Rhian Sheehan’s Ambient Music Box Symphony.

Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere
Echoes May CD of the Month

Hear Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere featured on Monday May 6

In a music style built on translucent hues, there are many shades of ambient chamber music.  There’s Harold Budd’s minimal austerity and Ludovico Einaudi’s classical melodicism.  Ólafur Arnalds trades in glitchy, haunted moods while Kevin Keller charts a more romantic course.  But Rhian Sheehan may have created one of the most sublime shadings on his 7^th album, Stories from Elsewhere.  It’s a magical CD of soaring strings, surging rhythms, childlike music boxes and ambient expanses that sounds both familiar and timeless.

New Zealand artist Rhian Sheehan started out as an acoustic guitarist and he was good enough to jam with finger-style guitar icon, Tommy Emmanuel.  But he began releasing albums of electronic music in 2001, and more recently, he has emerged with a sound that brings guitars, synthesizers, music boxes and orchestras together into tightly honed, but melodically  sweeping compositions.  That sound was first evident on his album, Standing in Silence four years ago.  In the interim, he released a purely ambient EP, Seven Tales of the North Wind, that revealed the influence of the Nashville duo, Hammock, who remixed a Sheehan tune.

Rhian Sheehan Live

He brings all those elements together on Stories from Elsewhere, an album whose signature sound may be the music box.  Sheehan has custom music boxes for which he creates his own music rolls and then manipulates the resulting sounds electronically.  Nowhere is that heard to better effect than on “La Boite à Musique” (Music Box).  It opens with a charming music box melody that morphs into a marching rhythm, which then stutter-stops, and finally is enveloped in strings that rise like a Jupiter rocket breaking the atmosphere: slow, graceful, inevitable.

There is innocence and foreboding in equal measure on Stories from Elsewhere.  It begins with the cover art, a painting of a young boy alone in the forest with a toy piano or music box. But the inside cover depicts that same boy, standing alone in an abandoned, desolate village.  It’s the kind of package that makes one lament the ascension of digital releases because it creates the surrounding aura of the album of an innocent world with a darker side lurking underneath.

Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere

Sheehan rocks-out on the deceptively titled “Nocturne 1985,” a heroic slab of fuzz guitar and sequencer overdrive while “Imber” more closely adheres to the nocturne theme with a plaintive music box sequence and Arvo Pärt-like piano, courtesy of Sheehan’s wife, Raashi Malik.  There’s more than a little bit of Sigur Rós in the falsetto vocals of “Litle Sines” and the heroic dawn-of-the-world surge on “A Thimble Full of Sorrow.”

There aren’t a lot of albums that grab you like a page-turner  novel and change you by the end, but Stories from Elsewhere is one.  The track “Somnus” provides a heroic, ambient denouement that leaves you breathless, with the final “Lullaby Machine” tagged on to say: It’s alright.  Go to sleep.  It’s only a dream, isn’t it?

Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere is a masterpiece of quietly epic dimensions.

~John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Hear Rhian Sheehan’s recent Echoes Interview in the Echoes Podcast.

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.

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Rhian Sheehan’s Music Box Podcast

Hear Rhian Sheehan’s interview in the Echoes Podcast.

New Zealand artist Rhian Sheehan has been releasing electronic albums since 2001, but he started out playing acoustic guitar. He was good enough to jam with finger-style guitar icon, Tommy Emmanuel. But after forays into pure electronic music he has emerged with a sound that brings guitars, synthesizers, music boxes and orchestras into epic, sweeping compositions.  He’s just released his seventh album, Stories from Elsewhere.  That album will be the Echoes CD of the Month for May.  Watch for the review next Wednesday. But for now, hear this interview with Sheehan from his studio in Wellington, New Zealand.  Rhian Sheehan Echoes Podcast

Among his thoughts are:

“I’ve got this guy staring right back at me with evil eyes.”

“I was trying to instill a sense of magic within the music, really, this kind of naivety, childlike quality to the whole work.”

“The children toys, musical toy obsession has not disappeared at all.”

“I collect ukuleles as well. Shock! Horror!”

“The children toys, musical toy obsession has not disappeared at all.”

“I was in Avatar. I’m dressed in red, being lead off by the Na’vi into a spaceship.”

Hear more in the Echoes Podcast.

~John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Rhian Sheehan’s Stories from Elsewhere

Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.  With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs likeFor Now I Am Winter.  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.

Echo Location: Rhian Sheehan’s New Zealand Soundscapes

New Zealand composer Rhian Sheehan uses synthesizers and music boxes.

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with Rhian Sheehan’s music, here.

In the attic studio of his New Zealand home, just around the corner from where Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson makes his films,  Rhian Sheehan spins out electronic fantasies.  He’s got a room full of electronic gear, but on his new album, Standing in Silence, he raided his daughter’s toy chest and came out with a music box. It originally played “What a Wonderful World,” but after Rhian finished sampling it, it sounded quite different.

Rhian Sheehan: I took it out of context and tuned it to my own melody, Popped it through a sampler. I had this idea of What would it be like if you were inside of the music box and you could hear the cranks and the sounds, what would it sound like? That was the idea of that track which is track 3 on that album.

In a post-modern twist, Rhian took the digital melody he made from the music box and had that made back into a physical music box which he gave away with his CD. As he plays it in his studio, you can hear the melody of “Standing In Silence 3.”

Rhian Sheehan: We actually put that melody into a real music box so it was like deconstructing and reconstructing.

Although these instrument give Rhian Sheehan’s Standing in Silence a sense of innocence, there is also an undertow of foreboding.  Upon returning to the bucolic calm of New Zealand after an extended trips to places like Tokyo and India, he felt a certain disconnect.  You can see that in the photographs that accompany the CD: desolate urban locations in Tokyo and other places, but the music contains field recordings he made that are full of life and people.

Rhian Sheehan: I was fascinated with that idea. There are photos of shopping malls for example but there are no people, there’s nobody there. I guess that was the idea, in the music you can hear crowds and hear people but you never see people.

Rhian Sheehan’s new album is called Standing in Silence on Loop Records. I’ll have a more extended interview with Rhian on next Tuesdays Echoes.  This has been an Echo Location.

Here’s a video from Standing in Silence.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))