Matthew Schoening leads the looping cellists to head of Echoes August Top 25
Summer closes with another strong Echoes Top 25 headed up by our August CD of the Month, Matthew Schoening’s Elements. Not far behind it is our CD of the Month from July, Carmen Rizzo’s Looking Through Leaves, something we’ll be doing in the forthcoming months. I don’t know that I detect any trends here. You’ve got your looping cellists, Schoening and Zoe Keating, your looping guitarists, Dave Preston, even your looping Chapman Stick player, Rob Martino, who played a great living room concert this past week. You have retro-space music with Arc, and contemporary space music with Carbon Based Lifeforms. Their Interloper CD is sure to be in my top ten this year. And let’s take a moment to welcome back Hiroko Okano to Echoes. The Japanese composer was a favorite in the 1990s, mixing traditional Japanese instruments with electronics in finely tuned compositions that always hung in perfect balance. His Wind Travelin’ Band collaboration with R. Carlos Nakai was one of our favorite projects of the 1990s. We haven’t heard much from him lately, but he’s been busy and he sent us a bunch of CDs a few weeks ago. My favorite has been Orbit, an album that recalls the sound of his albums on Innovative Communications. You can see the entire Echoes Top 25 for August.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))
No love for the new Lights Out Asia album “In the Days of Jupiter”? It’s an incredible album in the same vein as Radiohead’s “Kid-A”. Took me about five listens to start getting this one…really digging it now.