Hans Christian was one half of the group Rasa with singer Kim Waters, but before that he was a solo artist mixing his cello with electronics and other exotica. He returns to solo form on a new CD called Hidden Treasures. It’s an album of lush orchestrations featuring his cello, the Indian sarangi and sitara, Swedish nyckelharpa and more. We’ll hear a track from that and new music by Thus Owls, a band with members from Montreal and Sweden creating a theatrical dream pop on their album Turning Rocks. We’ll hear that as well as Davidge. He was the producer of Massive Attack for many of their albums and he’s just released his solo debut, Slo Light with a bunch of guests singers including Emi Green on the track we’ll hear. And speaking of Massive Attack, I’ve got them as well with Protection. It’s all ahead today on Echoes.
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Videos for the full concerts of AMBIcon 2013 are currently up on youtube. You”ll find them all on the AMBICON youtube page. Here’s a bunch of them with Stephan Micus, Michael Stearns, Steve Roach, Robert Rich, Jeff Pearce, Tim Story and Hans Christian. A rare confluence of ambient artists. I knew I was missing a great show.
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Hans Christian & Harry Manx’sYou Are the Music of My Silenceleads the Echoes Top 25 for October. Their dreamy Indian evocations, the Echoes CD of the Month for October, floats like a seagull above a roiling ocean of post & alt-rock bands in the Top Ten.
Tycho, All India Radio, Balmorhea, Hammock, The American Dollar, Azure Ray and The Album Leaf are all artists that hail from the rock side of things, creating variations on ambient rock and dream pop. Yet it’s still music with roots in the sound of Echoes. In fact all those artists grew up listening, in varying degrees, to the sounds of space music, Windham Hill Records and ambient music. You can hear those sounds in the bottom half of the list with Dead Can Dance still holding on after their September CD of the Month with Anastasis, Paul Avgerinos with his new age designs, Kevin Keller’s ambient chamber music and the return of Michael Stearns with his score to Samsara.
For a limited time only new subscribers to the Echoes CD of the Month Clubwill not only receive the November CD pick, Jeff Johnson & Phil Keaggy’s WaterSky, but an additional THREE previous CD of the Month picks absolutely free! With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like WaterSky coming to you each month. Join now and you’ll get Watersky plus three additional CDs. Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.
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You can trace many movements in modern music back to The Beatles, and they are at the roots of Hans Christian and Harry Manx. Not The Beatles of “She Loves You,” but the eastern-influenced Beatles of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and especially “Within You Without You.” Musicians like the German-born Christian and English-born Manx were inspired by those sounds to head east, although each approached it from a different perspective.
HANS CHRISTIAN is a classically trained cellist whose 1990s albums, Phantomsand Surrender, took his instrument into electronic and ambient terrain. But it was his work with Rasawhere he found his true voice, partly inspired by George Harrison’s recording of devotional chants from the Radha Krsna Temple. He’d become expert on the Indian sarangi, the Swedish nyckelharpe and the sitara, and he curved the sounds of these instruments into yearning melodies, wrapped them up in electronica atmospheres, and caressed the voice of his partner, singer Kim Waters. Rasa broke up, but Christian contines that sound, sans Hindu chants, on You Are the Music of My Silence.
HARRY MANX joins Christian, singing, playing guitars and the Indian lap guitar called the Mohan Vina. He went east through the The Beatles and the blues, and he has several solo albums out as a singer-songwriter that fuse those worlds. On his own, he has a lighter, more pop and punny approach as evidenced by some of his album titles: Bread and Buddha, Mantras for Madmen and West Eats Meet. He goes a bit deeper with Christian, forging an album that seduces you with gentle, folk-like melodies and lifts you with an exotic instrumental array: they’re global mystic minstrels jacked into the net.
Every song on this album is a journey. Sometimes it’s a slow river ride like “Harmonious Convergence,” which lazes along on the laziest, haziest summer day. But more often, it takes off on the melodic flights like those on “Apparently an Apparition,” mixing electronic grooves, string sections and solos on Mohan Vina, in an exhilarating swirl.
Some songs are gently lulling, like “I Saw It In Your Eyes” while others, like “Shorthand Prophecy,” propel you through an imaginary bazaar at the crossroads of Ibiza and Mumbai, with Manx singing the rhythmic syllables of Indian bols. In the midst of this Indian drive, Christian drops in a startling jazz fusion electric bass solo that makes you realize what a supreme instrumentalist he is.
Like George Harrison and The Beatles, Hans Christian and Harry Manx aren’t attempting to make traditional Indian music. Instead of straight ragas, they channel that spirit into a new sound, one full of ear-catching melody, propulsive rhythms and serenely enticing atmospheres that beckon you into their temple. You Are the Music of My Silence is the sound you might hear in your deepest, quietest space.
Tino Izzo’s Morning Scapes was an Echoes Top 25 CD even before it became the Echoes CD of the Month (read review and hear trax). It leads our January list as Echoes returned to a more normal mode after December’s holiday programming. It heads up a top 25 that has no particular rhyme, reason or trend, except there’s some pretty great music there that fits into the chilled mode of Echoes.
Of the new pleasures for this month the best came from a new band and an old friend. Hans Christian is the old friend. We played his music when he was recording under his own name in the early 1990s and then followed his beautiful chant-fusion duo, Rasa with singer Kim Waters. Lately, Hans has been going the solo looping cello route, of which he is a master, but on a new CD calledRumi Symphony he went into electro-global-orchestral mode. It’s a double CD. Disc one has Andrew Harvey reciting the poetry of the Persian mystic, Rumi over Christian’s music. He takes an authoritative approach to Rumi’s oft-romantic works. Poetry with music collaborations generally leave me cold. If you want to merge poetry and song, then sing. But the second disc is the music on its own and that would’ve made a brilliant CD. With beds of electro-Persian percussion loops and orchestral strings, Christian plays cello, sarangi and other stringed instruments in a global dreamscape of four, long epic journeys.
The new group is Liftoff and I’ve been enchanted by this Washington DC quartet that takes some of it’s cues from Thievery Corporation. Rob Myers has played guitar and sitar with Thievery for years so that makes sense. The other members play in the dance oriented bands, Fort Knox 5 and Thunderball. But as Liftoff, they create lysergic dreams dappled in 60s pop pastels with new millennium grooves. Echoes of Pink Floyd, Lee Hazelwood and the Strawberry Alarm Clock abound in the intricately crafted songs of their impressive and joyful debut, Sunday Morning Airplay.
Look at #12 for next months likely number one album, Pino Forastiere’sFrom 1 to 8. We’ll be featuring that on our Monday, February 6 show and you can read a review and hear tracks now right here.
Hans Christian was one half of the group Rasa with singer Kim Waters, but before that he was a solo artist mixing his cello with electronics and other exotica. He returns to solo form on a new CD called Hidden Treasures. It’s an album of lush orchestrations featuring his cello, the Indian sarangi and sitara, Swedish nyckelharpa and more. We’ll hear a track from that and new music by Thus Owls, a band with members from Montreal and Sweden creating a theatrical dream pop on their album Turning Rocks. We’ll hear that as well as Davidge. He was the producer of Massive Attack for many of their albums and he’s just released his solo debut, Slo Light with a bunch of guests singers including Emi Green on the track we’ll hear. And speaking of Massive Attack, I’ve got them as well with Protection. It’s all ahead today on 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.
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.
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