Echoes Top 25-Rachel Zeffira Shines in June.

Echoes Top 25 for June features Dream-Pop, Ambient Chamber Music and Space Music.

Rachel Zefirra – The Deserters

The Echoes Top 25 is led by singer-songwriter Rachel Zeffira whose album, The Deserters was the Echoes CD of the Month.  This chamber pop singer is joined by several other vocal ensembles in the Top 25 including Karl Hyde, Olivier Libaux, Seven Saturdays and Still Corners.  In fact, eleven of the Top 25 are vocal groups marking a bit of a sea change in where Echoes music is going.  But there’s still plenty of ambient and space music out there including the number two album, Exploration and Ascent by Northcape and Jah Wobble & Marconi Union’s deep space dub album, Anomic.  Here’s the complete list of The Echoes Top 25 for June.

ECHOES TOP 25 FOR JUNE

1. Rachel Zeffira – The Deserters (Paper Bag)
2. Northcape – Exploration and Ascent (SunSeaSky)
3. Ólafur Arnalds – For Now I Am Winter (Mercury Classics)
4. Karl Hyde – Edgeland (UMe)
5. Ludovico Einaudi – In a Time Lapse (Ponderosa Music & Art)
6. Olivier Libaux – Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age (Music for Music Lovers)
7. Peals – Walking Field (Thrill Jockey)
8. Seven Saturdays – Seven Saturdays (Lunada)
9. Still Corners – Strange Pleasures (Sub Pop)
10. William Tyler – Impossible Truth (Merge Records)
11. Wall – Shoestring (Big Picnic)
12. Jah Wobble & Marconi Union – Anomic (30 Hertz)
13. Axess – Aviator (Spheric)
14. Amatorski – Same Stars we Shared (Munic)
15. Stephen DeRuby – Awakening
16. Rena Jones – Echoes (Cartesian Binary Recordings)
17. Dido – Girl Who Got Away (RCA)
18. Allison Moyet – The Minutes (Metropolis)
19. Hooverphonic – The Night Before (Columbia Europe)
20. Rhian Sheehan – Stories from Elsewhere (Darla Records)
21. Syriana – The Road to Damascus (Real World)
22. Shaman’s Dream – Prana Pulse (Sounds True)
23. Sigur Ros – Kveikur (XL Recordings)
24. Ian Boddy – Liverdelphia (DiN)
25. John Parish – Screenplay (Thrill Jockey)

See the Best of Echoes 2013….So Far

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club. With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like Rachel Zeffira’s The Deserters.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see what you’ve been missing.

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Ludovico Einaudi Live on Echoes

Acclaimed Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi comes to Echoes with his electro-acoustic ensemble and plays the sometimes haunting, sometimes exuberant themes of his latest album, In A Time Lapse.

Below, watch Ludovico Einaudi’s live performance of “Divenire” from his 2008 CD, Divenire.

Read a review of Ludovico Einaudi’s In A Time Lapse, Echoes March CD of the Month.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club. With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like Rachel Zeffira’s The Deserters. Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see 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

Echoes Ólafur Arnalds Interview Podcast

Hear the Echoes Interview with Ólafur Arnalds in the Echoes Podcast

Ólafur Arnalds’ For Now I Am Winter

There is an emerging generation of artists who are positing the first new movement in classical music since 1970s minimalism: Ambient Chamber Music.  It mixes classical orchestrations with electronic sounds, but couches  them all in gorgeous, often heart-rending melodies and an atmosphere that envelopes you, unlike a lot of neo-classical music.  Artists like Ludovico Einaudi, Hilmar Orn Hilmarrson and Max  Richter are at the leading edge, but there’s a growing younger generation that includes Dustin O’Halloran, Johnann Johannsson, Kevin Keller and leading the pack, Ólafur Arnalds.  His latest album, For Now I Am Winter was the Echoes CD of the Month in April.  During an Echoes living room concert we sat down to talk about his winter soundscapes. You can hear that interview in the Echoes Podcast.

Olafur Arnalds band & John Diliberto

Ólafur on Alicia Keys piano:   It’s a really, it’s so polished.

