in Echoes Tonight.
In the 1980s, Rick Smith and Karl Hyde got together in a band called Freur and then formed the influential electronic dance group Underworld. They’ve been musically inseparable until recently. Rick Smith scored the soundtrack for Tranceand Karl Hyde released his solo debut, working with Brian Eno collaborator, Leo Abrahams. The album is called Edgeland. I travel with Karl Hyde and Leo Abrahams to the outskirts of civilization.
Highlights:
Karl Hyde Painting
Karl Hyde on synaesthesia: I’m synaesthetic in as much as I see shapes and hear colors, and colors make sounds and buildings generate words.
Karl Hyde on decay: I’m largely drawn to what we think of as decay and I find very beautiful…you know, the cracks in pavement or walls, weeds, discarded things, things that I see as markers left behind by people who are on journeys, things we need to find and to follow like a trail of breadcrumbs. I find all of these to be very beautiful in their rhythm, in their sequencing.
Leo Abrahams on improvised songs: He [Karl Hyde] literally will turn up with notebooks full of lyrics that he’d written often on the train on the way down to my studio. And he’d just say, “Play something.”
Hear more of Karl Hyde & Leo Abrahams’ interview in Echoes tonight.
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Hear Karl Hyde & Leo Abrahams talk about Edgeland in Echoes Podcast.
In the 1980s, Rick Smith and Karl Hyde got together in a band called Freur and then formed the influential electronic dance group Underworld. They’ve been musically inseparable until recently. Rick Smith scored the soundtrack for Tranceand Karl Hyde released his solo debut, working with Brian Eno collaborator, Leo Abrahams. The album is called Edgeland. I travel with Karl Hyde and Leo Abrahams to the outskirts of civilization.
Highlights:
Karl Hyde Painting
Karl Hyde on synaesthesia: I’m synaesthetic in as much as I see shapes and hear colors, and colors make sounds and buildings generate words.
Karl Hyde on decay: I’m largely drawn to what we think of as decay and I find very beautiful…you know, the cracks in pavement or walls, weeds, discarded things, things that I see as markers left behind by people who are on journeys, things we need to find and to follow like a trail of breadcrumbs. I find all of these to be very beautiful in their rhythm, in their sequencing.
Leo Abrahams on improvised songs: He [Karl Hyde] literally will turn up with notebooks full of lyrics that he’d written often on the train on the way down to my studio. And he’d just say, “Play something.”
Hear more of Karl Hyde & Leo Abrahams’ interview in the Echoes Podcast.
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Tonight on Echoes, new music from world flute player Stephen DeRuby, whose new album is called Awakening. DeRuby plays all kinds of world flutes and sets them in dreamy landscapes. We’ll also hear from Daft Punk’sRandom Access Memories. It’s a dance album but even dancers have to chill and we’ll hear one of the tracks that does that..
Below, watch Stephen DeRuby’s live, improvisational performance of “Cave of the Ancient Ones.”
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Kevin Keller is one of our favorite ambient chamber music composers. He’s just released on internet video a series of 1 minute compositions set to dance works and videos by producer Kyla Ernst-Alper. As with all of Keller’s work, the music is emotionally concise and cut with laser-knife precision and he’s found a perfect visual embodiment in these six videos. Here’s three of them. The rest are here.
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Gabrielle Roth wouldn’t have won any musician polls. She didn’t really play anything beyond some percussion. Yet she was responsible for nearly two dozen albums over the last 20 years or so. She referred to herself as an urban shaman and with the floating personnel of her ensemble, Gabrielle Roth And The Mirrors, she released music and conducted dance movement workshops. Gabrielle Roth passed away on October 22, after a long struggle with stage four lung cancer.
We interviewed Roth and her husband, Robert Ansell in the early 1990s. Walking into their Greenwich Village apartment I found Indian yarn paintings from North Mexico and Persian rugs amid a clutter of drums and percussion.
