Acclaimed Space Musician Vic Hennegan Play Live on Echoes
You can sort of blame me for Vic Hennegan. He grew up in Philadephia in the 1970s listening to me spinning space music albums by Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre on WXPNback then. That, and the fact that his mother took him to psychedelic ballrooms like the Electric Factory as a child permanently mutated Vic Hennegan’s musical DNA. Now he makes his own electronic music that emulates that sound and brings in something new. He recently put out a download release called Journey to Sirius. He comes into the Echoes Living Roomto play music from it live. You can also hear a long track from his set, an unreleased piece, on our album TRANSMISSIONS: THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19 (See below)
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You can sort of blame me for Vic Hennegan. He grew up in Philadephia in the 1970s listening to me spinning space music albums by Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre on WXPNback then. That, and the fact that his mother took him to psychedelic ballrooms like the Electric Factory as a child permanently mutated Vic Hennegan’s musical DNA. Now he makes his own electronic music that emulates that sound and brings in something new. He recently put out a download release called Journey to Sirius. He comes into the Echoes Living Roomto play music from it live.
Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club now and you can put David Helping and Jon Jenkins’ Foundunder 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.
Join us on Facebookwhere you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind whenDead Can Danceappear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.
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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 volumeSacred Journey of Ku-Kaitrek 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.”
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Chuck Van Zyl from Star’s End & John Diliberto from Echoes.
Friday Arts, a program on Philadelphia PBS station WHYY, did a piece on Philly space music and interviewed EchoesJohn Diliberto & Jeff Towne as well as Chuck Van Zyl from Star’s End and electronic musician Jason Sloan. The feature ran Friday, 1/4/2012, but you can see it online here: http://video.whyy.org/video/2323750666 The Echoes/Star’s End Segment is the first on in the show.
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Tonight on Echoeswe’ve got David Wright coming into the Echoes Living Room to play live. This veteran English synthesist has been recording space music opuses since 1989 and has released 2 dozen solo albums plus recordings with Code Indigo and Callisto. David’s music is initially inspired by artists like Vangelis and Klaus Schulze, but he’s embraced many other aesthetics over the years. He also runs the AD Music label which records albums by Geigertekand Divine Matrix among others. On his third Echoes performance, he’ll be playing music from his latest CD, Connectedplus some spontaneous performances. Here’s a youtube video of an earlier work
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63 isn’t a very significant birthday, but any time we can celebrate the music of Klaus Schulze, we should do it. Born August 4, 1947, Klaus Schulze remains the John Coltrane of electronic music. It’s been nearly four decades since his solo debut, Irrlicht, and he continues creating CD length opuses. His most recent recordings have been one studio and two live discs with Lisa Gerrard. Coincidentally, Lisa Gerrard is an Icon of Echoes and will be featured on Echoes today Weds, August 4.
Here’s a YouTube video with a vintage live performance from Klaus Schulze circa 1977.
Artists like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze did have musical children and among them is a musician named Vic Hennegan. He makes a music born of technology and reveling in spacious rhythms and layered timbres.
(You can hear an audio version of this blog, with music.)
Vic Hennegan in Echoes LRC 2006
Vic Hennegan is an imposing figure, tall, athletically built with a dark brown complexion and a shaved head covered by a bandana. He grew up in a black community in Philadelphia, but even as a child, his mother took him to psychedelic ballrooms like the Electric Factory and his very first concert was the Beatles in 1966 at JFK Stadium.
That might explain why Vic Hennegan had a problem connecting with black culture. He tried getting into the soul sounds that his sister and friends enjoyed.
Vic Hennegan at Echoes Living Room 2008
Vic Hennegan: I decided, I guess I was about 12 years old, I was going to be into black music. Because you know I’m black, I should be into black music, you know, so I was watching Soul Train, I was learning how to do the Soul Train dances and I was listening to the O’Jays and everybody, because that’s where I should be right? And it just didn’t work for me.
He realized the Beatles turned him on more than the O’Jays and he started playing guitar. But his musical direction was launched when he heard the space music put out by Philadelphia radio station WXPN. He actually listened to me spinning records there in the 1970s and 80s.
Vic Hennegan: I’ve always loved electronic music, it’s, just been a part of me since I discovered in like the mid to late 70s, thanks to you. You and the shows you produced were my biggest influences. I listened to Star’s End and Diaspar and it changed my life.
