The Best of Echoes 2004: The Listener Poll
and
25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2004
by John Diliberto
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Living Room Concert
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Recently, listeners have seen and heard two polls on Echoes. The first is The Best of Echoes 2004: The Listener Poll in which listeners voted in record numbers this year. The second is 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2004. That list is compiled by me and the staff of Echoes. |
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It's interesting to note that 14 of our Essential
Echoes CDs did not make the Listener Poll at all, including six
of our top 10. Conversely, 14 listener choices were not
on the Essential list. What to make of that discrepancy, I'm not sure. But I do love the fact that we picked Anja Lechner and Vasillis Tsabropoulos's Chants, Hymns and Dances as our number one CD, and listeners selected Air's Talkie Walkie. Could there be two more disparate albums? One is a serene, deeply contemplative recording of hymns from an Armenian mystic played purely on acoustic piano and cello. The other is a studio concocted electronic affair mixing vintage synthesizers with Kraftwerk odes, space-age bachelor pad moods, and 60s and 70s pop music references, all delivered in an arch naivete. Yet both are embodied in the soundscape of Echoes and if the rest of the lists are any indication, that soundscape is wide-ranging and wildly eclectic. But exactly what comprises that soundscape exactly is not easy to ascertain. Here are a few highlights, with CDs that came to our attention this year. |
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Ambient Americana was a new phenomenon in the last few years. It's a sound that has roots in Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores...<more> |
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Women singing
in mysterious ways still entrance Echoes listeners and us. After
spending the last few years creating soundtracks for Gladiator,
Whalerider and The Insider, Lisa
Gerrard returned with a solo album called Immortal
Memory, collaborating with Irish composer Patrick
Cassidy. Lisa abandons her wordless hymns for ancient hymns
sung in Gaelic and Aramaic. It's a darker and more somber album
than even Lisa's earlier darker, and somber work. |
 Lisa Gerrard  Donna DeLory |
Interview feature with
Moya Brennan
(Echoes On-Line Subscribers)
Living Room Concert
(Echoes On-Line Subscribers)
Jan Garbarek
(Echoes On-Line Subscribers)
Interview feature with
Mary Youngblood
(Echoes On-Line Subscribers)
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Moya Brennan returned with a new, phonetic spelling of her first name, Maire, and a lushly produced CD of Gaelic hymns and Celtlic anthems called Two Horizons. Her presence on both the Listener Poll and Essential List highlights the fall that Celtic music has taken in popularity in the last several years. She's the only Celtic artist to appear this year. |
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Two veterans of acoustic, modern instrumental music released CDs this year that looked back. George Winston returned from his trip with the Doors and went home to the high plains state for Montana - A Love Story... <more> |
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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... <more> |
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Another Echoes trend, Ambient Chamber Music, continued to insinuate its subtle way into our hearts in 2004. Ambient Chamber Music has the mood, and usually the instrumentation of classical chamber music, but there's usually an electronic component of processing or resonance...<more> |
 Jan Garbarek |
 Mary Youngblood |
The Native American flute still enchants listeners and solo recordings from the father of Native American flute R. Carlos Nakai (Sanctuary), Autumn's Child's Mark Holland (For Such A Time As This) and Mary Youngblood (Feed the Fire) made the Listeners Poll. We selected William Eaton's jam band approach to global chamber music, Sparks & Embers, with flute player Claudia Tulip. |
Yo-Yo Ma & Obrigado Brasil
To our ears, there's a unity in these sounds.
And the fact that the listeners' #1 and #2 choices were electronic
pop and solo piano, Air and George Winston respectively,
only illustrates the emotional and sonic affinity of this music,
despite industry attempts to polarize those audiences. It's not
that they sound alike, it's that they are both tapping the same
spirit in their music, filtering the musical slipstream in different
ways, while drawing from the same soundpool. It's what allows
the listeners' number #6 choice, Yo-Yo Ma's florid cello
with Brazilian folk album, Obrigado Brasil Live In Concert,
and Aryeh Frankfurter's lyrical Celtic harp renditions
of Scandinavian songs, Aurora of the Northern Harp,
to sit alongside Space-electronica opuses like Mark Dwane's
The Sirius Link and Amethystium's Evermind.
After 15 years of producing Echoes, a certain jaded attitude
can begin to rear its cynical head. And there have certainly
been years where I've surveyed 12 months of music and thought,
there is absolutely nothing good, new, innovative or moving coming
out. The year 2004 wasn't one of them. There were several albums
that not only knocked me off my feet, but gave me some hope for
humanity.
~John Diliberto
