Echoes Goes to the Darkside

Hear an Interview with Darkside Tonight on Echoes.

Darkside @ Mountain Oasis. Photo: Diliberto

This past October I got to see the band Darkside at the Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit.  They played before an impressively large audience in the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, considering they only had one album out, Psychic.  They’re a band that favors shadows, standing in twin cones of low, smoke filled light, delivering snarling guitar leads over throbbing electronic drums and sequences like a pong game on acid. They recalled the German band Can, with their motoric grooves and free improvisation, but brought a modern DJ sensibility to their set.  It was like a rave in a bomb shelter.  Tonight on Echoes we’ll revisit our interview with Darkside’s Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington.

Guitarist Dave Harrington has just released a solo EP,  Before This There Was One Heart But a Thousand Thoughts .

Check out their live set in Paris last year.  And turn it up.

WHERE & HOW TO LISTEN TO ECHOES

Echoes is on different stations, on different days and different times.
You can listen locally or stream-live from our many stations’ websites.
You can also stream it on-demand from Echoes On-line, our streaming subscription service.  You can sign up for a 1 week trial of unlimited streaming for $2.99 here.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club. and get Hans Christian’s Hidden Treasures, the May 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.

 

 

 

Echoes Goes to the Darkside

Hear an Interview with Darkside Tonight on Echoes.

Darkside @ Mountain Oasis. Photo: Diliberto

This past October I got to see the band Darkside at the Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit.  They played before an impressively large audience in the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, considering they only had one album out, Psychic.  They’re a band that favors shadows, standing in twin cones of low, smoke filled light, delivering snarling guitar leads over throbbing electronic drums and sequences like a pong game on acid. They recalled the German band Can, with their motoric grooves and free improvisation, but brought a modern DJ sensibility to their set.  It was like a rave in a bomb shelter.  Tonight on Echoes we’ll talk to Darkside’s Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington.

Check out their live set in Paris last year.  And turn it up.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Hammock’s Oblivion Hymns is our January   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.

Cover Me Over, the Echoes Cover Show.

You can’t pull back the sheets of a new album these days without finding someone covering tunes by other people.  There’s a whole cottage industry of people just covering Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and full album covers are almost the norm.  Today we go undercover to hear music by artists you know performed by other artists.   These shows are always fun because we find Echoes artists covering rockers who usually don’t get played on the show.  There’s no “Hallelujah” on this one but you’ll hear Patti Smith reconfigured by Tricky;  the old Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ song, “I Put A Spell on You” covered in a more sensual fashion by Jesse Cook and Emma Lee who were more inspired by the Nina Simone rendition;    Nouvelle Vague’s Olivier Libaux covering Queens of the Stone Age (an Echoes CD of the Month); we’ll hear some Metallica, in an un-Metallica fashion by finger-style guitarist Kelley Valleau and there’s Bruce Springsteen, covered by Dessa.

And this being Echoes, you have to have a cover of Pink Floyd, so I have three of them, Dar Williams covering “Comfortably Numb”, Lia Ices with a haunting take on “Wish You Were Here” and of course “Echoes” covered by electronica artist Banco de Gaia.

Go between the sheets with us tonight on Echoes Undercover.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB SPECIAL

Pick up you copy of Transmissions in the Echoes Store.  Current members of the Echoes CD of the Month Club will be getting Transmissions with their next CD.  You can join them in getting a great CD every month by signing up for the  Echoes CD of the Month Club.  New members will get Moby’s Innocents album, our November CD of the Month and a BONUS CD of Bombay Dub Orchestra’s Tales from the Grand Bazaar.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.  You can do it all right here.

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.

Living Room Concert: Radio Massacre International

Hear Radio Massacre International in a Living Room Concert on Echoes tonight.

It’s a trip into deep space when the English electronic trio Radio Massacre International comes into the Echoes living room and elevates us into the cosmos with a live performance.

Radio Massacre International At Echoes

Below, watch the electronic music video of Radio Massacre International’s “Small Frozen North” from their 1995 album Frozen North.

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 Melorman’s Waves. 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

Living Room Concert: Radio Massacre International

It’s a trip into deep space when the English electronic trio Radio Massacre International comes into the Echoes living room and elevates us into the cosmos with a live performance.

Radio Massacre International At Echoes

Below, watch the electronic music video of Radio Massacre International’s “Small Frozen North” from their 1995 album Frozen North.

