(February 2010)

This Month's Pick: Nakai, Eaton and Clipman Dancing into Silence R. Carlos Nakai, William Eaton and Will Clipman have made some of the most moving and provocative music of the last 20 years. Their 1995 album Feather, Stone & Light is on my all-time top ten list for Echoes. This ensemble makes a music that defies easy categories, that seems deep in tradition, yet free from the limits of tradition. A member of the Navajo and Ute tribes, Nakai took the Native American flute off the reservation and out of the hands of traditionalists when he released his album Canyon Trilogy in 1989. He added electronic effects to his flute and then took it global, playing with orchestras and pianists, Japanese world fusion groups and electronica artists. Regardless of the setting, it all sounds like R. Carlos Nakai. The trio heard on his latest album, Dancing Into Silence, is where Nakai seems to do his best work. He's been recording with William Eaton for over 20 years. Eaton builds and plays hybrid stringed instruments that resemble ancient artifacts from the planet Pandora in Avatar. He's the orchestrator and atmospheric controller on the album, weaving synth textures, ringing harp strings and twangy guitar riffs like a space troubadour. The third member is Will Clipman whose percussion rig includes pony drums based on Native American designs, hang drums, African djembes, Irish bodhrans and anything else that will rattle or bang. They've recorded several albums together, but Dancing into Silence takes them into a terrain of pure intuitive improvisation. Although the concept was to leave preconceived songs off the album, these three artists have so much melody pouring out of them and are so attuned to each other after years of playing together, that every track sounds like a through- composed work. Nakai dips his flutes in and out of the mix, at times floating free, at others pulling the ensemble behind him in an epic theme. His vocable chants are calls from the edge of consciousness. Through deft segues between tracks, Dancing into Silence morphs from ethereal ballets to throbbing percussion trances. The aerated performances seem to hover above the ground like a desert mirage, but behind that mirage are three musicians in communion, bathed in a world of reverb, united by the rhythm of the earth. The album’s title speaks to both the joyful attunement one can hear in the making of this album, and the attainment of a quieter, more serene space after listening. © 2010 John Diliberto

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(January 2010) listen to samples

Jimmy Wahlsteen 181st Songs On the cover of his debut album, 181st Songs, Jimmy Wahlsteen just looks too stylish to be a fingerstyle guitar slinger. GQ poses and an androgynous look aren't the norm for the usual grizzled or blandly clean-cut anti-image approach favored by most fingerstyle players. But then you hear the impressive technique and realize he isn't like a lot of finger-style players anyway. Wahlsteen has all the post-Michael Hedges guitar approaches down, including two-handed tapping, playing percussion on his guitar and more. But this isn't a simple guitar-picker's anthem. The Swedish born musician grew up as a fan of Kiss, and has spent the first part of his young career playing on pop music sessions. He brings a keen melodic ear and arranging sensibility to his music. A song like "Suffice to Say" could be a pop ballad, with its song structure and use of electric guitar accents. Wahlsteen can burn the house down with technique, which he does on "The Urge to Gossip," a jazzy romp complete with horns, but he can also wax pastoral on "Carry Me," a gentle song backed by a string trio Wahlsteen doesn't credit it on the album, but you can hear subtle processing effects in his playing. He introduces “Rapid Eye Movement” with a delay sound reminiscent of U2's The Edge and on “You've Gotta Run Real Fast to Stand Still,” he uses shimmering harmonics and electric guitar shadings that exhibit his open ended approach to finger-style guitar. The title of the CD comes from the street on which Jimmy Wahlsteen lived in New York City, 181st Street. That's where he wrote most of an album on which he does it all, even picking out the cut you'll like best. It's called "It's your Favorite." Jimmy Wahlsteen's 181st Songs is our favorite for January and it's the Echoes CD of the Month. © 2009 John Diliberto