Arnór Dan Arnarson on his heavy metal reputation: It sounds so aahhhh!

Ólafur on Arnarson’s lyrics: When we were doing demos and just writing the vocal melodies in my studio, we didn’t have any lyrics yet, so Arnor would just sing jibberish, just go [jibbering] and then we got so addicted to those vowels because we had listened to it so many times, that when he started writing the lyrics he consciously tried to find words that rhymed with the vowels that we had previously used because they just felt so natural to the music.

Ólafur on silence:  I think silence is just as much music as not.

Here’s a dreamy video of my favorite song from the album, “Only the Winds.”

~John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club. With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club and see 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.

Ludovico Einaudi’s 21st Century Classicism-Echoes CD of the Month

Ludovico Einaudi’s In A Time Lapse
Echoes March CD of the Month

Hear an audio version of this review with music in the Echoes Podcast.

Hear In a Time Lapse featured this weekend 3/8-10/2013 on Echoes.

You could pretty much stop listening to Ludovico Einaudi’s new album In a Time Lapse after the second track and that would be enough for a perfect CD.  The piece is called “Time Lapse” and it’s a perfect sculpture of minimalist ostinatos and Arvo Pärt-like sustains, with ambient electronics hanging off the edges like shimmering specters.  It’s one of those pieces, like Pachelbel’s “Canon,” that builds without ever resolving itself.  And you don’t want it to.

If you do want resolution, go to the next track: “Life.”  This is a surging cinematic foray that harkens back to earlier Einaudi compositions like “Divenire” with its grand crescendo and heroic cadence.  It’s the kind of song that has put Einaudi at the top of the European charts.

Ludovico Einaudi is an artist who treads a delicate line.  His music isn’t classical with a capitol “C” but neither is it classical-lite.  He studied with Italian avant-garde icon, Luciano Berio and came of age during the age of minimalism.  Because of those influences, his themes are emotionally charged without resorting to sentimentality.  And unlike most classical composers, he uses ambience as part of his compositions, whether it’s quirky electronics, or the open spaces between notes.  He actually lists a guy, Alberto Fabris, in the musicians’ credits for playing “reverb.”  On the composition “Walk,” piano, celesta and kalimba glisten like distant stars glowing in a dark sky of viola and cello.

Ludovico Einaudi Live on Echoes

Of all the neo-classical contemplative solo pianists out there, Einaudi has the broadest range, and the most tightly controlled technique.  Listen to the heart breaking pensiveness of “Discovery at Night,” one of two solo tracks, and you’ll realize that you can just toss out almost every other solo piano album you’ve heard lately. While most of them go for the rhapsodic sentiment, Einaudi, in just a few notes, taps right into the soul of emotion.  You’ll find no better example of this than this video of his recent on-line live performance, playing all of In A Time Lapse solo.   It’s 75 minutes long so it takes a minute or so to load.

Einaudi has often been called a minimalist composer, but that never seemed quite accurate.  However, on In a Time Lapse, he employs many minimalist techniques: cyclical themes, loops and grooves lend his works a modal, spiritually introspective repose. Nowhere is that used to better effect than on “Newton’s Cradle.” It’s an epic track with insistent electronic ostinatos, shuddering electronic bass tones and ringing vibes, bells, and percussion creating a mood of tense apprehension.

For In a Time Lapse Ludovico Einaudi has pulled out all the stops, synthesizing a 21^st century classicism that is all-embracing in its musical influences, and all-enveloping in its emotional sweep.

~John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.  With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like In A Time Lapse   Club members will get this album 10 days before release.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club  and see 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.

Ludovico Einaudi’s Nightbook, Echoes March CD of the Month

Ludovico Einaudi’s Tales from the Nightbook

You can hear a podcast of this review with Ludovico Einaudi’s music.

Pianist Ludovico Einaudi is a different kind of classical composer.  He’s a student of the avant-garde and the rich classical tradition of his native Italy.  But the 54 year-old pianist is also a child of rock ‘n’ roll and minimalism.  All of that comes together in an ambient chamber music that is precise in its emotions, serene in its repose and exuberant in its realization.

