Posts Tagged ‘Echo Location’

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Echo Location: Fernwood’s Americana World Chamber Music

October 8, 2008

A progressive rock guitar warrior unplugs when Djam Karet’s Gayle Ellett journeys to Fernwood.

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

In an era of computer generated music where even the most folky, downhome pop song is electronically manipulated, a band called Fernwood wants to get back to nature. 

Fernwood's Almeria

Fernwood

Gayle Ellett: It’s a reaction to modern music and where modern music is going and it’s going so computer driven and played by machines and all the music you hear, a lot of the vocals you hear on pop radio are pitch corrected on popular radio and it’s a deliberate statement saying that’s bad. It’s wrong. We should avoid that.

Fernwood's Gayle Ellett in Echoes Concert

Fernwood

You might surmise from that statement that Gayle is an anti-technology Luddite, but consider that for the last 25 years, he’s been playing electric guitar in the ultra-progressive rock group, Djam Karet. Djam Karet revels in complex compositions and dynamic musicianship, but with Fernwood, Gayle Ellett was looking for something simpler. Along with his partner, Todd Montgomery, they’ve arrived at an Americana world chamber music based mostly on stringed instruments. Those strings include irish and greek bouzoukis, mandolins and sitars, banjo and oud. Todd Montgomery, who mainly plays sitar, doesn’t want to go to far.

Todd Montgomery: I want to play where, if my teacher were to hear it he wouldn’t be offended. It has to be enough Indian where he’s not going to be angry, you know.

For people of a certain age, Fernwood immediately calls to mind the 1970s Martin Mull comedy series,

Todd Montgomer of Fernwood at Echoes Concert

Todd Montgomer of Fernwood at Echoes Concert

Fernwood 2 Night. But that’s not what the band had in mind. Fernwood is the Topanga, California neighborhood where Gayle Ellett lives, and aside from the unintended TV show reference, it seems to conjure up the folky style of the group. But this is folk music with resonant overtones and exotic touches.

The debut album from Fernwood is called Almeria, named for a Spanish port city. Their music travels there and into other foreign destinations, discovering the sound of instruments combined, played by hand. You can hear a full interview with Fernwood on Echoes this Monday, September 13, and it will be our podcast that week. You can also hear an audio version of this blog with music. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

John Diliberto ((( Echoes )))

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Echo Location: Ludovico Einaudi’s Ambient Chamber Music

September 19, 2008

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. Divenire 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

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.”

Eden Roc 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 )))

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Echo Location: Ronn McFarlane’s 21st Century Lute

September 3, 2008

It’s not your ancient Renaissance lute anymore when Ronn McFarlane creates new music for an ancient instrument.

(You can hear an Audio Version of this blog, with music.)

Songs from the Labyrinth (Music by John Dowland) In 2006, Sting put out an album of tunes by 16th century composer John Dowland called Songs from the Labyrinth. Sting not only sang Dowland’s songs, but played a renaissance instrument called the lute. He plucked it convincingly, unless you happen to be a virtuoso renaissance lutenist.

Lutenist Ronn McFarlane at Echoes

Lutenist Ronn McFarlane at Echoes

Ronn McFarlane: I think he has fairly modest abilities on the lute but he does what he needs to do, and the most intricate lute playing tends to be done by his partner, Edin Karamozov, and he’s, you know, quite a fine player and quite brilliant.

Ronn McFarlane has been playing the lute for over 3 decades, much of it with the Baltimore Consort. What appealed to him in Sting’s music was less the Dowland pieces, and more, Sting’s own music.

Ronn McFarlane: One of my favorites was actually one of Sting’s original pieces, “Fields of Gold.” When they arranged that for two lutes and voice, I thought it was a haunting arrangement, quite beautiful, and I would have loved to have heard more contemporary music played on the lute.

So Ronn McFarlane decided to create his own repertoire. He’s been writing original compositions for about a decade and collected several of his tunes on an album called Indigo Road.