You can hear that influence on his latest album, Aqua Vista. Although it’s composed on computer with virtual synthesizers, the sound is vintage space music, but updated. You can hear homages to his music roots on songs like “Seascapes.”
Vic Hennegan - Aqua Vista
Vic Hennegan: You can definitely hear my Berlin influence coming in on that one and that was done on purpose, sort of my way of going back to my roots, you know, like Eric Clapton going back and doing a blues album, sort of like me going back to my roots and saying “Thank you guys.”
Vic Hennegan’s latest space music opus is called Aqua Vista. It’s named for the street he lives on in LA, but it takes a trip into oceanic space. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music. audio version
Despite titles like “Alpha Centauri” and “Fly and Collision of Comas Sola,” in spite of covers that seemed blown out of distant nebulae and regardless of music that, well, just listen to it, Edgar Froese always claimed that Tangerine Dream didn’t make space music. Robert Schröder‘s Galaxie Cygnus-A, however, is a space music album in every sense. It takes its inspiration, and reputedly some of its sonic pallette, from radio wave transmissions from the title galaxy. We tune it in tonight, October 21, on Echoes.
Robert Schröder
Schröder put this album length epic together for the 1982 Ars ElectronicaFestivalin Linz, Austria as a multimedia collaboration with visual artist Michael Weisser who went on to form the space music band, Software.
While everyone seems to be reissuing every electronic fart and burp they ever recorded, Galaxie Cygnus-A, released in a limited edition on Klaus Schulze’sInnovative Communications label, has never been issued on CD. That makes it a true lost star in the constellation of classic ’70s Berlin school electronics, even if it was recorded in 1982.
Schröder created an electronic symphony that traverses beatless spacescapes swept by sustained chords and electronic bursts, dotted by sample and hold patterns and squiggly sounds that dart through the spectrum like cyber-gnats. But it also has moments of propulsive, hypnotic rhythms . This was recorded a fraction of a second before samplers and digital synthesis were omnipresent, so the sounds are analog and many of them come from instruments that Schröder designed himself. An ominous pizzicato riff stalks through a dark twilight landscape in the second movement, sounding like a string pluck with a percussive attack and dampened decay, but it’s purely electronic. Schröder swirls electronic sounds around it, while improvising a reedy synth lead line.
Side two is centered by a waltz-like sequencer pattern counterpointed by a harpsichord arpeggio line and a sound like a sword whipping past your ears. Schroder patiently creates a slowly evolving balancing act floating in space. The original album had a locked groove at the end of each side that ran out into the hiss and gurgle of white noise or radio transmissions.
There’s a question whether the sounds are actually signals from the galaxy picked up by a radio telescope or if it’s simply white noise. That’s the claim of Klaus D. Mueller, the publisher and de facto manager of Klaus Schulze, who started Innovative Communications.
Klaus D. Mueller: This “Galaxy” hook (sending and receiving sounds from the Galaxy so-and-so) was a fake (Weisser’s speciality) made especially for a live show at the “Ars Electronica” in Linz, Austria, in the early eighties. These “live” sounds, allegedly coming from this Galaxy, was simply a prerecorded tape with “white noise.” (Later, someone showed me a letter from Weisser where he mentions this technical detail….,)
However, in an email Robert Schröder sent to me, he disputes this assertion.
Robert Schröder: The noise at the beginning and between a few tracks of Galaxie-Cygnus-A is
original space noise from these radio galaxie. The noise was received and
recorded by the big radio telescope in Effelsberg (Eifel /Germany).
It is not true what K.D.M. says.
You can’t get Galaxy Cygnus-A at this time, but someone on YouTube put pictures to the best movement from that work.
Robert Schröder was from the second generation of German space musicians, a decade or more younger than Klaus Schulze and most members of Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. He started out building his own electronic gear which looked and sounded a lot like the Moog and Arp synthesizers out at the time. He came under the wing of electronic pioneer Klaus Schulze when Schroder asked the synthesist to be the godfather of his son, Klaus. Schulze signed him to his Innovative Communications label and he went on to record several albums, including his debut, the acoustically tinged Harmonic Ascendant which mixed cello and acoustic guitar with his electronics and the chromium sequencer timbres of Floating Music. He’s put out several more albums and also recorded with the more pop oriented electronics of Double Fantasy, which turned into Dancing Fantasy, and now its called, Food for Fantasy, a project of diminishing returns and increasing corniness.
