Reflections on
2004:

 Guitar Heroes & Retro Space
contact echoes

Contact Echoes		    The rise of ambient music doesn't mean there weren't any guitars on Echoes this year. The California Guitar Trio almost makes up for the lack of finger pickers with their best album to date, Whitewater. CGT make three musicians sound like one, super guitarist. Erik Wollo on the other hand, sounded like a guitar orchestra on his largely acoustic album, Red Sky, Blue Guitars. It's a deft work of exhilarating guitar orchestration as Wollo plays his minimalist inflected works along with a pair of ingenious Kraftwerk cover tunes.

   While Wollo unplugged Kraftwerk, several artists waved the electronic flag. Retro-space artists Redshift made the Listener Poll with their latest disc, Oblivion. We still like them even though they changed the title of "Echo Flow," from Bridges: The Echoes Living Room Concerts Volume 9, to simply, "Flow" on their own CD. Spain's Dom F. Scab also flies under the retro-space banner but injects his album 12 STORIES, with a more contemporary sound.

   If Redshift and Scab present visions of the future from the past, several artists looked to the future from the present. The third album from Zero One, Psy-Fi,is another excursion into quirky, but seductive ambiences, cut-up voices and messages from the beyond. Zero One, a.k.a. Kevin Dooley, continues to have one of the most distinctive sound palettes around. Likewise, England's Jon Hopkins' second release, Contact Note, revealed a much edgier, more metallic tone than the gorgeous, Sex & the City-friendly moods of his previous CD, Opalescent.

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Redshift

Jon Hopkins

Erik Wollo

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