Ronn McFarlane-Indigo Road

Ronn McFarlane-Indigo Road

If you listen close to McFarlane’s music, you’ll hear techniques like harmonics and glissandos that weren’t part of the renaissance arsenal. Ronn got some of them from his days as a rocker, but also from listening to contemporary acoustic guitarists like the late Michael Hedges. Like Michael Hedges, Ronn McFarlane is an eclectic. Celtic influences infuse some tunes, while on others he sounds like a bluegrass player.

Ronn McFarlane isn’t ready to give up his classical career with the Baltimore Consort, but he has opened up new possibilities for an instrument that, with the exception of Sting, hasn’t seen much new music for a few hundred years.

There will be a full interview with Ronn McFarlane Wednesday 9/03 and you can hear Ronn McFarlane playing live on Echoes on Tuesday, 9/16. More Info on the Echoes website

This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music, heard on Wednesday mornings on 88.5 WXPN Philadephia and other enlightened Echoes affiliate stations.

(You can hear an Audio Version of this blog, with music.)

John Diliberto ((( Echoes )))

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Echo Location: Marconi Union’s A Lost Connection

August 13, 2008

I know, I just mentioned Marconi Union in a blog last week, but I decided to feature them in an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music, an Echoes feature heard on WXPN-FM, 88.5, in Philadelphia/Lancaster/Harrisburg.

An audio version of this Echo Location with music can also be heard.

Manchester, England was the home to some of the most seminal music of the 1970s and 80s. That’s where Jamie Crossley and Richard Talbot grew up, stoked on the Manchester born sounds of groups like Happy Mondays, the Durutti Column and Joy Division.  The two musicians met in a record store where Richard worked. He was playing his own electronic music to unsuspecting customers.  Jamie Crossley walked in, heard it and suggested a collaboration. The results have been a trio of critically acclaimed albums beginning with Under Wires and Searchlights in 2003 and Distance in 2005. 

Their latest CD, A Lost Connection continues their music of interior designs that could’ve emerged out of a Blade Runner dream, which is fitting for a band growing up in the midst industrial decay. Much of their music rises out of a droning, electronic hum, like the distant sound of a powerstation, or the rumble of a subway. But out of that hum, a pulse emerges, clicks and glitches congeal and a melody at the borders of perception rises up out of the noise like Clint Eastwood emerging out of a desert heat mirage.

You can hear echoes of ambient artists like Boards of Canada and Moby in Marconi Union and they certainly bow at the altar of ambient creator, Brian Eno. Like those artists, there’s a haunting, minor key melancholy and many of sounds seem almost a-musical, born from faulty joints, broken fittings or in the case of their new album, A Lost Connection. It’s the soundtrack for abandoned factories and dead technology, but one where sunlight is filtering through the broken glass.

Marconi Union’s Distance was released on the All Saints label, which also puts out CDs by Brian Eno, John Cale and Harold Budd. They expected their next album to come out there as well, and while they were waiting, they even recorded a second cd.  That’s a much swampier and darker effort called Beautifully Falling Apart.  But All Saints has stopped producing new music so Marconi Union decided to release the first of their two albums, A Lost Connection as a digital download from their website, marconiunion.com.  You’ll also find some free downloads on their site. 

This has been an Echo Location, soundings for new music.  Hear an Audio Version with music here.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

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Echo Location: Ozric Tentacles

August 6, 2008

The program director of an Echoes affiliate asked, “Are those guys still around?”  But Ozric Tentacles are still taking trips to the center of your mind.

(You can hear an audio version of this Echo Location, with music.)

Guitarist Ed Wynne was only born in 1961, but he has a unique perspective on the 1960s. Growing up in London, he lived in a duplex home next door to psychedelic folkie, Donovan.

Ed Wynne: Yeah, yeah, he rented half the house we lived in when I was growing up, it was very normal to have Donovan around the place and…
Brandi Wynne: And normal to have the Beatles around the place.
Ed Wynne: Yeah, yeah, they were popping in as well, and um stuff, yeah.
Brandi Wynne: Jimi Hendrix.
Ed Wynne: Yeah, it was funny in school when Donovan use to pick me up from school sometimes he was, you know we if my mom was busy or something and he’d come and pick me up from school, funny.

