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.

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Brian Eno & John Diliberto from Echoes

Mike Oldfield’s reputation still rests on his 1973 epic, Tubular Bells, but he’s recorded many brilliant albums since then, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn, Incantations, Songs of Distant Earth & Voyager.  His remake of Tubular Bells in 2003 was one of the few times a musician succeeded at updating his own work.

Mike Oldfield

We’ll be featuring Mike Oldfield on May 20 when we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Tubular Bells.  We’ll have interviews with Oldfield, Tom Newman, Brian Eno, The Orb and more, talking about this signature work and the artist behind it.  Sometimes I’m amazed at the young musicians we have on Echoes now, but Mike Oldfield was only 20 when the album was released and he’d started it when he was 17 while playing in Kevin Ayers Whole World.

Hear the story behind Tubular Bells on Monday, May 20 on Echoes.

Here’s a very nice video from the BBC of Mike Oldfield performing Tubular Bells live in 1973.  Pretty amazing what you can do without a single computer in sight.

Here’s Eno with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins from their sessions for Small Craft on A Milk Sea.

~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.

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Hear Pat Metheny talk about John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 tonight on Echoes.

Pat Metheny and John Zorn were born within a year of each other and share many of the same musical influences.  But in their professional lives, they’ve traveled in different, barely over-lapping circles.  In fact, though they both live in New York, they’ve only recently met.

Guitarist Pat Metheny is still best known for his fusion records and his long running Pat Metheny Group, but you only have to listen to albums like Song X with Ornette Coleman, Zero Tolerance for Silence or The Orchestrion to get the full measure of his musical dimensions. He doesn’t get credit for being as completely far out as he really is.

Likewise, there is a consensus perception of avant-garde iconoclast John Zorn.  This view would assert that Zorn is completely far out as a downtown renegade bouncing from the Ornette-Coleman meets 50s rock sound of Naked City, the elliptical chaos of his game theory pieces and the Coltrane meets klezmer improvisations of Masada.  But those elements don’t take into account the sublimely beautiful melodies and deep sense of introspection that turn up on Zorn’s Filmworks series, The Masada String Trio or The Book of Angels.

Pat Metheny in old Echoes Living Room

The Book of Angels is a project that Zorn has been working on for about eight years now.  He wrote over 300 compositions, each one named for an angel. Artists like Uri Caine, Marc Ribot, Erik Friedlander, Medeski, Martin and Wood, and Joe Lovano, have already recorded some of these works. The latest to take on this task is Pat Metheny on Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20.

Released on both the Nonesuch label and Zorn’s Tzadik label, I think Metheny fans would spot him right away in this work, drawing influences from across his career.  Zorn fans, however, might have a harder time picking out the saxophonists impact, especially since he doesn’t play on the album.  But it’s there with the Hebraic modes and melodic flourishes that have dominated his music for the last two decades or so.

Pat Metheny & Orchestrion

The opening “Mastema” could almost be a Pat Metheny Group track with the electric sitar and insistent rhythm, but then you notice the rhythm is a little mechanized because it’s coming from Metheny’s Orchestrion, his mechanical orchestra, and the guitar is running through glitched out distortions

John Zorn

“Sariel” starts out like Klezmer ballad with Metheny overdubbed on several stringed instruments, like some exotic Middle Eastern oud orchestra.  Metheny solos over a percussion and oud-like groove that sounds like it could’ve wandered in off the kibbutz.  But no oud orchestra would ever whip out the snarling acid blues that Metheny brings in as the percussion drives him into solo of ecstatic arabesques of intertwined feedback.  It concludes in a sprawl of distortion, riff fragments and Antonio Sanchez’s free drumming, like a meeting of Hendrix’s “1983″ and Coltrane’s Interstellar Space.

That leads into “Phanuel” the most Zorn like track, if you follow the conventional conception of Zorn, a free form work of acoustic guitar and industrial electronics with radio signals bleeding through like Stockhausen’s “Hymnen.” But as a Zorn track it morphs into something else, in this case a beautiful ballad for two acoustic guitars, bass and percussion.

“Albim” will sound familiar to Metheny fans opening with an acoustic guitar solo that could’ve been off his One Quiet Night album before segueing into a jazz suffused track that could be his recent trio, except all the backing is Orchestrion.

John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 Tzadik Cover

You can hear elements of Metheny’s Orchestrion Project, the expansive writing of The Way Up, the lyricism of One Quiet Night and the flow of the Pat Metheny Group.  There’s even some Zero Tolerance for Silence ear-bleeding guitar distortion, something you might expect from Zorn, but which you may have forgotten was part of Metheny’s sonic stash as well. Metney brings it all to bear on compositions are sometimes just sketches, a head or a chord sequence.  But instead of just jamming on these themes, Metheny has orchestrated them into expansive, electro-symphonic works.  The fact that it features some of Metheny’s most unbridled and psychedelic guitar playing in years is just a bonus.

