Linnea Olsson in Echoes Podcast

Swedish Cellist and Singer-Songwriter Linnea Olsson talks about her debut album in Echoes Podcast

Linnea Olsson

Linnea Olsson has played progressive rock with Isidurs Bane, backed folk singer Ane Brun and is currently touring with Peter Gabriel.  She’s from Sweden, but influences on Linnea Olsson’s debut album include The Blues Brothers and the “Theme from Rawhide” and surfer girls.   With looping pedals she writes cello based chamber pop songs that are playful and serene, on her album, Ah!  Hear her alk about it in the Echoes Podcast.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Mark McGuire’s Along the Way is our March 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.

 

Linnea Olsson Opens Wide and Says Ah!

Swedish Cellist and Singer-Songwriter Linnea Olsson talks about her debut album on Echoes Tonight

Linnea Olsson has played progressive rock with Isidurs Bane, backed folk singer Ane Brun and is currently touring with Peter Gabriel.  She’s from Sweden, but influences on Linnea Olsson’s debut album include The Blues Brothers and the “Theme from Rawhide” and surfer girls.   With looping pedals she writes cello based chamber pop songs that are playful and serene, on her album, Ah!  Hear her do it live tonight on

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Mark McGuire’s Along the Way is our March 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.

 

Just say AH! with Linnea Olsson Live on Echoes

Swedish Cellist and Singer-Songwriter Linnea Olsson plays live on Echoes Tonight

Linnea Olsson

A couple of weeks ago I recorded a double set of living room concerts in New York.  One was with singer-songwriter Ane Brun.  Look for that in forthcoming weeks. She was accompanied by fellow Swede, cellist Linnea Olsson.  When Brun’s set ended, she left, but Olsson stayed, plugged in her looping effects and performed a beautiful set of music from her bouyant, but gossamer fragile album, Ah!  Hear her do it live tonight on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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.

Heavenly Choirs from Julianna Barwick on Echoes

Julianna Barwick & Scott Bell on Echoes

Enya may not be putting out any new music but there are many artists who are taking that layered vocal sound in different directions.  One of them is Julianna Barwick.  The Louisiana born, Missouri raised and of course, Brooklyn based artist does something Enya doesn’t dare do, perform live, layering her voice in real time choirs.  Earlier this year Barwick released Nepenthe, an album of vocal music that seems to rise out of cemetery fog, a ghostly, amorphous sound ascending toward the heavens.  It’s a very rarefied released coming from the alt-rock heavy Dead Oceans label.

A very rarefied released coming from the alt-rock heavy Dead Oceans label, Nepenthe is ambient music for voice, with Barwick creating her vocal choirs in real time using looping and lots of delays and reverb.   It’s like Enya with the sweetness strained out through Joan La Barbara and looped in Frippertronics.     Joined by ambient guitarist Scott Bell, we’re going to hear Julianna Barwick do it live tonight on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.  This month,  CD of the Month Club members will be getting Moby’s  Innocents. 

                                                              SPECIAL FOR THIS MONTH
New and Renewing Echoes CD of the Month Club members will also got Bombay Dub Orchestra’s magnificent new album, Tales from the Grand Bazaar.

Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and hear what you’ve been missing.

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.

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.

August CD of the Month-Matthew Schoening’s Elements

A Definitive Album of Looping Cello from Matthew Schoening

We get inundated by looping cellists at Echoes.  For some reason, players of the most soulful of orchestral instruments have a predilection for hearing their own sound refracted in looping mirrors and digital delays. For Matthew Schoening‘s Elements, it’s a mirror worth gazing into.

Recorded live, Matthew Schoening shows right from the start that Elements isn’t going to be some elegiac cello recital. He uses the percussive aspects of his instrument, plucking a pizzicato line then looping in an elliptical rhythmic smack as he slaps the strings.  Against a chordal legato bed, he roars into a searing melody, his cello sound edged by slight phasing to give it that other-worldly, though not ethereal effect.