It was all just another magical mystery day for Ed Wynne. He was too young to actually participate in the 1960s revolution, but he made up for it when he formed a band called Ozric Tentacles at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1984. Ozric Tentacles created a bridge from 60s acid rock to 80s rave culture.
Erpland/Jurassic Shift Erpland
 

Ed Wynne is the only original member left in Ozric Tentacles. He’s a goofily affable presence on stage with shaggy brown hair curling down to his shoulders. He’s managed to keep this band going through shifting trends, releasing over 30 albums and becoming the Grateful Dead of space music. Ozric layers syncopated grooves, synthesizer swirls, deep throb bass lines and serrated guitar solos from Wynne. He was heavily influenced by the band Gong and their guitarist, Steve Hillage.  (Hear Hillage Echo Location here)

Ed Wynne: First off the guitar did not necessarily sound like a guitar to me, and I thought well okay, there you go, that opens up a whole little door way there.

Like Hillage, Ed Wynne can turn a single strummed chord into an epic tone poem, morphing it through effects and torquing a whammy bar the way Picasso wielded a brush.

A lot of musicians have passed through Ozric Tentacles including some that have gone on to play in Eat Static, Transglobal Underground and Jamiroquai. Currently Ed Wynne and his wife, bassist Brandi Wynne, continue waving the Ozric freak flag high. With Ozric Tentacles, you strap yourself in and hold tight for the ride.

The latest album from Ozric Tentacles is a live set and DVD called Sunrise Festival. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.
Sunrise Festival

(You can hear an audio version of this Echo Location, with music.)

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

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Echo Location: Ottmar Liebert’s The Scent of Light-Echoes August CD of the Month

July 30, 2008

Nouveau Flamenco creator goes wide-screen on The Scent of Light

(You can hear an audio version of this Echo Location with music.)

Ottmar Liebert would be the last person to call his music straight-up flamenco. His rhythmic strumming interspersed with intricate finger picking and Spanish rhythms comes from that tradition, but Liebert’s approach is more languid and less florid than most flamenco players. That’s one reason why he called his debut album, Nouveau Flamenco when he burst on the scene in 1990. It conjures up the southwestern desert landscapes of his home in Sante Fe more than sensual Spanish dancers. Nouveau Flamenco

Liebert has taken an introspective and experimental path that flies in the face of music purity and even fans’ expectations. He’s recorded an album of classical music with orchestra, Leaning Into the Night, that featured original tunes and compositions by Ravel, Satie and Puccini. That CD was something of an about face from his 1990’s love affair with electronics. He got the remix treatment on Euphoria, where Steve Hillage, Steve Be Zet and Aki Nawaz brought electronic beats to his music. That was followed up by his psychedelic epic, a double CD called Opium that was a Nouveau Ambient Flamenco journey. Opium

The ambient influence has remained a subtle force in Ottmar Liebert’s music. He uses electronics to gently shape the acoustic space around his guitar and band, Luna Negra. That’s evident on his new CD, The Scent of Light. The Scent of Light

The music on The Scent of Light builds slowly, each piece carving out a contemplative space until before you know it, the dynamic has completely changed. A centerpiece of the album is “Silence, No More Longing.” It’s an 11 minute excursion that builds from solo guitar, to multi-tracked guitars adding ambient electronics, bass, percussion, and finally unleashing a quiet electric storm from guitarist Stephen Duros.

In many ways, The Scent of Light is a direct descendent of his 1993 CD, The Hours Between Night and Day. Like that album, many of the songs here are inspired by Liebert’s travels, and he went beyond his standard ensemble line-up for more lush, evocative arrangements full of ambient shadows and environmental sounds.

The Scent of Light is full of subtle, but unexpected touches. There’s the reverse percussion echoes on “Firelight,” the call and response guitars of “The River: Writing in Water,” and the tamboura drone and tabla that comes in through “Candlelight.” The mellotron flutes and reverse guitar bring “Moonlight” to a haunting close as it dissolves dissolving into birds and wind. Liebert takes you from a world of interior ruminations to exterior vistas.