(December 2009) listen to samples

Michael Spriggs Neurasenia I first heard of Michael Spriggs in 1999 when he sent us an album called Without Words. His mixture of country-tinged guitar with synthesizer textures and expansive compositions was immediately distinctive. Little did I realize that millions of people had heard Spriggs as a session musician on dozens of country hits, including some that he'd composed. Like Without Words, Neurasenia is a long way from his work with Eddie Rabbitt and Kenny Rogers, but it does share that music's a natural flow and an earthy feel that pigments his music like fallen leaves on an autumn day. Neurasenia is a word Spriggs says he heard from his doctor to describe an essential state of existence or beingness. I can't find that anywhere, but maybe Spriggs' music is the definition. Neurasenia is a CD full of gentle melodies, lovely arrangements and pastoral moods that seem to emerge from some deeper yearning in this musician that goes beyond the confines of country. It's a music that wants to travel like "Waterfall," a track that sits between country and Kabul, with Middle Eastern percussion and a country violin. He uses his guitars as an orchestra, mixing acoustic, electric and synthesizer guitar. The title track is a cinematic excursion down an imaginary highway. A picked acoustic guitar cycle is punctuated by sweeping chordal strums that are underpinned by a muted violin pad, creating a steady-state momentum brushed by sudden turns. On "The Wind When you Leave," he plays a spare acoustic guitar that leaves synthesizer trails in its wake, swirling like eddies behind a slowly rowed boat. Even though he's inspired by the electronic landscapes of Steve Roach, Spriggs has a pop composer’s sense of form as he spins dreamy landscapes awash in melody, all tinged by a bit of country twang. As if Spriggs wasn't enough of a Nashville oddity, on the final track, "Xu Moon" he plays the guzheng, a Chinese zither similar to a koto. On this meditative ambient track, he improvises on the instrument over the course of 10 minutes, starting out atmospheric before converging on a looping rhythm as guitar and guzheng play counterpoints to each other. Michael actually sent me an early version of Neurasenia seven years ago. I'm glad it's finally seeing the light of day. It was an easy pick as the final CD of the Month for 2009. © 2009 John Diliberto

(November 2009) listen to samples

Robin Guthrie Carousel Carousel is the kind of album you might expect from Robin Guthrie. Shimmering, ringing guitars, layers of echo and darkly melancholy themes played over trancey rhythm machines. It picks up on the themes of his previous CDs like Continental and Imperial. But it's a nearly perfect rendition of that sound from the pensive opening track, "Some Sort of Paradise," to the deeply textural closer, "Little Big Fish." You've heard Robin Guthrie before. He was the guitarist with the Cocteau Twins during their entire existence from 1981 to 1998, defining an elegiac dreamworld along with singer Elizabeth Fraser. Guthrie created an archetypal guitar sound noted for its use of distortion, delays and reverb that continues to influence musicians including My Bloody Valentine, Ulrich Schnauss, Hammock, and Moby. On Carousel, Guthrie takes this sound and expands it into a series of drifting, paisley dappled tone poems. While many of his adherents have drifted into the drone zone of pure electric ambiences, Guthrie never leaves melody or rhythm, or at least pulse, behind. Tracks like "Delight" and "Search Among the Flowers" unfold in cascading patterns rippling through the layers of his processed guitar matrix. Guthrie is a thoroughly modern musician, yet there's a wistful, nostalgic sensibility in an album that seems autumnal in its mood. It comes through on "Sparkle," which recalls the twangy sound of 60s guitar bands like The Shadows via Twin Peaks. But there's also an older, distinctly British pastoral sensibility from this musician who grew up in Scotland and now lives in France. Titles like "The Girl with the Little Wings" and "Waiting by the Carousel" suggest a mature, reflective sound that seems appropriate from a 47-year-old musician with children. It's a personal, contemplative music that happens to be psychedelic and moody. Robin Guthrie is one of the significant guitar stylists of the last 30 years. He's not a flash player, with ripping pyrotechnic leads and guitar shredding distortion. Instead, his sound is an electric orchestra, layering shadings, harmonies, and melodies within melodies that unfold across his compositions. If you have to pick one Robin Guthrie album to get, Carousel is it. © 2009 John Diliberto

