2013 Rewind: Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll

Start 2014 Off Right with a Reprise Broadcast of The Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll Results tonight 01/01/2014

What do you get when you take a contemporary avant-garde composer, psychedelic folkies, Indian sitarists and Japanese electronic musicians.  Apparently you get the soundscape of Echoes or at least the music listeners thought was the best aspect of that soundscape.  Listeners have voted and today we’ll hear the results of the Best of Echoes 2013.

A few comments:
Both listeners and Echoes staff picked the same number one album, Ludovico Einaudi’s In A Time Lapse, the listeners by a very wide margin.

Nine tracks from 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2013 made it to the listener poll.

Five CD of the Month Picks made it to the Listener Poll (Nine made it to 25 Essential Echoes CDs)

It’s the 2013 Poll, but there is music on it dating back from one to forty  years: Dead Can Dance’s In Concert, essentially there 2012 #1 album, Anastasis done live, Steve Roach’s Rasa Dance, a collection with tracks dating back to the 1980s, and Tubular Beats, a remix of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.

And who would’ve thought that a band who had a #2 hit single, would be on an Echoes list? We didn’t play Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” but the album it came from Random Access Memories, came in at #9.  Top Ten on Echoes has to be better than #2 on Billboard, right?

BEST OF ECHOES 2013 LISTENER POLL

1. Ludovico Einaudi – In a Time Lapse (Ponderosa Music & Art)
2. Moby – Innocents (Mute)
3. Dead Can Dance – In Concert (PIAS America)
4. Sigur Ros – Kveikur (XL Recordings)
5. Ulrich Schnauss – A Long Way to Fall (Domino Records)
6. Agnes Obel – Aventine (Pias America)
7. David Bowie – The Next Day  (Columbia)
8. Ólafur Arnalds – For Now I Am Winter (Mercury Classics)
9. Daft Punk – Random Access Memory (Columbia)
10. Bombay Dub Orchestra – Tales from the Grand Bazaar (Six Degrees)
11. David Helpling & Jon Jenkins – Found (Spotted Peccary)
12. Darshan Ambient – Little Things (Spotted Peccary)
13. Anoushka Shankar – Traces of You (Deutsche Grammophon)
14. Steve Roach – Rasa Dance: The Music of Connection (Projekt)
15. Arborea – Fortress of the Sun (ESP Disk Ltd.)
16. Kitaro – Final Call (Domo Records)
17. Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp Records)
18. Mike Oldfield – Tubular Beats (Eagle Rock Entertainment)
19. R. Carlos Nakai & Will Clipman – Awakening the Fire (Canyon Records)
20. Tom Griesgraber & Bert Lams – Unnamed Lands (Inner Knot)
21. Mazzy Star – Seasons of Your Day (Ingrooves)
22. The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars (Sensibility Recordings)
23. Pat Metheny – The Orchestrion Project (Nonesuch)
24. Bill Frisell – Big Sur (Sony Masterworks)
25. Pat Metheny – Tap: John Zorns’s Book of Angels, Vol. 20 (Nonesuch)

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Nine of the CDs in this list were Echoes CDs of the Month, and the other three could’ve been on this list. 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.

Best of Echoes 2013 Listener Poll

What do you get when you take a contemporary avant-garde composer, psychedelic folkies, Indian sitarists and Japanese electronic musicians.  Apparently you get the soundscape of Echoes or at least the music listeners thought was the best aspect of that soundscape.  Listeners have voted and today we’ll hear the results of the Best of Echoes 2013.

A few comments:
Both listeners and Echoes staff picked the same number one album, Ludovico Einaudi’s In A Time Lapse, the listeners by a very wide margin.

Nine tracks from 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2013 made it to the listener poll.

Five CD of the Month Picks made it to the Listener Poll (Nine made it to 25 Essential Echoes CDs)

It’s the 2013 Poll, but there is music on it dating back from one to forty  years: Dead Can Dance’s In Concert, essentially there 2012 #1 album, Anastasis done live, Steve Roach’s Rasa Dance, a collection with tracks dating back to the 1980s, and Tubular Beats, a remix of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.

And who would’ve thought that a band who had a #2 hit single, would be on an Echoes list? We didn’t play Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” but the album it came from Random Access Memories, came in at #9.  Top Ten on Echoes has to be better than #2 on Billboard, right?

