Tycho’s Electronica Rock.

Tonight on Echoes Hear an Interview with Tycho’s Scott Hansen

For most of the last decade there has been a strain of Rock music that didn’t really rock out, but instead took a more introspective and almost ambient course, often mixing guitars with electronics.  And they usually don’t have singers, at least in a conventional sense.  Explosions In the Sky, The Album Leaf, Hammock and Sigur Ros are among those groups.  Add to that list Tycho.  That’s a project put together by Scott Hansen who started out as an electronic musician but has found himself in a hybrid, Ambient Rock world.  His latest album is Awake.

For Scott Hansen, Tycho isn’t just about music. It works on a visual level as well.  “I tend to think of the project as an audio visual project,” he explains.  “The music always comes first and then I try and illustrate the kind of space that that music represents with the art work.”

Tycho’s Dive

That’s because Hansen is not only a musician, but a visual artist known as iso50. He spent many years doing commercial work as a graphic artist.  You’ve probably seen a lot of it.   “I did a bunch of snowboards and skis and I did stuff for Diesel, some poster art, all this random, all sorts of stuff,” he reveals.  “Twix, and Starburst and all sorts of like ad agency stuff back when I was doing that.”

His visual style is a mix of Bauhaus austerity (the art movement, not the band) and the elaborate San Francisco psychedelic poster art he saw in his parent’s record collection with The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Led Zeppelin.

Echoes John Diliberto & Tycho’s Scott Hansen

“That was my gateway into just kinda of understanding music to be in with the Beatles and all that stuff,” Hansen confesses.  “But also the artwork behind them and the aesthetic that was applied to all those album covers and just the style–down to the way the people dressed and everything.  That kind of informed from then on what I thought was like the architect for bands, and music and album covers and all that.  So yeah, you can see that pop up in my work a lot.”

You can hear how that work pops up in his music tonight on Echoes when we revisit our 2012 interview with Hansen when he came into Echoes to play live.

Tycho recently released a new album, Awake.  We interviewed Hansen back in 2012 when he released the last Tycho album, Dive and came into Echoes to play live.  (You can hear a track from that on our CD,Transmissions. We return to that feature tonight on Echoes.

~© 2012

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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Best of Echoes 2012-Listener Poll Results.

Hear The Best of Echoes 2012 Rewind TONIGHT!
See Spotify Playlist Below

How much of a runaway was Dead Can Dance’s win in the Best of Echoes 2012 Poll?  They had almost twice as many votes as the next artist, Hammock.  But after that, it’s pretty tight.

But what does the list say musically?  It’s pretty diverse for one. I could argue that the top five are variations on modern electronic strategies, even Dead Can Dance and their largely programmed Anastasis.  But delve into the next five and you find acoustic world fusion from Todd Boston’s Touched by the Sun, mostly acoustic ambient chamber music from Jeff Pearce’s In the Season of Fading Light,   Kate Bush’s expansive song cycle set from late last year, 50 Words for Snow and then Eric Wollo’s more conventionally electronic excursions on Airborne.

What’s on the list? You’ll find some post-rock, including two by Sigur Ros, along with Tycho, Balmorhea and Hammock for whom ambition clearly paid off in their sprawling double CD, Departure Songs, an Echoes CD of the Month.  There’s different flavors of ambient including the Godfather, Brian Eno, joined by Marconi Union and Darshan Ambient.  The avatars of Space music, Tangerine Dream, get two on the list, and several of their disciples appear as well, Ian Boddy, Erik Wollo, Robert Rich, Thierry David and Paul Ellis.

Ambient Chamber Music continues to hold interest with Jeff Pearce and Kevin Keller. I’d include Jeff Johnson & Phil Keaggy’s gorgeous WaterSky in there as well.

Seven of the winners were Echoes CD of Month Club selections.  That’s a pretty good batting average.

What’s missing?  Acoustic guitarists.  Outside of Todd Boston and the California Guitar Trio, none are present.  And even they aren’t truly solo which, given the amount of solo acoustic guitar we play, is surprising.