(October 2009)

Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy Frio Suite Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy are musicians from different musical worlds.Jeff Johnson is best known for his Celtic and Persian inflected albums, draped with lush keyboards, sensual rhythms and his melodic writing. Phil Keaggy is known to a bigger slice of the world as a veteran of the psychedelic rock era with the group Glass Harp and a solo career that has embraced rock, country and new age. Among guitarists, especially finger-style players, he's a legend. But both musicians are united by their born-again Christian backgrounds and that's how they got together at a Laity Lodge meeting on the Frio River in Texas. They've combined to make an album unlike anything either has done, yet it draws from the core of their music. Composed in their separate studios in Nashville and Washington state, Frio Suite is a CD of intricately painted landscapes, much of it inspired by the Frio River and the photography of Kathy Hastings, which adorns the album. She takes macro photos that have a painterly look, making for often surreal, abstract images of real life objects and settings. Johnson and Keaggy create the same sort of detailed, close-up music that draws you into its patterns. "Of Time & Frio," a nicely detailed, almost folk-jazz track opens the CD with its light, gentle airs. But that's a deceptive beginning for an album of deep moods and exploratory themes. Johnson and Keaggy's compositions could be reflecting the landscape of the Frio River in Texas or Hastings' detailed macro-photos, but they play less as environmental ambiences and more as interior journeys. Take "Ride the Stone Waves." Johnson orchestrates a shifting, textured backdrop that includes gamelan sounds, ghost synthesizers and plaintive piano while Keaggy plays acoustic and electric guitars, deploying his intricate melodies while dropping Pink Floyd-like echoes, fuzz chord punctuations and some sinewy fretless bass. Jeff Johnson's sound design has never been more inventive, with often minimalist loops, Balinese cycles and ephemeral synthesizer scrims. He remains a font of pensive, turning-to-dusk melodies. Within Johnson's ambiences Phil Keaggy sounds like twenty different guitar players, offering country twang, folky picking, spacey ambiences and jazz-inflected changes. But it all coheres into a chamber orchestra of the imagination. From the first piano notes to last guitar strum, Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy have created a nearly perfect album of deeply moving chamber music on Frio Suite. It's our CD of the Month for October. © 2009 John Diliberto

(September 2009)

Fernwood Sangita The backwoods of American music may be the last hidden realm of exotica left in the world. Brian Eno collaborator Leo Abrahams, Beck producer Tom Rothrock, ambient artist Kaya Project and jazz guitarist Bill Frisell have all tapped into a bucolic Americana, from country to rural blues, Appalachian banjo music to bluegrass fiddle cadences. But few have embraced this concept more than Fernwood, a band led by multi-instrumentalists Gayle Ellett and Todd Montgomery. They play stringed instruments from around the world whether it's a dilruba or banjo, sitar or guitar. On their debut Almeria, they established the template for a global Americana music, mixing banjo and bouzouki, sitar and mandolin into a soundscape that's as sweet as a country fiddle tune and as beguiling as a raga. In a way, they're the American version of Iceland's Amiina, creating a gentle, slightly surreal sound like a music box with Indian tines being cranked in the Ozarks. Sangita takes a while to work its charms. Melodies are embedded in an intricate interplay of strings, like the strumming mandolins of "Mistral,” which are topped by a melody that alternates between sitar and fiddle. Indian ambiences, Appalachian picking and an elegant European nostalgia converge on "Cimarron," which sounds like a Nino Rota soundtrack for Fellini, played by a bluegrass band. Sangita is like an undiscovered musical tributary, a meeting of the Ganges River with the Swanee River. It's a CD full of sonic details and plaintive melodies. Sangita is our CD of Month for September. © 2009 John Diliberto

(August 2009)