Ottmar Liebert is calling The Scent of Light his best album ever. I’ll need more time for that kind of assessment, but it’s certainly one of his best. It’s our Echoes CD of the Month for August.  We’ll be featuring it in a special show on Monday, August 4.  Check www.echoes.org for for more information.  A separate review of The Scent of Light  will be live on the site shortly.

John Diliberto,  July 30, 2008                                                                                                              (((echoes)))

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Echo Location: The Penguin Cafe Orchestra

July 23, 2008

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra along with Harold Budd, virtually created the Ambient Chamber Music genre. Their CDs have just been re-released. In this Echo Location we return to a 1988 interview with PCO founder, the late-Simon Jeffes.

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

When Malcolm McLaren decided that Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious should cover the Frank Sinatra hit, “My Way,” he got Simon Jeffes to write the string arrangements.

Simon Jeffes: His singing was grotesque, but at the same time there was something moving about it. And it wasn’t a send up when I did the arrangement. I actually got quite touched by it. Because although it sounded totally moronic in a way, it was full of kind of anger and despair and yet life, there was really life
in the piece.

“My Way” might be Simon Jeffes’ most notorious work, but it’s not the music for which he’s best known. That would be the quirky chamber music group, The Penguin Café Orchestra. They were an ad hoc assemblage of musicians headed up by Jeffes from 1973 until his untimely death 24 years later. They recorded their first album for rock and new music auteur Brian Eno‘s label called Obscure Records. The roster included John Adams, Harold Budd and Michael Nyman, but even more than those genre- bending composers, the Penguin Café Orchestra was unclassifiable.

You’ve heard the Penguin Café Orchestra on NPR shows, IBM commercials and even the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack. They were an influence on modern chamber rock and Trey Anastasio, guitarist from the jam band, Phish, was looking to the Penguin Café Orchestra when he composed his instrumental album, Seis De Mayo.

Trey Anastasio: If there was a sound that was in my head, interestingly, it was probably the Penguin Café Orchestra. I don’t know how many albums they had but I had one of them, and I use to always play that album while I was cooking. So when I sequenced and mixed this album I literally sequenced it in the kitchen while cooking, and I use to think I want to have an album that you can cook to, like the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

I think Simon Jeffe’s would’ve appreciated the music for cooking scenario.

Simon Jeffes: It was whole idea of an orchestra playing Beethoven in a smokey atmosphere, I think was very exciting. People with a sparkle in their eye and sort of maybe a cigarette in the corner of their mouth.

Several albums from the Penguin Café Orchestra have just been re-released.

You can hear a longer version of this interview, Tonight, July 23, on Echoes. You can also here an audio version of this Echo Location with music.

It’s hard to pick out on Penguin Café Orchestra album. Signature songs are scattered across their 4 studio recordings.

Signs of Life My personal favorite is Signs of Life. Besides key tracks like “Southern Jukebox Music,” it has a few songs of unalloyed and quaint beauty including “Rosasolis” and “Perpetuum Mobile.”

 

Music From the Penguin Cafe (Reis)  Music from the Penguin Café, their debut, is still a standout. Playing ukeleles and quatros, with earnest string arrangements, this album was so unhip that it was ultrahip. “The Penguin Café Single” stands out here.

                                                                                                                                                                    Penguin Cafe Orchestra The self-titled album, Penguin Café Orchestra contains “Telephone and Rubber Band,” the closest they came to pure novelty, although they always flirted with that. (Note that the CD cover links to the original CD issue. The remastered version wasn’t on Amazon at this writing.)

Broadcasting from Home Broadcasting from Home has some signature tracks, including “Music for a Found Harmonium.”

 

When in Rome When In Rome is a live album and contains faithful renditions of most of PCO’s best-loved tracks.

 

 John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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An Echo Location: Alu’s Cosmic Cabaret

July 16, 2008

The latest singer to carry the torch of Kate Bush into new terrain is named Alu

[You can also hear an Audio Version of this Blog, with Alu’s music]

Ziggy Stardust came from Mars, Sun Ra came from Saturn.  Alu isn’t from another planet, but sometimes she wants to be.

Alu: Ah, no, not really happy with earth, I sometimes not happy with the humans here, I think I’ve always felt like a bit of an outcast and you know, just, I think we all kind of want to go to that place where our family is, or the people who understand and support us are, and that’s kind of Mars to me.