Another surprise is Loreena McKennitt’s Troubadours on the Rhine.   In years past McKennitt consistently topped this poll and in some years, held both the one and two positions.  But this year she only makes it to the middle of the pack.  Admittedly, it’s a live recording of materiel from one of McKennitt’s less auspicious albums, The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

It was clearly the year for Dead Can Dance.  They may be a love ‘em or hate ‘em group, but the people who love them really do.

Here’s the list of The Best of Echoes 2012 – The Listener Poll

1. Dead Can Dance – Anastasis (Pias America)
2. Hammock – Departure Songs (Hammock)
3. Brian Eno – Lux (Warp Records)
4. Marconi Union – Different Colours (Just Music)
5. Air – Le Voyage Dans La Lune (Astralwerks)
6. Darshan Ambient – Falling Light(Lotuspike)
7. Todd Boston – Touched by the Sun (Gita Records)
8. Tycho – Dive (Ghostly International)
9. Sigur Ros – Valtari (XL Recordings)
10. Jeff Pearce – In the Season of Fading Light (Jeff Pearce Music)
11. Kate Bush – 50 Words For Snow (ANTI Records) 
12. Tangerine Dream – (Eastgate Music & Art) The Angel From the West Window
13. Erik Wollo – Airborne (Projekt)
14. Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy – WaterSky (Ark Records)
15. Loreena McKennitt – Troubadours on the Rhine (Quinlan Road)
16. Tangerine Dream – (Eastgate Music & Art) Finnegan’s Wake
17. Kevin Keller Ensemble – The Day I Met Myself(Kevin Keller)
18. Robert Rich – Nest (Soundscape Productions)
19. Thierry David – Stellar Connection (Real Music)
20. Ian Boddy and Erik Wollo – Frontiers (Inner Knot)
21. California Guitar Trio – Masterworks (California Guitar Trio)
22. Coyote Oldman – Time Travelers(Coyote Oldman)
23. Sigur Ros – Inni (XL Recordings)
24. Balmorhea – Stranger (Western Vinyl)
25. Paul Ellis – I Am Here (Lotuspike)

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

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Sign up for Echoes CD of the Month Club.

With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like Hammock’s Departure Songs coming to you each month.  Follow the link to the Echoes CD of the Month Club  and see what you’ve been missing.

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.

Here’s a Best of Echoes 2012 Spotify Playlist Minus Seven who weren’t on Spotify.

Tycho’s Electronic Designs – Echoes Podcast.

This past Tuesday we ran our interview with Scott Hansen of Tycho, but many of you probably missed it while you were battling Hurricane Sandy.  Well, now you can hear it in all its glory as an Echoes Podcast.  Here’s a taste of it below.

Scott Hansen of Tycho live on Echoes

For most of the last decade there has been a strain of Rock music that didn’t really rock out, but instead took a more introspective and almost ambient course, often mixing guitars with electronics.  And they usually don’t have singers, at least in a conventional sense.  Explosions In the Sky, The Album Leaf, Hammock and Sigur Ros are among those groups.  Add to that list Tycho.  That’s a project put together by Scott Hansen who started out as an electronic musician but has found himself in a hybrid, Ambient Rock world.  His latest album is Dive.

For Scott Hansen, Tycho isn’t just about music. It works on a visual level as well.  “I tend to think of the project as an audio visual project,” he explains.  “The music always comes first and then I try and illustrate the kind of space that that music represents with the art work.”

Tycho’s Dive

That’s because Hansen is not only a musician, but a visual artist known as iso50. He spent many years doing commercial work as a graphic artist.  You’ve probably seen a lot of it.   “I did a bunch of snowboards and skis and I did stuff for Diesel, some poster art, all this random, all sorts of stuff,” he reveals.  “Twix, and Starburst and all sorts of like ad agency stuff back when I was doing that.”

His visual style is a mix of Bauhaus austerity (the art movement, not the band) and the elaborate San Francisco psychedelic poster art he saw in his parent’s record collection with The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin.