Chris Bocast and MJCatalin Stratagem What do you do when you're a guitarist playing new wave music, but you get seduced by shape-shifting players like David Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix and Bill Nelson? When Chris Bocast came to that crossroads, he dug deep into the ambient expanse and has now emerged with Stratagem, an album that is breathtaking in its scope and entrancing in its melodic thrust. Working in a virtual, transcontinental mode with Cătălin Pîntea, a.k.a. MJCatalin, Bocast has found a meeting ground between dynamic compositions and ambient designs, a place where echoes of progressive rock are heard in electronica grooves.From the opening track, "To Cross the Sea of Clouds,” Bocast and MJCatalin establish the strategy of Stratagem. An ostinato bass line, ricochet filtered snare hits and a looping sequencer groove link up to an electronic drum loop while sweeping chords push the piece forward, It gradually opens up to Bocast's crying e-bow solos. After that, just sink into the world these two musicians orchestrate.MJCatalin is a Romanian drummer and electronic artist and he mixes both modes here. "Song of the Dodo," a lament for the extinct bird, is driven by his kinetic groove which sounds acoustically played until sound effects start streaming off his drum hits. Ironically, many of these tracks are sampled from their own works as each artist lifted from the other as well as cannibalizing their own recordings. A hidden track, "Zbor Indepartat" actually began as "Return of the Far Fleet" from Bocast's previous solo CD, Through the Airlock. MJCatalin added grooves and changed the piece completely. A track called "Nocturne" actually began as an MJCatalin piece called “That Magic Light.” Both tracks are reborn under Bocast and MJCatalin’s virtual ministrations. MJCatalin supercharges Bocast's soundscapes with swampy, churning rhythms, while Bocast adds harmonic complexity and melodic flights to MJCatalin's electronica loops. You can hear the roots of both artists in 80s synth pop (Bocast played in Tokyo Vogue) with songs like “Mr. X,” but there's also a progressive side to these musicians that emerges on the dynamic, shifting scenes of "The Hidden Face of Eva" and "Caelestis Caravel." Stratagem is an album of cinematic sweep. It's our CD of the Month for August. © 2009 John Diliberto

(July 2009) A poignant song cycle that reveals its secrets over repeated listening listen to a review listen to samples

Moby Wait For Me Moby is famous as a maker of dance and electro-pop music, but the musician has always had an ambient side. You could hear it in his early work for the Instinct label, collected on the album, Ambient, as well as later albums like Play the B-Sides and the second disc of Hotel. But Wait for Me is Moby's most deeply felt and atmospheric album yet. He mixes minor key instrumentals that roil in undertows of texture with modern hymns and laments that ask the big questions in a personal way. You can hear echoes of Moby's previous work throughout Wait for Me. Although there's only one track, "Study War," that has the archival voice samples Moby made famous on Play, his lyric phrasing has that sense of old gospel and blues, sampled and cut. "Pale Horses,” a song contemplating death, recalls the wistful scratchy sampled vocals of Play, but are actually sung by Amelia Zirin Brown in a voice that’s tired beyond her young years.  And she does it again on the gospel hymn cadences of "Walk With Me." The title track is another song that seems to contemplate eternity of a lost soul. It's sung by Kelli Scarr, who has a fragility that breaks over the waves of Moby's ghost rhythms, minimalist piano figure and sonic scrims. She sings "I'm gonna ask you to look away, I lost my hands and it hurts to pray," like a half-remembered nursery rhyme, a paean to lost youth, a contemplation of the end. On a couple of tracks, Moby sings in a voice that's less than perfect, but like Brian Eno, it's an instrument that conveys what's needed. He's heartbreaking on "Mistake," falling somewhere between David Bowie and Lou Reed in a song of regret, singing "You never felt this lost before, and the world is closing doors/I never wanted anything more." Despite desperate lyrics, it's the only rocking tune on the CD. For all its synthesizers and processing tricks, Wait for Me is strangely quaint in its sound design, like a vision of the future from the past, covered in dust and cobwebs and attaining a deeper meaning through its archival status. Of course there are cinematic moments like the instrumental "Shot in the Back of the Head," which takes a grinding, off-center backwards riff and then launches it into a twisted Ennio Morricone-like landscape with Moby's slide guitar. On "Scream Pilots," Moby spins around Ulrich Schnauss dancing on a surf rhythm, churning electronics and ringing guitar. Moby said he wanted to make a personal album, and he did, but Wait for Me also speaks to universal yearning, in a song cycle that reveals its secrets over repeated listening. It will bring you to tears in its forlorn poignancy, but will lift you up in the end.It's our Echoes CD of the Month for July. Wait for Me is not a summer album, but a timeless album. © 2009 John Diliberto