You can hear Alu’s trip to Mars on a song called “Martian Rendezvous.” It’s one of the quirky, atmospheric and theatrical songs from her sophomore album, Lobotomy Sessions. 

That seems like it might be an ironic punk title or the follow-up to Spinal Tap’s Intravenous De Milo.  But although her song “Recluse” appears in the new Clive Barker film, The Midnight Meat Train, Alu isn’t a morose Goth or raving headbanger. For the Los Angeles-raised singer, Lobotomy Sessions is more like therapy.

Alu: It is very healing for me and every, every song is very healing for me. They help me a lot.

Lobotomy Sessions doesn’t remove part of Alu’s head, but it does let us see the world inside it on songs like “Buzzin’ in My Brain.” It’s a spiritual and musical descendent of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross’s “Twisted,” via Joni Mitchell.

Alu: Buzzin’ in My Brain is kind of about my relationship with music and creation and insanity, you know, because it’s the process is kind of maddening, so it’s not directly about therapy, but it is in a way because it’s, it’s about my form of therapy which is creating.

She’s a child of Hollywood animation artists and went to school at Cal Arts where she got the voice lessons that help set her apart. She’s been compared to Bjork and Tori Amos, cabaret and The Addams Family. But rarely have those elements come together with the haunting, and haunted charm you hear on the three ring pyschosis of her song, “Circus Cosmos.”

Alu is the latest in a string of idiosyncratic, introspective and provocative singers following in the tradition of Kate Bush. It’s a tradition that includes Happy Rhodes, Tori Amos, and Bjork. On her new CD is Lobotomy Sessions, Alu creates yet another new and inventive iteration of that muse.

You can hear an extended interview with her on Echoes Monday, July 21. You can also listen to an Audio Version of this Echo Location blog with music.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

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Echo Location: Tangled up in Strings-California Guitar Trio & David Pritchard

July 10, 2008

The California Guitar Trio and David Pritchard are acoustic fingerstyle players who aren’t taking the lonley solo route. 

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

If you think one acoustic guitar is good, there are some musicians who think 2, 3 or 4 is even better. The California Guitar Trio has embraced this concept. As the name suggests, there are three of them, Paul Richards, Bert Lams and Hideyo Moriya, but despite the name, none of them live in California. They’re graduates of Robert Fripp’s League of Crafty Guitarists and for seventeen years they’ve been making music that sounds like one musician, with 30 fingers. Their new album is a CD of cover tunes called Echoes. Echoes

They cover Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Lynard Skynard‘s “Freebird” (probably in response to smart-assed requests from the audience), and something from a guy named Ludwig Van Beethoven.
CGT write some beautiful original tunes, but they’ve always done a lot of covers in their music, creating unlikely adaptations like this for their 3 guitars. They expand a little bit with a few other musicians and really stand out on remakes of Pink Floyd‘s “Echoes” and Mike Oldfield‘s “Tubular Bells.”
CGT haven’t been acoustic purists for a while. They amp up their acoustics so they sound like
electrics at times and aren’t wary of using some electronic processing and a few other musicians to obtain the sound they want.
Unlike the California Guitar Trio, David Pritchard actually lives in the Golden State. He started doing the multiple guitar thing just before CGT in 1990 with his album, Air Patterns. Air Patterns Sometimes he plays one guitar. Sometimes he plays five. He’s a jazz guitarist with classical chops composing a lush minimalist music for multiple guitar players, although sometimes they are all named David Pritchard.

On the title track to his new album, Vertical Eden, he overdubs himself playing 5 acoustic guitars. But he brings in four other guitarists when he plays live. Like the California Guitar Trio, he’s expanded his palette on CD with other musicians, but multiple guitars, contrapuntal arrangements and what Guitar Player magazine once called “arpeggios from hell,” remain the cornerstone of his music.
You can get tangled up in strings with David Pritchard’s Vertical Eden and the California Guitar Trio’s Echoes.

You can also hear an Audio version of this Echo Location, soundings for new music.

John Diliberto July, 2008
(((echoes)))

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