Echoes John Diliberto & Tycho’s Scott Hansen

“That was my gateway into just kinda of understanding music to be in with the Beatles and all that stuff,” Hansen confesses.  “But also the artwork behind them and the aesthetic that was applied to all those album covers and just the style–down to the way the people dressed and everything.  That kind of informed from then on what I thought was like the architect for bands, and music and album covers and all that.  So yeah, you can see that pop up in my work a lot.”

You can hear how that work pops up in his music on the podcast of Tycho’s Echoes interview, available for free on iTunes.
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~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

SPECIAL OFFER FOR NEW CD OF THE MONTH SUBSCRIBERS

For a limited time only new subscribers to the Echoes CD of the Month Clubwill not only receive the November CD pick, Jeff Johnson & Phil Keaggy’s WaterSky, but an additional THREE previous CD of the Month picks absolutely free!  With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like  WaterSky coming to you each month.  Join now and you’ll get Watersky plus three additional CDs.  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.

Post-Rock Dominates Echoes Top 25 for October.

Hans Christian & Harry Manx’s You Are the Music of My Silence leads the Echoes Top 25 for October.  Their dreamy Indian evocations, the Echoes CD of the Month for October, floats like a seagull above a roiling ocean of post & alt-rock bands in the Top Ten.

Tycho, All India Radio, Balmorhea, Hammock, The American Dollar, Azure Ray and The Album Leaf are all artists that hail from the rock side of things, creating variations on ambient rock and dream pop.   Yet it’s still music with roots in the sound of Echoes.   In fact all those artists grew up listening, in varying degrees, to the sounds of space music, Windham Hill Records and ambient music.  You can hear those sounds in the bottom half of the list with Dead Can Dance still holding on after their September CD of the Month with Anastasis, Paul Avgerinos with his new age designs, Kevin Keller’s ambient chamber music and the return of Michael Stearns with his score to Samsara.

THE ECHOES TOP 25 FOR OCTOBER

1. Hans Christian and Harry Manx – You Are the Music of My Silence (Allemande)
2. Tycho – Dive (Ghostly International)
3. All India Radio – Red Shadow Landing (Inevitable)
4. Balmorhea – Stranger (Western Vinyl)
5. Hammock – Departure Songs (Hammock)
6. The American Dollar – Ambient Three (Yesh Music)
7. Azure Ray – As Above So Below (Saddle Creek)
8. Darshan Ambient – Falling Light (Lotuspike)
9. Kaki King – Glow (Velour)
10. The Album Leaf – Forward/Return (The Album Leaf)
11. Paul Avgerinos – Lovers (Round Sky)
12. Kevin Keller Ensemble – The Day I Met Myself (Kevin Keller)
13. Little People – We Are But Hunks of Wood (Youth & Progress)
14. Slow Dancing Society – Laterna Magica (Hidden Shoal)
15. Dead Can Dance – Anastasis (Pias America)
16. Sounds From the Ground – Widerworld (Waveform)
17. Michael Stearns/Various Artists- Samsara OST (Varese Sarabande)
18. Nicholas Gunn – Thirty-One Nights (Spring Hill Music)
19. Janel and Anthony – Where is Home (Cuneiform)
20. Julia Holter – Ekstsasis (RVNG International)
21. Nik Bartsch’s Ronin – Live (ECM)
22. Lymbyc Systym – Symbolyst (Western Vinyl)
23. Jesse Cook – The Blue Guitar Sessions (Entertainment One)
24. Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy – WaterSky (Ark Records)
25. Ooze – Where the Fields Never End : Revisited (Aleph Zero)

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

SPECIAL OFFER FOR NEW CD OF THE MONTH SUBSCRIBERS

For a limited time only new subscribers to the Echoes CD of the Month Club will not only receive the November CD pick, Jeff Johnson & Phil Keaggy’s WaterSky, but an additional THREE previous CD of the Month picks absolutely free!  With the Echoes CD of the Month Club, you get great CDs like  WaterSky coming to you each month.  Join now and you’ll get Watersky plus three additional CDs.  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: Mono

Japanese post-rockers Mono, attain symphonic dimensions.