(June 2009) A contemplative chill in down-tempo electronica Listen to a review

Tosca No Hassle The Viennese duo called Tosca may take their name from the Puccini opera, but this plugged in pair doesn't usually have romantic intrigue and mezzo-sopranos in mind when they compose. With No Hassle, they've made an album that goes deeper than the chillout lounge. It may not make it onto the dance floor, but it will reverberate across the ballroom in your head with a sultry beckoning call and warm embrace. Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber are eclectic musicians, avant-garde bred, jazz besotted and electronically wired. Their music, going back to their 1997 debut with "Chocolate Elvis," has always mixed heady atmospheres with sly asides and No Hassle is no different. But the mood is purely seductive here on tracks like "Birthday" with Julie McCarthy intoning a poem of "heaven's embroidered cloths" and "dreams laid" at your feet while her knowing chorus moans "Get Away." Tosca eschews conventional song forms and dramatic arcs on No Hassle. Each track establishes a sonic terrain and plays around inside it. They slide some blues guitar into "Joe Si Ha," a hypnotic track that offers a midnight drive through burnt neon plains. Space age keyboards, funky guitar riffs, non sequitur spoken word fragments and jazzy grooves circulate through the CD in a grab-bag of sonic references that cohere more often than they should, like on "Rosa," which mixes more blues guitar with country acoustic reverb-drenched strumming, a swirling keyboard, and conga rhythm. The result is intoxicating, especially when the guitar hits a Hawaiian-style slide. As part of the duo Kruder & Dorfmeister, Richard Dorfmeister hit the scene with sampling electronica in 1993, about the same time as Moby. "Raymondo" recalls Moby's Play both with its moody keyboard-based atmospheres and the soulful field recording calling out a fragment over an insistent groove. The second disc is a live concert from the Ars Electronica festival in Switzerland, for which No Hassle was originally conceived. If anything, it's an even more immersive experience, with alternate mixes and piano soliloquies in a seamless performance. Tosca's No Hassle is electronica's answer to "Don't Worry, be Happy," a soundtrack to "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream." It's our Echoes CD of the Month for June. © 2009 John Diliberto

(May 2009) An ambient accomplice of Brian Eno creates pastoral music for strings Listen to a review

Leo Abrahams The Grape and the Grain Guitarist Leo Abrahams must exist in a perpetual fugue state. Upon hearing his new CD, The Grape and the Grain, you might not suspect he's been collaborating with Brian Eno for years. His Scene Memory album of abstract, electronically manipulated guitar finds few echoes here. The Unrest Cure, his previous CD of rockin' electronica vocal tunes with longtime associates like Ed Harcourt and KT Tunstall, couldn't possibly be from the same musician. Instead, The Grape and the Grain traffics in a poetic reverie harking back to the sound of his debut album, Honeytrap, a melodic trap of gorgeous, sometimes nostalgic themes. The tone is set, though hardly frozen, on the opening track, "Masquerade." A medieval lute called the bandura doubles the Renaissance melody of Abrahams's acoustic guitar, biding time until the cello and hurdy-gurdy crank in. It's the first step on a walk in the woods through classically arranged forests, Americana-dusted plains and English folk-fed streams. The sound hits the ears as unplugged, but there's lots of 50s reverb and tremolo guitar layered into the acoustic guitars, ethnic strings, and an ensemble that could have come off the corner of a Parisian café. "From Here" has an early-60s "Ebb Tide" feel while "Spring Snow" echoes the Pat Metheny Group, with Abrahams's arpeggiated guitar riff and Tim Harris's double bass. With its twangy guitar, "Ghost on Every Corner" is a pastoral riff on spaghetti western themes. Abrahams brings us back home on the album’s closer, "Daughter of Persuasion," a haunting piece that culminates in grinding hurdy-gurdy and distorted guitars over an insistent groove. It's back to the world, but the world looks better now. Like The Penguin Café Orchestra in the past or Ludovico Einaudi in the present, Leo Abrahams taps a vein in music that is ultimately more profound than its pleasant, quaint surface. He pulls off a rare feat, making music that looks wistfully to a simpler time, but is touched with a modernist’s hand. The Grape and the Grain is the perfect Echoes CD of the Month for May. © 2009 John Diliberto