On his latest album, Nightbook, Ludovico Einaudi brings avant-garde edges to rhapsodic piano works.  Think George Winston remixed by The Orb, with a bit of 50’s exotica, and 60’s sci-fi electronics.  On tracks like “In Principio” he nods to Harold Budd and Brian Eno, expanding the concept of solo piano with haunting glitched echoes and fractured reverb.  It’s like unearthing a digital artifact and seeing its image through a cracked lens.

Ludovico Einaudi in Echoes Concert

In the 1970s, he might have been called a minimalist, in the ’80s a New Age artist and in the 90s an ambient musician.  But Ludovico Einaudi is all of that and more.  He brings an emotional precision and a cerebral play to his music that probably comes from his studies with Italian avant-garde icon, Luciano Berio.  Listen to the calibrated emotions of “Reverie,” a wistful track for piano, vibes and cello that seems like the last wave goodbye.

Ludovico Einaudi has an electro-ambient trio called Whitetree that includes electronic musician Robert Lippok.  He’s all over Nightbook, playing electronic sounds that don’t glisten and groove like chromium clockwork.  Instead, they wheeze and whisper like busted steam pipes and dream voices. “Bye Bye Mon Amour” is an ecstatic interplay between Einaudi’s piano and Lippok’s electronics.  “The Planets” is his miniaturized, ambient take on the Gustav Holst theme.  But Einaudi’s planets sound more like lost transmissions and doppler echoes from the solar system.

Nightbook isn’t all reverie and melancholy.  Percussion drives “Lady Labyrinth” as Einaudi pounds out left hand chords against a subtly syncopated beat that sounds like the score for the last charge into the breach.

Ludovico Einaudi has some 20 albums out in Europe where he sells out venues like the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican Centre in London.  But Nightbook may be the best introduction to the range of this artist. It’s thoroughly modern music but with a texture and depth as if written on old frayed and singed paper.  It’s the Echoes CD of the Month for March.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Best of Echoes 2008 Listener Poll Results

The Best of Echoes 2008 Listener Poll is over and the results are in. You can hear them tonight on Echoes and you can see them below.
Bombay Dub Orchestra’s 3 Cities, the November Echoes CD of the Month topped the poll and it led a list of eclectic music from across the Echoes spectrum. I don’t know that there were any surprises.

Six of the selections were CDs of the Month.  Fourteen of the artists appeared on the show with interviews, performances or both.

Echoes listeners were a bit ahead of the curve. Many year end lists will have Ludovico Einaudi’s Divenire on their selections. But we had that in 2007. Instead, you selected his Live In Berlin CD, which isn’t even out in the US yet.

Your love of Urlich Schnauss continues, voting in Stars, which is only an EP, with only one track played on Echoes. Will Ackerman made a surprise showing at #3 with his understated Meditations CD, which is only available at Target.

There were only 5 albums on the list from major labels. Sixteen CDs came from small independent labels ranging from Lotus Spike to Six Degrees. Four CDs were self-released.

 Thanks for voting. If you’re looking for CDs to add to you collection or iPod, you couldn’t find a better place to start, except maybe the 25 Essential Echoes CDs of 2008  😉  You can also read more about this year’s music with  25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2008: A study in confluence 

THE BEST OF ECHOES 2008 LISTENER POLL 

1 Bombay Dub Orchestra 3 Cities (Six Degrees) read a review 2 California Guitar Trio Echoes (Inner Knot) 3 William Ackerman Meditations (Compass Productions) 4 Sumner McKane What A Great Place to Be (Don’t Hit Your Sister Records) read a review 5 Ottmar Liebert The Scent of Light (Spiral Subwave Records Int’l) read a review 6 David Arkenstone Echoes of Light and Shadow (Gemini Sun Records) 7 R. Carlos Nakai Talisman (Canyon Records) 8 David Gilmour Live in Gdansk (Sony) 9 General Fuzz Soulful Filling (Self Released) 10 Ludovico Einaudi Live in Berlin (Ponderosa Italy) 11 Ahn Trio Lullaby for My Favorite Insominac (Sony BMG) 12 Fripp & Eno Beyond Even (1992-2006) (DGM) 13 Hammock Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow (Darla Records) See the rest of the list

