Japanese Spaces-Arizona Skies

Today on Echoes it’s new music from Hiroki Okano and Steve Roach

Hiroki Okano was initiated as a Buddhist monk, but he decided to take a different path.  Throughout the 1990s, Okano made beautiful , delicately etched albums like Enn , Hearing There and Rainbow Over the Gypsy Hill, some of them on the late-lamented Innovative Communications label.  He formed the Wind Travelin’ Band, mixing Japan’s native Ainu artists with contemporary musicians and that band then collaborated with R. Carlos Nakai for the album Island of Bows.  He spent the last decade or so playing in jam bands and other music experiments including collaborations with English New Age artist Nigel Shaw, but he returns to form on a new CD called .jp. We’ll also hear a new, deep electronic journey from Steve Roach called Spiral Meditations.  We’ll be hearing a lot more about Steve Roach next Tuesday when we feature him talking about the 30th anniversary of Structures from Silence.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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.

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THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

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Erik Wøllo’s Timelines: Echoes February CD of the Month

Erik Wøllo’s Timelines
Echoes February CD of the Month

It’s a cliché, I know, but as soon as an Erik Wøllo album starts,
you know you are on a journey.  It’s like the moments before take-off, only Wøllo’s ascent doesn’t throw you back in your seat with G-Force thrust.  It’s a gentle rise into euphoric space. Timelines is a beautifully sculpted example of that.

Wøllo is a Norwegian musician who has been recording since 1984, releasing 18 solo albums in that span plus collaborations with musicians like Steve Roach, Ian Boddy and Kouame Sereba. From his 1988 album Traces (recently reissued on Spotted Peccary Records along with other Wøllo titles) Wøllo showed a command of detailed orchestrations and dramatic melodies. A guitarist and keyboardist, both elements come together in intricate and unexpected ways on Timelines.

Erik Wollo Live on Echoes 2010

Wøllo’s recent albums, Silent Currents and Airborne, have taken him into the drone zone inhabited by Steve Roach, but Timelines is a return to form for this guitarist who is more at home in a world of melody.  But you can hear those abstract influences in his electronic percussion palette which reflects the influence of his collaborations with Roach on Streams of Thought and Road Eternal.

The central core of this album is acoustic guitar, on which Wøllo composed all of the tracks, except I suspect, the spacey closer, “Ocean.”  On “Blue Rondo,” an acoustic guitar arpeggio seems to reveal itself out of an electronic swirl, merging with glurpy water drip electronic percussion, soaring synth pads and growling electric guitar drones before evolving into a gently percussive piece with some searing ebow guitar leads.

Erik Wollo Live on Echoes 2010

“Visions” is the centerpiece of the album, a slowly building work of interlocked percussion, electronic cycles and that ebow guitar that seems to emerge like a stealth bomber out of the storm clouds. Maybe that imagery is a little foreboding, but that’s what draws me to Wøllos music.  A track like “Along the Journey” could be a gentle walk through a Norwegian forest and easily devolve into New Age prettiness.  But throughout the walk, Wøllo has ambient atmospheres swirling at the edges, leaving them unfocused and mysterious.  There’s a darkness that balances the light, a dark undertow that serves to put his melodies in beautiful bas relief.  And then of course, there’s the thudding percussion and spiraling ebow solo that reveals this is no country walk.

Erik Wøllo has had a few CD of the Month picks in the past.  It’s hard not to.  Time is suspended when you cross Erik Wøllo’s Timelines.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))
Read more about Erik Wøllo
Gateway CD of the Month
Erik Wøllo & Steve Roach Interview

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Erik Wøllo’s Timelines is our February 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.

Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Meditations

LOU REED: METAL MACHINE MEDITATIONS

Hear an interview with Lou Reed talking about his final album.

Lou Reed at Echoes interview 2007

You may not think of Lou Reed, who passed away on October 27, as a meditative kind of guy, but the founding member of The Velvet Underground and purveyor of proto-punk songs created an electronic CD designed for meditation and body work, in particular, Tai Chi, of which he was a staunch devotee.  It’s called Hudson River Wind Meditations.  Who knew in 2007 that it would be his final album.  In this Echoes interview from that year, Lou Reed talked about his ambient spaces.