Tap: John Zorn’s Book of Angels Volume 20 is an exhilarating ride. After hearing it the only real surprise is why hadn’t this happened before?

~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.

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I don’t think we’ve ever had an artist interviewed on the show with as little materiel as Wall.  That’s the recording persona of English singer-songwriter Lyla Foy who has managed to build up a lot of buzz with a sparse amount of materiel equaled only by her even sparser songs.  But those songs touch a deep and resonant chord of melancholy and beauty.  She’s just released a 5 song EP called Shoestring .

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

Regarding “Left to Wonder”:  That was just a late night writing session, just me and a glass of wine, pouring my heart out.  That song was written about, I think about six months ago.

Lyla Foy of Wall

Regarding her Black Cab Session: There’s no pretense when you’re in the back of a cab.  You can’t, you can’t hide behind you know, like clever recording devices or you know, auto tune, God forbid, or any of those things.  Just, you and your singing, and it’s hot and you’re cramped.

Regarding her influences: I’m a massive fan of Beth Gibbons of Portishead.  And more current people, Annie Clark of St. Vincent, sort of women who have a very sort of articulate way of songwriting.

Regarding her state-of-the art technology: The keyboard I use is a Casio and it’s a Casio Tone MT200 and it is ancient.  I got it off eBay and I think it’s made in the ’80s.

Download the free podcast of the Echoes interview with Wall.

~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.

Still Corners

Gaudi

Tonight on Echoes (5/9/2013) it’s dream pop from England with Still Corners‘ new album “Strange Pleasure“, global electronica from Gaudi‘s new “In Between Times.” And speaking of global, I’ve got a band called Syriana on Peter Gabriel‘s  Real World Label.    They have members from Ireland, Algeria and Palestine and they sound like Dick Dale in the Middle East.  Have a listen to a preview of Syriana’s “The Road to Damascus“:

Steve Tibbetts

Michael Brook

I’ve also got some guitar icons.  We’ll hear something from Steve Tibbetts, the idiosyncratic guitarist from Minneapolis, and Michael Brook, going back to his second album.  It’s coming up today, 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.

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Uwe Gronau

Aes Dana

Tonight on Echoes, (5/8/2013) new electronic music from Europe.  We’ll hear Germany’s Uwe Gronau with Visions and France’s Aes Dana with Pollen.

We’ll also hear from a duo called Koan.  They’re from Moscow and their sound is a mixture of downtempo techno but with a rich melodicism.  Their album, Argonautica will take you on a journey that transports Jason and his Golden Fleece into space.

Koan

http://www.echoes.org/comingup.html#0509

~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.

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~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.

Lyla Foy of Wall

Tonight on Echoes you can hear an interview with Lyla Foy of the English Dreampop band called Wall.  She came to renown when she participated in a web series called  The Black Cab Sessions.   A couple of guys would coerce musicains into the back of a big black London taxi and get them to play one song, which was filmed.  Artists like Mumford and Sons,  St. Vincent, Bon Iver, William Orbit and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson have participated.  So has Wall, even though they didn’t even have an album out at the time.  Catch a great interview with Wall’s Lyla Foy  talking about her EP, Shoestring tonight on Echoes .  Meanwhile, here’s her Black Cab Session.

~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.

In the alternative rock, irony drenched landscape of Brooklyn, the band called Hem stands out for their sincere lyrics and nearly pure acoustic sound.  They’ve been recording since 2001 and despite a litany of travails that might give Job pause, they’ve persevered, flourished and been reborn with their first new album in five years. It’s called Departure and Farewell and was supposed to be an ending, but instead, it’s a beautiful CD of redemption.  There’s no hemming and hawing, when I talk with Hem.

Some Key Hem Comments

Sally Ellyson: I grew up on Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk.
Gary Maurer: The joke was we wanted to do a record that sounds like a cross between Lawrence Welk and Hee-Haw, as close as we could get.  But then we met Sally and she made us the classy act that we are now.

Sally Ellyson & Dan Messé of Hem live on Echoes

Dan Messé: Oh, absolutely.  I mean there were divorces, babies.  I was struggling with a pill addiction during the middle of this period.

Dan Messé: It was quite a process, but I will say

that there’s, that tension between the, the sort of almost uplifting music and the sad lyric, for me it’s about this comfort that takes place.  And that’s inherent in Sally’s voice.  That’s what I hear in her voice.  It’s a balm that is very healing.

Hear the complete interview in the Echoes Podcast.

~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.

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.

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.

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.