While a lot of looping musicians simply set up a cycle and jam over it for 10 minutes, Schoening’s loops evolve as part of a compositional process.  Loops are faded in and out, shifting tempos and key changes, interlocking in new patterns.   Although every piece has momentum, it’s not a train rushing to the end of the track. “Air” shifts on its rails and takes turns that you don’t expect.  It’s a ride in which you won’t recognize the beginning from  the end.

Matthew Schoening @ Echoes

Elements is completely live, every note originating on Schoening’s fingers in concert, playing non-stop from beginning to end as the cellist moves from one composition to the next in a single, 45 minute performance.  And thanks to the audience for knowing how to STFU until the very end.  I’ve sat in front of Schoening as he played live in the Echoes Living Room, so I know their experience was awe-inspiring, but their presence doesn’t interfere with your intimate relationship with this music as it forms before you.

For all his technical skill and technological assistance, it’s the music that keeps drawing you back into Matthew Schoening’s looping soundscapes.  He crafts melodies like an architect of air and he gets deep into the groove, using electronics to pitch his instrument down into low bass range.  It’s a new kind of classical music, a modern iteration of Bach and Mozart filtered through Jimi Hendrix and Steve Reich.

Elements is the Echoes CD of the Month for August.

Here’s the opening track from Matthew Schoening’s Elements, “Air”

To hear Matthew Schoening talking about his cello and living in a truck listen to this interview.

Watch Matthew Schoening work his cyclical magic in this YouTube video.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Matthew Schoening’s Looped Cellos

Echoes finds a  lapsed classical cellist who is looped.

You can hear an audio version of this blog with Matthew Schoening‘s music here.

Just like Nathaniel Ayres, the homeless cellist at the center of the film, The Soloist,  Matthew Schoening was a cellist, in Los Angeles, without a home.

Matthew Schoening:  Well, I lived in L.A. for a while and recorded my first solo cello album there and ran out of money [laughs], so I had to break my lease and not live there anymore, and not pay rent. So I ended up being in my truck most of the time, so I actually built a little bed that went in the back, and had drawer space, so I could sleep back there if I needed to. but.. yeah, I didn’t have my own space for about a year and a half.

That album is called, Solo Electric Cello and although it sounds like there’s a guitarist, rhythm section and string orchestra, it’s all Matthew Schoening, overdubbing himself in real time with a looping device.  Don’t feel too bad for Matthew Schoening’s homeless plight.  He’s not schizophrenic like Ayres and he had a pretty good safety net.  He comes from a musical family in San Francisco.

Matthew Schoening: My father is in the San Francisco symphony and my mother is a professional flautist in San Francisco.  I grew up with my dad practicing and my mom teaching flute lessons, listening to Stravinsky and Mozart, Beethoven and I used to sneak backstage at Davis Hall and listen to music. So, I grew up around it.

He played cello as a teenager, abandoned it for ten years, then picked it up again.  He performed with various singer-songwriters before discovering a looping pedal at the music store where he worked.

Matthew Schoening: Well, right about the time that I essentially got fired from all the bands I was playing with, I was still working at the store, so I took home this looping pedal just to try it out, and the first thing I did was write ‘desert dreams’, which is from my first cello album. And then I was hooked.

Nouveau Flamenco guitarist Ottmar Liebert was hooked as well when he heard Schoening playing.

Ottmar Liebert: Basically imagine that Mtt can start playing a riff, then lock it in, then put a second thing over that.  So he can get percussive on the cello, do basslines on the cello and then play more high register melodies.  So it’s pretty impressive when you see it all come together.

Matthew and Ottmar wound up playing on each other’s most recent albums and Matthew recently got to combine his looping orchestra with the Northwest Symphony Orchestra. His  latest album is called The Art of Live Looping.  I’ll have a longer interview with Matthew tonight 06-24-09 on Echoes.  This has been an Echo Location.

You can hear an audio version of this blog with Matthew Schoening’s music here.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))