We’ll feature music from Robert Schröder’s Galaxy Cygnus-A in an Ancient Echo this Tuesday, October 21
Ottmar Liebert’sThe Scent of Light, our August CD of the Month tops the Echoes Top 25 for August, but electronica and ambient music make a comeback after a few months off. They include Marconi Union who repeats their Top 5 performance with A Lost Connection, a download only release. Joining them are Klaus Schulze and Lisa Gerrard’sFarscape, Darshan Ambient’s obviously ambient From Pale Hands to Weary Eyes and Sumner McKane’sWhat A Great Place to Be, are all electric/electronically based albums that debut in the Top Ten this month. There are nine new entries this month in the Top 25. Go to the Echoes Blog to read reviews and hear audio reviews of many of these recordings, includingMarconi Union, Klaus Schulze & Lisa Gerrard, Biomusique, California Guitar Trio, Sacred Earthand David Pritchard.
Even though we play individual songs on Echoes, I don’t usually think of the music that way. Being from the pre-digital generation, I still organize music in terms of artists and albums. I thought of this recently as our local Echoes affiliate, WXPN in Philadelphia, has been pumping their latest poll, The Top 885 Essential XPN Songs. (885 because their frequency is 88.5 FM) Listeners are being requested to submit their top ten lists on-line.
My Top Ten Artists list has been stable for years, and my Top Ten Albums only changes occasionally. But Top Ten Songs? I think that could change every 10 minutes. When you think about songs across genres, and open it up completely, how do you narrow it down to ten. Even limiting it to the current core XPN sound of singer-songwriter and alternative rock is pretty broad. Hell, I don’t even think of Echoes music in terms of songs. It’s more like sounds, moods, and at most compositions. I tried to keep that in mind when I submitted my poll. This is the Top Ten Essential XPN Songs list I submitted that tried to split the difference, but in the end didn’t succeed. There is no ranking to the list. Miles Davis “In A Silent Way” In A Silent Way Jimi Hendrix “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” Electric Ladyland Klaus Schulze “Frank Herbert” X Dead Can Dance “Cantara” Within the Realm of a Dying Sun Kate Bush “The Dreaming” The Dreaming Steve Tibbetts “10 Years” YR Brian Eno “Sky Saw” Another Green World Beth Orton “She Cries Your Name” Trailer Park Laurie Anderson “O Superman” Big Science Steve Reich “Music for 18 Musicians” Music for 18 Musicians
As I peruse this quickly tossed together list, I realize I kind of blew it. Most of these are indeed, compositions, not songs and in the context of XPN, it’s a little like voting for the Green Party (no offense). So here’s my amended Top Ten List: Jimi Hendrix “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” Electric Ladyland Dead Can Dance “Cantara” Within the Realm of a Dying Sun Kate Bush “The Dreaming” The Dreaming David Sylvian “Let the Happiness In” Secrets of the Beehive Beth Orton “She Cries Your Name” TrailerPark Laurie Anderson “O Superman” Big Science The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows” Revolver The Rolling Stones “Satisfaction” Out of Our Heads Moby “Porcelian” Play Jane Siberry “Calling All Angels” When I Was A Boy
It’s still a bit off base I suspect.
If you’re a listener to WXPN, you can cast your vote on their website ballot. The deadline is September 7. Who knows what might show up on there amidst the inevitable selections of My Morning Jacket, R.E.M, the Cure, Tori Amos, Coldplay, U2, and Bob Dylan tunes. In fact, I should have put some of them on my Top Ten. Yep, that list took about 10 minutes to change, twice.
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.
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The Echoes Blog 
Klaus Schulze Turns 63
August 4, 2010A Sultan of Synthesizers
63 isn’t a very significant birthday, but any time we can celebrate the music of Klaus Schulze, we should do it. Born August 4, 1947, Klaus Schulze remains the John Coltrane of electronic music.
It’s been nearly four decades since his solo debut, Irrlicht, and he continues creating CD length opuses. His most recent recordings have been one studio and two live discs with Lisa Gerrard. Coincidentally, Lisa Gerrard is an Icon of Echoes and will be featured on Echoes today Weds, August 4.
Here’s a YouTube video with a vintage live performance from Klaus Schulze circa 1977.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))
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Tags:electronic music, Klaus Schulze, Space Music
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