Drums were at the root of Gabriele Roth’s sound and one of the vehicles on what she called Maps To Ecstasy. That’s also a book she wrote. Tall and lithesome, with long, dark hair and bright, penetrating eyes she called herself an urban shaman.
“To be a Shaman means to be a wounded healer,” claimed Roth. “It means somebody who has fallen apart and put themselves back together again. So it’s very human. It’s just a job. But a Shaman is essentially somebody who transports, who moves from regular reality to ecstatic states of consciousness and knows how to do that. And can take other people with them.”
Roth didn’t claim to have studied any shamanic traditions. She never became a disciple of a voodoo priest or Indian medicine man. but she spent some time at Esalen, the self-actualization institute and studied a spiritual philosophy called Arica. But she says she was already on a path of using music and dance to heal. She wrote several books and gave dance movement workshops in what she calls ecstatic dancing, getting participants to into a whirling dervish of trance.
“I created my own form of dance, which is an ecstatic dance form,” explained Roth. “And it’s based in rhythms, specifically five particular rhythms. The very flowing rhythm, the very staccato, percussive rhythm, a very chaotic rolling, abandoned type rhythm, 6/8. And a very light and lyrical rhythm. And then a still rhythm. And then within this context, I get people to dance their own particular steps, but staying in the context of that state of being. So it’s really a practice, it’s like, it could be looked at as a workout, or it could be looked at as a meditation, that’s just how you come to it. ”
Here’s one of Gabrielle Roth’s dances from her workshops.
Gabrielle didn’t actually write any of this music. In fact, she rarely played anything but incidental percussion and sang on a few tracks. Instead, she guided the music, giving directions to the musicians, even dancing for them. It sounds a little flakey, but she’s gotten some serious musicians to work with her including percussionist Mino Cinelu who played with Miles Davis and Weather Report, Adam Rudolph who played with Jon Hassell, jazz trombonist and conch shell player Steve Turre, Latin percussionist Sammy Figuroa and bassist Alex Blake.
“I talk to these artists in tongues,” she proclaims. “You know, in rhythms, in feelings, in tones, in landscapes, in images, and it’s like soul to soul. And we just, you know I totally trust that they will know exactly what to do.”
She started out with earthy and organic slow movement trance pieces with percussion and synthesizer atmospheres which you can hear in the sensual spaces of albums like Ritual. But as she moved on she tapped into more electronic dance and techno forms which you can hear and see in this video which won’t embed, but is worth following the link.
Gabrielle Roth’s mix of drums and mysticism, world music and primal dancing might smack of New Age opportunism. She said she never wanted to be a shaman, she just wanted to feel good, to live an existence in a state of ecstasy. Music and dance is how she got there. Being a shaman was knowing the way.
“Shamans are really map makers,” she said. “It’s like you find your way somewhere and then you map it. You know it’s instinct to do so. So it’s like the cartography of the soul. And inside the soul what I found was a dancer and a singer and a poet and an actor and a healer in every soul. That’s what the soul is, it’s those archetypes. So my work is just to bring those out. To give them something to do, to find a way to express, whoever happens to be there, you know. ”
Ultimately, cancer proved too much for even Gabrielle Roth’s healing shamanic ways. She passed “into stillness” on October 22 at the age of 71.
Join us on Facebookwhere you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours the states or Eno releases a new album.
Bombay Dub Orchestra have been fusing eastern and electronic music for several years now and doing it with a grace and elegance that is unparalleled. I still go back to their 2006 eponymous debut album which sounds as fresh now as it did then. Their mix of eastern modes and musicians, with lush strings channeled through electronica and dub transformations, forged a sensual, seductive and enraptured east-west exotica.
So why was I struck with dread when I saw the release of BDO’s album, The New York Remixes? It’s because so many remix albums are just an excuse to use a name and a few exotic touches of an artist’s music to create dance floor grooves that by and large are generic. I still cringe when I think of the Patrick O’Hearn remix album, Mix Up. So does O’Hearn.