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 Olivier Libauxs Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age. 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

Seven Saturdays Echoes Podcast

Hear the Echoes Interview with Seven Saturdays in the Echoes Podcast

What do you do when you’ve been weened on Brian Eno, Zero 7 and Pink Floyd, but you’re only in your mid-30s?  There’s a good chance you might make music like Seven Saturdays.  That’s the recording project from Jonathan D. Haskell who began making music under that name a few years ago.  On his latest album he moves from ambient instrumentals to dream pop.  It’s called Seven Saturdays, not to be confused with their debut EP, Seven Saturdays.

HIGHLIGHTS

On Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon, like every other kid we wore that out and I remember we used to go to the Griffith Park Observatory and they did a laser show in high school.  And we’d go there and totally zone out to Dark Side.

On vocals:  The minute I added a vocalist, any kind of a vocal, I felt a more human connection to each song.  Just having that human voice in there, a girl singing oohs and ahhs or whatever, makes me feel more connected to it in a way.

On Electronic Music:  It’s not electronic music….Pretty much everything is recorded with a microphone or a person playing it, you know.  There’s just not a lot of electronics going on and it’s very analog in a way.

Here’s a video of one of the tunes:

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

The Art of the Cover Tune – Echoes Undercover – Weds, May 29th

On the next Echoes we go Undercover.  It’s an entire show of cover tunes from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin, King Crimson  to New Order and more.   Songs you know by artists who aren’t known for playing them.

The best cover tunes reinvent a song and my standard for that will always be Jimi Hendrix’s take on Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.”  He took Dylan’s understated song with its biblical implications and turned it into a storm from the heavens.  Even Dylan began playing it with Hendrix’s arrangement (sans raging guitar) afterwards.

I don’t know if anything we’ll hear tonight on Echoes reaches those heights, but I think several songs see some serious reinvention, like Pat Metheny’s meditation on Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence,” Geigertek’s luxurious interpretation of John Foxx’s “Underpass” and George Winston’s highly underrated interpretation of The Doors.

One interesting trend is whole album covers.  I think this began in the mid-nineties when Blue Note Records launched their “Cover Series” in which one artist covered an entire album by another artist like Charlie Hunter’s take on Bob Marley’s Natty Dread.   It took a while to grab hold, but the new millennium has seen several albums covered from beginning to end.  Mary Fahl re-imagined  all of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as did The Flaming Lips.  Japancakes recorded a gorgeous and raging version of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless with cello and pedal steel guitar in the lead rolls and Icebreaker made an album from their live performance of Brian Eno’s Apollo, an album that was a studio creation, never intended for live performance.

We’ll hear selections from some of them and more as we get undercover tonight on Echoes.

~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.

Dr. Who Gets Pink Floyd Treatment

The “Dr. Who Theme” is pretty iconic for English musicians.  Written by  Ron Grainer and realized by Delia Derbyshire, it was one of the first electronic TV scores and plugged in several generations of electronic musicians.  I just ran across this video by a group called Traffic Experiment.  It’s a Pink Floyd “Echoes” era style take on the classic theme played live in their very cool looking studio.  They call it “Vashta Nerada [Doctor Who Theme).”   Equipment geeks should love the fetishistic gear shots in the beginning.  And of course, there is a cat reclining on a synthesizer.   There is a free download of the song on their website.

A lot of musicians have done their takes on this theme.  I loved IAMX’s lift of the bass line for his “Nature of Inviting.”  And Orbital did a loving and rocket propelled take of it on their The Altogether album.

Here’s the original.

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

You can get great CDs like Thierry David’s  Stellar Connection  and Coyote Jump’s Waking form the Roots by becoming a member of the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Follow the link and see what you’ve been missing.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news.

Radio Massacre International

Musical Children of Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream  Improvise Electronic Dreams.

You can hear an audio version of this blog with RMI’s music

Radio Massacre International @ Echoes

The English band called Radio Massacre international has been around for a long time. How long? Steve Dinsdale says the trio made their first recordings on cassette, taping hours of jam sessions.  In fact, when we visited them in London in 2006, dozens of them sat in a pile in Duncan Godard‘s living room.

Steve Dinsdale: It was really like a noise making session rather than anything constructive, but it was just like how much noise could we make with cassette decks and really basic keyboards.  And that, that, I was actually listening to one of these things that we’ve done, and the name literally just sort of popped in, into to my head, you know, and I thought oh we’ll call this, we’ll call it Radio Massacre International.