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

Most composers would take offense if the orchestra playing their music was wearing ear plugs.  That was the case with the Wordless Music Orchestra when they performed with the Japanese band Mono in New York City in May.  But Mono founder, Takaakira Goto wasn’t insulted.

Takaakira Goto: Yeah, yeah, yeah. especially my guitar sound, guitar volume is totally crazy.

Mono is nothing if not loud as Takaakira Goto and Yoda bend down on their low stools, feeding their guitars through a distorted wall of sound.  When Taka formed Mono, his conception of an instrumental rock band was born as much from necessity as desire.

Takaakira Goto: I had a band, which always had a singer but the singer always hated my guitar sound because I’m always so big. [laughs]

Mono isn’t a noise band.  Over the last decade, they’ve been performing a minimalist symphonic brand of instrumental guitar rock, with a sound that has electric storms, but also delicate modal reveries.  Their latest album, Hymn to the Immortal Wind, was made with Steve Albini who produced Nirvana, The Pixies and Flogging Molly.  It’s a soundtrack for a fable-like story that’s scored for a full orchestra.  Taka had been listening to classical music, especially the sacred minimalists like Arvo Pärt and Henryck Gorecki.

Takaakira Goto: For me, good sounds always shake in the air.

Strings don’t sound like strings.  They sound like…

TG: Human choir

And he experiences the same choral effect with his guitars.

Takaakira Goto: Two electric guitars combined, it’s a more beautiful voice of the human.

The name Mono isn’t a nostalgic plea to bring back the Mono audio format.  Taka says he chose it for two reasons.  One was pronunciation.

Takaakira Goto: At first, the pronunciation of Mono was very easy.

But the real reason was for the commitment to a single purpose.

TG: Mono means kind of a single.

Mono is focused on their aspirations towards a symphonic rock.
Their Hymn to the Immortal Wind is released on Temporary Residence.  I’ve got a more extensive interview with Mono next Monday including comments from Steve Albini.  This has been an Echo Location.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Lights Out Asia and Near the Parenthesis

Lights Out Asia and Near the Parenthesis create an ambient rock

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

The n5MD record label began with a suspect business plan. They were going to release their music only on mini-disc. Although commercially that format went the way of the Apple Newton and Pets.com sock puppet, n5MD hung on, switching to CDs and building a roster of moody, electronic shrouded rock acts. Among their latest releases are CDs from Near the Parenthesis and Lights Out Asia.

Near the Parenthesis is just one guy, Tim Arndt. He lives in San Francisco where he plugs in his laptop and keyboard to create glitch strewn landscapes that frequently start out as noise and slowly converge into something quite melodic and beautiful. Although Near the Parenthesis is an awkward name, the music has a post-modern elegance as Tim fine tunes a filter on digital detritus honing in on haunted melodies buried in the noise. His latest album is called L’eixample, a Catalonian name for the area in Spain that has many of the surreal architectural works Antoni Gaudi. Near the Parenthesis captures some of that otherworldliness in his music.

While Near the Parenthesis is chilled and ethereal, another n5MD act, Lights Out Asia has roots in shoegazer rock. The Milwaukee-based trio combines guitars, keyboards, drums and computers in cinematic landscapes. On their album, Eyes Like Brontide, Lights Out Asia has a heroic sound to their music, even when some of the titles are full of foreboding, like “Radars Over the Ghosts of Chernobyl.” Gothic chords and Latin voices that sound like an oblivion mass slowly merge into surging guitars, powerful rhythms and Chris Schafer’s anguished vocal.

Although their roots are in shoegazer and electronica, Lights Out Asia have been accused of being New Age and they’re not ashamed to admit that they enjoy some New Age music. Chris Schafer says he has the complete Enya collection. You can hear that influence, but Enya didn’t ever sound like this.

Lights Out Asia has just released their third album, Eyes Like Brontide. Near the Parenthesis CD is called L’eixample. I’ve got an interview with Near the Parenthesis on Monday, September 15 and look for Lights Out Asia in October. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

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

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))