So often remix artists take music that is delicate in melody and subtle and complex in rhythm and strip it down to four on the floor tom hits and handclaps. I remember Thrash, then of The Orb, telling me that when they remixed Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, he wanted to speed it up so fast that it would be just a blip that he would use as a drum hit. Inveterate hippie Alex Patterson wouldn’t have it.
“I’m thinking, this is semi-sacred sort of thing. It’s got to be put on. We eventually came to an agreement where we could have a backward one as opposed to a forward one.”
Still, you’d be hard pressed to find any of Mike Oldfields melody in their remix.
There are exceptions. Solar Stone always seems to tap into a more serene aspect of any artist and the album of Ulrich Schnauss remixes, Missing Deadlines, is a wonder of anthemic drive and euphoric ecstasy.
But from the opening thud of Bombay Dub Orchestra’s “Compassion – Pivotal Movement Remix,” it’s clear that subtle will go out the window. Three remixers take a whack at brutalizing this song. They all have something of merit. Pivotal drops in swooning bass, loops several voices of the song into a canon and has some startling pressure drops, but the beauty of the original is lost. For point of reference, here’s the original:
Likewise Force of Change makes some interesting dubstep moves on “Monsoon Malabar”, but in the process ruins everything that was beautiful about that song. With “Junoon,” remixed by EarthRise SoundSystem, The New York Remixes hits its nadir, with a generic hip-hop groove and forgettable raps by no less than three MCs. Why does anyone think this is a good idea?
Sound Shikara seems to understand the moods of “The Berber of Seville” for a minute. Not surprisingly perhaps, he’s from Oman, not New York. But it isn’t long before he launches into a ferocious dub-step groove of doom. The original “Berber” strings have little to do with the rhythms he’s created making it almost a Cagian “Indeterminacy Music” effect. But I don’t think that was the intent.
Of course, you can go the other way. Moby frequently, if not always, creates remixes of his music. And frequently, if not always, he strips out everything that made the song interesting and turns it into vaporous ambience. We went 5 or 6 songs deep into his Wait for Me album, but I could barely find a piece to play off Wait for Me, Ambient. Same thing with DestroyedRemixed, even though both original releases were Echoes CD of the Month selections.
When you’re handed someone else’s music to remix, I think there should be an obligation to respect the original spirit of the song, to draw upon the best elements of the composition and production, but also bring something new or discover a hidden facet. Just turning a song into a dance tune just isn’t enough, and is not interesting.
Surprisingly Bombay Dub Orchestra have done some cool remixes themselves like their take on Juno Reactor’s “Pistolero,” Miklós Rózsa’s “Love Theme from Ben-Hur” and Azam Ali’s “Abode.” You can hear several of these on the BDO website.
And completely aside from its intrinsic artistic merits, there’s no Echoes on this disc. Where are the chill mixes guys? Meanwhile, I eagerly await a new Bombay Dub Orchestra album.
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.
You get great CDs like Dead Can Dance’s Anastasis by becoming a member of the Echoes CD of the Month Club. Follow the link and see what you’ve been missing.
Join us on Facebookwhere you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours, or Brian Eno releases a new CD.’
In the 1980s, Rick Smith and Karl Hyde got together in a band called Freur and then formed the influential electronic dance group Underworld. They’ve been musically inseparable until recently. Rick Smith scored the soundtrack for Trance and Karl Hyde released his solo debut, working with Brian Eno collaborator, Leo Abrahams. The album is called Edgeland. I travel with Karl Hyde and Leo Abrahams to the outskirts of civilization.
Leo Abrahams on improvised songs: He [Karl Hyde] literally will turn up with notebooks full of lyrics that he’d written often on the train on the way down to my studio. And he’d just say, “Play something.”
Support Echoes by becoming a member of the Echoes Sound Circle.
The Echoes Blog 
A New Age Shaman’s Last Dance.
October 24, 2012Gabrielle Roth passes at age 71.