BEST OF ECHOES 2013 LISTENER POLL

1. Ludovico Einaudi – In a Time Lapse (Ponderosa Music & Art)
2. Moby – Innocents (Mute)
3. Dead Can Dance – In Concert (PIAS America)
4. Sigur Ros – Kveikur (XL Recordings)
5. Ulrich Schnauss – A Long Way to Fall (Domino Records)
6. Agnes Obel – Aventine (Pias America)
7. David Bowie – The Next Day  (Columbia)
8. Ólafur Arnalds – For Now I Am Winter (Mercury Classics)
9. Daft Punk – Random Access Memory (Columbia)
10. Bombay Dub Orchestra – Tales from the Grand Bazaar (Six Degrees)
11. David Helpling & Jon Jenkins – Found (Spotted Peccary)
12. Darshan Ambient – Little Things (Spotted Peccary)
13. Anoushka Shankar – Traces of You (Deutsche Grammophon)
14. Steve Roach – Rasa Dance: The Music of Connection (Projekt)
15. Arborea – Fortress of the Sun (ESP Disk Ltd.)
16. Kitaro – Final Call (Domo Records)
17. Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp Records)
18. Mike Oldfield – Tubular Beats (Eagle Rock Entertainment)
19. R. Carlos Nakai & Will Clipman – Awakening the Fire (Canyon Records)
20. Tom Griesgraber & Bert Lams – Unnamed Lands (Inner Knot)
21. Mazzy Star – Seasons of Your Day (Ingrooves)
22. The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars (Sensibility Recordings)
23. Pat Metheny – The Orchestrion Project (Nonesuch)
24. Bill Frisell – Big Sur (Sony Masterworks)
25. Pat Metheny – Tap: John Zorns’s Book of Angels, Vol. 20 (Nonesuch)

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

GIVE THE GIFT OF THE ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB

Nine of the CDs in this list were Echoes CDs of the Month, and the other three could’ve been on this list. 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.

3 Variations of a New Americana: Moby-Bill Frisell-Jon Hassell

Americana Pulls Up Its Roots

You can hear an audio version of this Blog with music

Americana is a genre that usually refers to rustic music with roots in heartland sounds from folk, blues and country. Looking back on 2009, Americana emerged in some unusual locations on Echoes, including jazz, the avant-garde and electronica.  My top three albums for 2009 (see Top Ten List) are very different, but all are dipping into a new stream of 21st century Americana.

At the top, Moby‘s Wait for Me, an album of modern hymns, mournful laments and deep blues.  He mixes major key instrumentals that roil in undertows of texture with songs that ask the big questions in a personal way.  On his album Play, Moby came to renown sampling archival gospel and blues field recordings.  On Wait for Me, he’s absorbed that sound into his own, wholly original music.

Bill Frisell has been infusing his jazz improvisations with country twang  and modalities since his 1997 album, Nashville.  His 2009 album, Disfarmer was named for a rustic photographer in the early 20th century.   On Bill Frisell’s evocation of Disfarmer, you can feel the humidity and smell the Delta soil of Arkansas where the title character lived. Playing his Fender Telecaster and mixing pedal steel guitar with chamber strings, Bill Frisell made a masterpiece of Americana Chamber music.

Jon Hassell is the least obvious in his Americana influences, but the maverick trumpeter is tapping a vein of music that draws on swamp blues and jazz, transmuting it through 21st century electronic manipulation on his album, Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, an album title that challenged many a critic’s word count.  In the 1980s Hassell created a genre called Fourth World Music but in the oughts, he’s mixing laptops, layered compositions and live sound processing.  It’s a cyber-merging of Hassell’s heroes like Duke Ellington and Gil Evans, along with Arvo Pärt, tuning in signals from space.

In 2009, Jon Hassell, Bill Frisell and Moby, took Americana and propelled it into the 21st century.  They borrow from roots traditions, but they’re making the music of our time.  This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Bill Frisell

A Different kind of Americana

You can hear an audio version of this Blog with Bill Frisell’s music here.

Guitarist Bill Frisell is a genre unto himself.  His music flows through interlocking veins of jazz improvisation and harmonies, country melodicism and twang, chamber music strings and electronic dissonances.  On his latest album, Disfarmer, Bill Frisell takes his Fender Telecaster into a country chamber music setting with pedal steel guitar, violin and upright bass.  Disfarmer was an obscure portrait photographer who worked in the 1930s and 40s.

BILL FRISELL: He basically lived in this real small town called Heber Springs in Arkansas and he had a little photography studio on the main street and would just sit outside and ask people if they wanted to have their photo taken.  And he was kind of a loner kind of guy, he didn’t have friends and I guess he was kind of intimidating, people didn’t really like him and it didn’t seem like he liked them much either.

Nevertheless he got intimate photographs. Like a rustic Richard Avedon, he framed his subjects so that their hard-scrabble lives are revealed in every line on their faces.  You can hear that in Bill Frisell’s music as well.

Bill Frisell says his country sound was always there, although not quite evident in his own music or his work in the ear-bending dissonances of John Zorn’s Naked City group. But in the mid- 1990s, he went to Music City and recorded the deeply country inflected album, Nashville.

BILL FRISELL: I went there and I played with a banjo player and a mandolin player and a Dobro player and that really got me thinking about it a lot more where I wanted to research that music more.

Bill Frisell’s country experiences led him towards a more profound understanding of music’s deeper connections.

BILL FRISELL: Whatever we call this stuff, blues and jazz and country and rock, if you go back far enough, there’s some point where you can’t make those divisions in it and that’s what really gets me excited I think.

Bill Frisell’s Disfarmer is out July 21st on Nonesuch Records.  You can see Disfarmers photo online. I’ll have a more extended interview with the guitarist on Monday.  This has been an Echo Location.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))