14 Biomusique The 10,000 Steps (Kosmic Music) read a review 15 Ulrich Schnauss Stars EP (Domino) 16 Sigur Rós With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly (XL Recordings) 17 Coyote Oldman Under an Ancient Sky (Hearts of Space) 18 Alu Lobotomy Sessions (Alu Music) 19 Digitonal Save Your Light for Darker Days (Just Music) read a review 20 Steve Roach Arc of Passion (Projekt) 21 Jami Sieber Unspoken (Out Front Music) read a review 22 Bill Frisell History, Mystery (Nonesuch) 23 Kevin Bartlett Glow in the Dark (Aural Gratification) 24 Darshan Ambient From Pale Hands to Weary Eyes(Lotuspike) 25 Kaki King Dreaming of Revenge (Velour Recordings)

Ludovico Einaudi-New Age Fodder or Classical Elegance

Ludovico Einaudi is in the midst of a short US tour. Echoes and WFUV will be presenting him in concert in New York City on Tuesday November 25^th.  (Concert Info)

He just played Los Angeles in Largo at the Coronet Theater and two reviews from that show point up the dichotomies in Einaudi’s music. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Josef Woodard, a fine jazz journalist, had trouble wrapping himself around Einaudi’s heroic cadences, minor key ruminations and haunting melodic trances. He went so far as to cast out the dreaded “New Age” tag, critical code for “lite-weight shit.”  He added a final insult:

Classical music fans might wonder whether Einaudi’s popularity could lead new listeners in the direction of the real thing

You’d think that Woodard, a veteran of the fusion wars, would recall that critics used that same invective: maybe fans of fusion would be led to “real” jazz.

Phil Gallo,  writing about the same concert for Variety,  had a different perspective, dialing directly into the charm of Einaudi’s sound. He asserts that:

His points of reference are not all that different than those of Radiohead or Sigur Ros. This is ultimately pop music he is performing and at times his chord changes and timbral decisions echo the work of Christopher O’Riley, the classical pianist who has tackled the work of Radiohead, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake from a solo piano perspective.

Ludovico Einaudi in Echoes Living Room Concert

Gallo pointed out the minimalist connections and Einaudi’s ability to “tell a story”  while also extolling Einaudi’s cinematic expanse, something which Woodard uses it as a criticism. I think ultimately, Woodard is looking for something in the music that isn’t there.  I do hear where Woodard is coming from, but that’s like asking Charles Lloyd or Keith Jarrett to rock out.   He wants flights of improvisation and technical expertise, but Einaudi is more concerned with form, mood, and melodic invention.

When I sat with Einaudi for an Echoes Living Room Concert,  I barely missed the strings and electronics that make recordings like Divenire so captivating. Even on his own, he unfolds a magical world as stories are revealed and scenery shifts. I hear in his playing echoes of Michael Nyman’s The Piano score and George Winston at his best.  If you haven’t checked out this musician, here’s an Echo Location featuring his music.

Ludovico Einaudi has a few more U.S. concerts.  He’s be playing two dates in Boston November 22 and 23 and one presented by Echoes and WFUV in New York at The Concert Hall on November 25. (Concert Info)

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Echo Location: Ludovico Einaudi’s Ambient Chamber Music

Ludovico Einaudi orchestrates new refinements in ambient chamber music.

You can also hear an Audio version of this blog, with music.

Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi heeds a dictum of ambient chamber music pioneer, Harold Budd. He declared that he wanted to hear music that’s so beautiful it hurts. On albums like Divenire, Ludovico Einaudi’s music is unabashedly beautiful and maybe a little romantic, but there’s something that keeps him from becoming sentimental and that’s probably his studies with the dean of the Italian avant-garde, Luciano Berio. Berio’s combination of acoustic and electronic sound and his cerebral approach tempered by Italian romanticism had it’s impact on Ludovico Einaudi. As a classical composer who didn’t look down on popular music Berio showed Einaudi that the ivory tower wasn’t the only place to make music.