Lou Reed wasn’t the kind of artist you usually hear on Echoes, but his music had an impact on many of the artists you do hear on the show from Moby to Robert Rich.   Musicians who could be Reed’s great grandchildren like Tessa Murray and Greg Hughes of Still Corners are citing him.  I’ve always had mixed feelings about Lou Reed.  In the 60s, I was more inclined to the dreamy flower power of San Francisco and London than the dark, debauched undertones of New York.  I still remember writer Ralph J. Gleeson’s excoriating review of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable –  which included the Velvet Underground – when they played the original Fillmore Auditorium.   As a founder of Rolling Stone Magazine and the Monterey Jazz Festival, and early proponent of artists from Miles Davis to The Jefferson Airplane, Gleason was a hero and his review shaped a lot of my feelings about VU and Lou.

Echoes’ John Diliberto & Lou Reed

But somehow, the Velvets and Lou Reed wormed themselves into my life.  My older cousin Goody enthused to me about “The Gift” making me listen to the John Cale rendered tale of the macabre concocted by Lou Reed.   I heard a charming interview with the band on some late-Sunday night AM radio show near Boston in ’67.  Drummer Mo Tucker wasn’t there because she was “at church.” You couldn’t deny the seductive, droll-Fellini charm of “Walk on The Wild Side,” and Street Hassle and The Bells were both ambitious works I reviewed at the time.  Then there was Metal Machine Music, his noise manifesto, which included a written manifesto about the future of music which I read over the air on WXPN’s Diaspar program while the music squalled in the background.  And when he started hanging with Laurie Anderson, I couldn’t deny him his props.

But he still wasn’t an artist we’d play on Echoes until he released what has turned out to be his final album, Hudson River Wind Meditations.  It was indeed, a meditation CD, albeit one of the most minimally ambient kind.  Even that was too extreme to play on the air, but I thought, when else would I have the opportunity to interview Lou Reed?

Given his reputation for cantankerousness, I had more trepidation than I usually would.  But I had a few things I thought would engage him.  The first was commenting on the deep bass tones of the album which my woofers couldn’t really handle.  Being something of a tech geek, he loved that I commented on that aspect.  And then, it didn’t hurt that I had a picture of Laurie Anderson on an Echoes brochure I gave him.    When his manager popped in after ten minutes to cut the interview short, Reed waved him off and we talked for over an hour about noise, meditation,Tai Chi, LaMonte Young and more.

You can hear that interview here.

We’re saddened by the passing of Lou Reed, who left an indelible mark on music. And our deepest sympathies go out to his wife, artist/musician Laurie Anderson, who found her soulmate in an unlikely place.

Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Meditations.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1591795540/echoes

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A Trip to the Drone Zone with Furthernoise

It’s difficult finding reliable reference material about the music you hear on Echoes. I’ve yet to locate a single site that reliably covers the music heard on the show, or even some of its significant component parts. One interesting site I recently stumbled across is Furthernoise.org  out of the U.K.  It travels through the darker regions of the Echoes soundscape, deep into the drone zones of noise and soundscape music, but they do a good job of surveying that often opaque range. Their new issue covers recent releases from the Hypnos label which we often play on Echoes.  Coincidentally, one of the albums they cover is Stewart Brand’s serenely textured “Bridge To Nowhere.  I wonder if that’s on Sarah Palin’s iPod.   Another label called Gears of Sand is also featured with some compelling textural composers.  

Furthernoise states their mission as:

Furthernoise is an online platform for the creation, promotion, criticism and archiving of innovative cross genre music and sound art for the information & interaction of the public and artists alike.

Furthernoise wears their avant-garde tastes like badge of honor, but those of you into the murkier, more experimental side of Echoes, might enjoy some time here.  The site is also heavily laden with soundfiles that continue to play with a control panel that remains on top no matter where you move within their site. A nice touch.    They’ve just put their September issue on-line.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))