(April 2009) Drummer creates other musical worlds Listen to a review

Morgan Doctor Other Life Morgan Doctor is one of those musicians who finds herself between worlds. The music on her new solo album, Other Life, is marked by imagery-laden journeys colored with Indian instruments and ambient designs. She's a world music percussionist who's just as likely to play tabla drums in a kirtan session with Durga Das as mount the stage with The Cliks, a Canadian power-punk band. On Other Life, Doctor mixes eight layered and textured instrumentals with a quartet of heartrending vocal tracks. The first is "There Were Horses," a sensual haiku with Clara Engel singing forlornly over Doctor's cyclical hang drum rhythm. It sets the introspective mood of the album, which contemplates themes of mortality through an eastern prism. "Namsam Sunrise" even uses a monk chanting at a Buddhist funeral in Korea. But while Doctor practices Yogic philosophies, her music is more progressive than meditative. Odd time signatures and expansive arrangements make her compositions cinematic in scope. It's a reflective mood but with hard charging grooves on tracks like "Silver City" and "Rebel." Benjy Wertheimer guests on tracks like "Come Smiling Back," playing the Indian violin called the esraj, bending out those melancholy, resonant-string drenched themes. Violin and cello are over-dubbed into soaring string choirs on "Silver City." That leads into one of three songs with singer/lyricist Tamara Williamson. "Show Me How" is a study in epic passion, the simplest of love songs performed with heroic shoegazer moodiness. I put it right next to Heidi Berry's "Cradle." The album winds down through more ethereal terrain, beginning with the eastern trance psychedelia of "A Moment to Go," through to the aforementioned "Namsan Sunrise" and contemplative album closer, "Better Person." Morgan Doctor’s Other Life is a CD of transcendent ecstacy and subversive melody and it's our Echoes CD of the Month for April. © 2008 John Diliberto

(March 2009) Chilled cellos and melancholy moods Listen to a review

David Darling Prayer for Compassion David Darling goes low on his new CD, Prayer for Compassion. His is not the cello of virtuoso playing and high flying pizzicato runs. He can do that, but on most of his CDs, and especially Prayer, he's going for a deeper, more introspective sound. It follows suit from his previous CDs like Eight-String Religion and Cello Blue (read a review) as he orchestrates a blissfully turned landscape, over-dubbing cello choirs, laying down reverb-drenched melodies and looping trancey rhythms. The opening "Untold Stories" sets the somnolent tone of the album with an udu-loop groove that drives into deeper layers of cello over-dubs. Prayer for Compassion can seem dark and foreboding, an endless largo toward the abyss. But deeper listening reveals a quiet joy on the title track with the Ars Nova Choir providing a soft Enya-like pad to Darling's mix of pizzicato and arco playing. Samite lays a kalimba cycle on "Beautiful Life" with Darling's trumpet-like vocalese making this one of the few tunes that might be considered light and airy. On "War is Outdated," the cellist takes a walk on the beach where the song title's protestations are belied by the breezy melody. Those are a few among some surprisingly light and playful moments on Prayer for Compassion. Darling even drops in a quote from "Oh Susannah" on "Shoe Strings."Throughout Prayer for Compassion, co-producer Mickey Houlihan judiciously deploys subtle environmental recordings that flow into the backdrops Darling lays down like seeds swirling from a tree. David Darling recorded his first solo album, Journal October in 1979. Thirty years later, Prayer for Compassion, like Darling himself, gets deeper and reveals more shadings and nuances with each listening. It's our Echoes CD of the Month for March. © 2008 John Diliberto