Radio Massacre International is Steve Dinsdale on keyboards and drums, Duncan Godard on keyboards and bass and Gary Houghton on guitar.  They’re often compared to Tangerine Dream, but they’re more likely to cite space rock bands like Hawkwind, Gong and especially Pink Floyd.  Their 2007 album, Rain Falls in Grey, is a tribute to the late Pink Floyd founder, Syd Barrett. It started as just another RMI jam.

Steve Dinsdale: The opening track on Rain Falls in Grey, that was an improvisation.   That actually happened spontaneously days after Syd actually passed away.  You know, we didn’t actually know what we were doing but to me it sounded like it was a tribute and I actually played the drums from “Astronomy Domine” when the drums come in because I felt that’s what we were actually doing.

Radio Massacre International plays electronic music the old fashioned way, with their fingers.  You’ll find no computers on an RMI stage.  Instead they use a mixture of vintage synthesizers, mellotrons and digital keyboards to erect their sound.  They’ll also often turn off the keyboards and become a psychedelic power trio with guitar, bass and drums. Either way, the only thing agreed upon beforehand is the key signature and beats per minute, maybe.

Duncan Godard:  Improvising is just, it’s more fun, I think, and a better way to express yourself than playing the same tune over and over again.
Steve Dinsdale:  So, we stick to the same ethos of improvisation but anything goes.  So, every time we set up, we were able to create something new.  So, we say our album is sort of diary entries, really, sort of ongoing diary entries for the band.

Radio Massacre International @ Echoes

You can hear the improvisational ways of Radio Massacre International on their new double CD called Time and Motion on Cuneiform records.  The band will play live on Echoes this coming Monday, April 26.  This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

You can check out Radio Massacre International’s few dozen CDs on their website.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

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Echo Location: Erik Scott’s Cosmic Bass Guitar

From Alice Cooper to Other Planets– Erik Scott takes a cosmic bass trip.

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

There have been a lot of virtuoso electric bass albums released over the years. Musicians like Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke tried to become gunslinging front men with an instrument that’s usually holding down the bottom end of a groove. But bassist Erik Scott says he never really listened to those musicians.

Erik Scott: I never owned a bass solo album because so many of them were technical displays or sound. Some of them even sounded like exercise videos or something, as opposed to music.

That may explain why his solo debut, Other Planets, is so different from most bass guitar albums. Scott isn’t a frustrated electric guitarist. He dives into the deep soul and nuances of the bass, extracting sensuous melodies and atmospheric moods.

The Chicago-based musician has played on numerous sessions for people like Kim Carnes, Tonio K and Ted Nugent. He spent a couple of years playing with Flo and Eddie, who had been lead singers with both The Turtles and Frank Zappa. In the early 1980s he was bassist and composer with Alice Cooper during the shock rocker’s Special Forces period.

But it was with the Chicago band, Sonia Dada that Scott came into his own. He’s been a member of the group since their first album, which included the hit song, “You Don’t Treat Me No Good.” On the last Sonia Dada album, Test Pattern, Scott slipped in the instrumental track, “Sundogs.” That led to his debut solo album, Other Planets. An expanded version of “Sundogs” reappears there as the title track.

Other Planets is a spacious album with much of that atmosphere coming from pedal steel guitarist John Pirruccello with a cosmic country version of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s sustained guitar leads. And remember, Gilmour played lap steel on Dark Side of the Moon.

The music on Other Planets is a long way from Sonia Dada, let alone Alice Cooper. Just hitting 61, Erik Scott can still rock out, but he’s experiencing a quieter state of existence these days.

Erik Scott: Right now I’m looking out the window and see pine trees, a frozen lake covered in snow. It’s just that kind of expanse I’m just looking at here in the dead of winter and I’m down here in the studio by myself so, it’s not the type of atmosphere that would make me want to break out into “Welcome to the Jungle.”

You can hear Erik Scott’s landscapes on Other Planets. It’s our February CD of the Month and I’ll be featuring it on Monday’s show. This Echo Location will be broacast by WXPN, 88.5 Philadelphia (www.wxpn.org) on Wednesday morning, January 28 about 9:30 AM. You can download the podcast from their site. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

John Diliberto (((echoes )))