Gabrielle Roth
Gabrielle Roth wouldn’t have won any musician polls. She didn’t really play anything beyond some percussion. Yet she was responsible for nearly two dozen albums over the last 20 years or so. She referred to herself as an urban shaman and with the floating personnel of her ensemble, Gabrielle Roth And The Mirrors, she released music and conducted dance movement workshops. Gabrielle Roth passed away on October 22, after a long struggle with stage four lung cancer.
We interviewed Roth and her husband, Robert Ansell in the early 1990s. Walking into their Greenwich Village apartment I found Indian yarn paintings from North Mexico and Persian rugs amid a clutter of drums and percussion.
Drums were at the root of Gabriele Roth’s sound and one of the vehicles on what she called Maps To Ecstasy. That’s also a book she wrote. Tall and lithesome, with long, dark hair and bright, penetrating eyes she called herself an urban shaman.
“To be a Shaman means to be a wounded healer,” claimed Roth. “It means somebody who has fallen apart and put themselves back together again. So it’s very human. It’s just a job. But a Shaman is essentially somebody who transports, who moves from regular reality to ecstatic states of consciousness and knows how to do that. And can take other people with them.”
Roth didn’t claim to have studied any shamanic traditions. She never became a disciple of a voodoo priest or Indian medicine man. but she spent some time at Esalen, the self-actualization institute and studied a spiritual philosophy called Arica. But she says she was already on a path of using music and dance to heal. She wrote several books and gave dance movement workshops in what she calls ecstatic dancing, getting participants to into a whirling dervish of trance.
“I created my own form of dance, which is an ecstatic dance form,” explained Roth. “And it’s based in rhythms, specifically five particular rhythms. The very flowing rhythm, the very staccato, percussive rhythm, a very chaotic rolling, abandoned type rhythm, 6/8. And a very light and lyrical rhythm. And then a still rhythm. And then within this context, I get people to dance their own particular steps, but staying in the context of that state of being. So it’s really a practice, it’s like, it could be looked at as a workout, or it could be looked at as a meditation, that’s just how you come to it. ”
Here’s one of Gabrielle Roth’s dances from her workshops.
Gabrielle didn’t actually write any of this music. In fact, she rarely played anything but incidental percussion and sang on a few tracks. Instead, she guided the music, giving directions to the musicians, even dancing for them. It sounds a little flakey, but she’s gotten some serious musicians to work with her including percussionist Mino Cinelu who played with Miles Davis and Weather Report, Adam Rudolph who played with Jon Hassell, jazz trombonist and conch shell player Steve Turre, Latin percussionist Sammy Figuroa and bassist Alex Blake.
“I talk to these artists in tongues,” she proclaims. “You know, in rhythms, in feelings, in tones, in landscapes, in images, and it’s like soul to soul. And we just, you know I totally trust that they will know exactly what to do.”
Gabrielle Roth’s mix of drums and mysticism, world music and primal dancing might smack of New Age opportunism. She said she never wanted to be a shaman, she just wanted to feel good, to live an existence in a state of ecstasy. Music and dance is how she got there. Being a shaman was knowing the way.
“Shamans are really map makers,” she said. “It’s like you find your way somewhere and then you map it. You know it’s instinct to do so. So it’s like the cartography of the soul. And inside the soul what I found was a dancer and a singer and a poet and an actor and a healer in every soul. That’s what the soul is, it’s those archetypes. So my work is just to bring those out. To give them something to do, to find a way to express, whoever happens to be there, you know. ”
Ultimately, cancer proved too much for even Gabrielle Roth’s healing shamanic ways. She passed “into stillness” on October 22 at the age of 71.
~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))
You get great CDs like our October CD Club selection, Hans Christian & Harry Manx’s You Are the Music of My Silence by becoming a member of the Echoes CD of the Month Club. Follow the link and see what you’ve been missing.
Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours the states or Eno releases a new album.
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Tags:dance, Gabrielle Roth, New Age, R.I.P.
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