(February 2009) A rocking bassist takes the ambient instrumental path Listen to a review

Erik Scott Other Planets There have been a lot of virtuoso electric bass albums released over the years. Musicians like Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke tried to become gunslinging front men with an instrument that's usually holding down the bottom end of a groove. But bassist Erik Scott has taken a different approach. To say that his solo debut, Other Planets, is a bass guitar album is to miss what a powerful, cinematic release he's created. It's an album that's more Pink Floyd than Jaco Pastorius. Scott isn't a frustrated electric guitarist. He's a composer as much as a bass player who dives into the deep soul and nuances of the bass, extracting sensuous melodies and atmospheric moods.After the opening vamp tune "Bartalk," Scott untethers the bass and heads into space. The title track started life as "Sundogs" on Test Pattern, the last album from Chicago alt-rockers Sonia Dada, which whom Scott has played for nearly two decades. It's a spacious track with rolling mallet tom-tom drums underpinning Scott's rubbery fretless bass lead as synth choirs soar through the background. Although Scott plays most of the instruments, including keyboards and drum loops, he brought in some key musicians, notably, John Pirruccello on pedal-steel guitar. He adds some celestial glissandos on "Other Planets" and then brings some cosmic country to the serene "Peace on Saturn." You can hear echoes of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's sustained guitar leads in many of Pirruccello's lines. And remember, Gilmour played lap steel on Dark Side of the Moon. Erik Scott gets some driving, trancy grooves going on "Proper Sun" and he evokes Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western sound on "Donnie & Sancho." Besides Sonia Dada, Erik Scott is best known for playing with Alice Cooper in the early 1980s and Flo & Eddie (singers from The Turtles and Frank Zappa) just before that. None of that really prepares you for the sensitivity and depth of Other Planets. Erik Scott's Other Planets is a bass player's album, if your idea of a bass player's album includes haunting moods and heartbreaking melodies. It's our February CD of the Month on Echoes. © 2008 John Diliberto

(January 2009) Listen to a review

Kaya Project And So It Goes Some records simply exude joy and dispense intoxication and that's the sound of And So It Goes, by Kaya Project. The title may suggest a certain resigned attitude or an inadvertent nod to Billy Joel, yet the music is anything but, on both counts. Seb Taylor is the master mixer of Kaya Project and on their third album, he brings in many of the same ethno-electronica elements that made the first two discs so exhilarating. "Always Waiting" serves as something of an overture to the album with cross-picking guitar, Indian percussion, and tribal vocals from Irina Mikhailova, diva of the late and lamented Lumin and countless other ethno-fusions. Equally compelling is Taylor's partner, Natasha Chamberlain. She co-composed several tracks and sings in a wordless style on songs like "Obsidian Beats," where her voice is stacked in chanting choirs against Bollywood strings. Kaya Project uses voices as instrumental colors instead of lyric vehicles. Besides Chamberlain and Mikhailova, other tracks include Deeyah, who takes a Bollywood turn on several tracks and the soulful voice of Randolph Matthews. The vocals play alongside some virtuoso musicians including clarinetist Susi Evans and violinist Deepak Pandit, who can be found wailing on most of the tracks. Taylor, who started as a guitarist before he went digital, draws deeply on American blues and folk music in his playing, from the swampy reverb and tremolo intro of "Five Plus Eight" to the slide guitar that seems to slip into every setting he creates. Kaya Project's ethnic brew is all-embracing, from the bluesy "Jamming with Marco" to the ethno-techno excursion of "Obsidian Beats." That's tough to do on an album that goes from Klezmer clarinet to country picking, raga sarangi to electronica grooves. Sometimes that's all on one track, but Kaya Project make it sound like one happy global party. We take it for a spin as the first Echoes CD of the Month for 2009. © 2008 John Diliberto

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