Ludovico Einaudi: There was something that, in common between us because he has strong love for, for folk music and also popular music, he transcribed also some from the Beatles and he was interested in African music, so I think he was understanding what I was doing even it was very different from what he was doing.

Like Berio, Einaudi experiments with technology, creating ambient electronic accompaniment and using loops of his piano to created haunted echoes in his work on trackes like “Uno” from Divenire.

Ludovico Einaudi on Echoes

Now in his mid-50s, Ludovico Einaudi, is as likely to record with African kora player, Ballake Sissoko as work with German electronica artist Robert Lippok.

Ludovico Einaudi: In contemporary music, the music has to be connected with life. And it’s impossible to think it’s a music that is not in touch with the world and what’s happening in the streets.

Einaudi is in his mid-50s and a child of Rock ‘n’ Roll, but he deploys those influences in subtle ways. The guitar loop to his song, “Eden Roc” recalls the delayed guitar lines of U2‘S “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

Ludovico Einaudi is only now getting exposure in the US after years of selling out concert halls in Europe. He’s become a defingin voice in ambient chamber music sitting comfortably among composers like Michael Nyman, Arvo Pärt and Max Richter.  Classical elegance, modernist sensibilities and a simple harmonic language combine with breathtaking and often heartrending melodies for emotionally powerful music.  Last year’s CD, Divenire made several top ten lists last year including the number 2 slot on 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2007.  He’s just released Live in Berlin.   Anyway, we have to love somebody who calls an anthology of his music Echoes: The Einaudi Collection. A complete interview with Ludovico Einaudi runs tonight, September 17, on Echoes. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music. 

You can also hear an Audio version of this blog, with music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Ambient Chamber Music Reigns on Echoes Top 25 for June

Ambient Chamber music dominates top airplay at Echoes in June.
We’ve been tracking ambient chamber music since the beginning of Echoes when it was mostly Tim Story, David Darling and Kevin Keller, but the subgenre has exploded, in an ambient chamber music way, that is, gently and without many people noticing, partly because it falls in between genres from the ambient chamber world music of Biomusique and Jami Sieber to the Euro-minimalist classical of Ludovico Einaudi and Ronn McFarlane to the folk chamber music of William Ackerman and Gerry O’Beirne. Nine of the Top 10 albums fall into the category and 14 of the Top 25.  When I hear 20-somthing bands like Balmorhea citing 50-something composers like Ludovico Einaudi or the venerable Arvo Part, that tells me that something is happening.  This is another ebb and flow in the evolution of Echoes which has seen influxes of Celtic, space music, electronica and world fusion over the years.  There’s still plenty of electronica, world fusion and unclassifiable music that makes up the Echoes soundscape. Here’s the Top 25 with a few links to reviews.

ECHOES TOP 25 FOR JUNE

1 – Biomusique – The 10000 Steps  <Listen>
2 – Jami Sieber – Unspoken  <Listen>
3 – William Ackerman – Meditations
4 – Ronn McFarlane – Indigo Road
5 – Fernwood – Almeria
6 – California Guitar Trio – Echoes
7 – Ludovico Einaudi – Divenire
8 – Niyaz – Nine Heavens
9 – Eldad Lidor – Closer
10 – Gerry O’Beirne – The Bog Bodies and Other Stories <Listen>
11 – Qntal – Translucida
12 – Ahn Trio – Lullaby For My Favorite Insomniac <Listen>
13 – Don Peyote – Peyote Dreaming
14 – Richard Bone – Short Waves
15 – Christopher Young – Sleepwalking
16 – v/a – Future Memories (v/a)
17 – Lisa Lynne & Aryeh Frankfurter – Two Worlds One
18 – Robert Rich & Ian Boddy – React
19 – The Orb – The Dream  <Listen>
 20 – Michel Banabila – Traces
21 – Bill Frisell – History Mystery
22 – Deobrat Mishra & David Michael – Himilayan Crossroad
23 – Kevin Bartlett – Glow in the Dark
24 – David Arkenstone – Echoes of Light and Shadow
25 – Rudy Perrone – The Language of Spirits