Despite titles like “Alpha Centauri” and “Fly and Collision of Comas Sola,” in spite of covers that seemed blown out of distant nebulae and regardless of music that, well, just listen to it, Edgar Froese always claimed that Tangerine Dream didn’t make space music. Robert Schröder‘s Galaxie Cygnus-A, however, is a space music album in…
Category: Reviews & Commentary
Reviews & Commentary
Twilight of a Titan: Ravi Shankar Plays Kimmel Center at 88
I don’t know how many giants of music were still mounting the concert stage at 88 years of age, but Ravi Shankar did once again last night at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. Performing with his daughter, Anoushka, who is substantially younger than 88 at 27 years old, Shankar once again enthralled the audience, taking…
Reviews & Commentary
The Real Story behind Vangelis
From the Vangelis list, I came across an alternative history of the Greek composer who scored Chariots of Fire and Bladerunner. It’s in the Uncyclopedia. I’m probably the last person on the planet to discover this take-off site on Wikipedia. The Vangelis entry scores a direct hit on the enigmatic composer who is praised as…
Reviews & Commentary
Brian Eno’s iPhone Music
Ever an artist on the bleeding edge, Brian Eno, along with collaborator Peter Chilvers has created a music making program for the iPhone. It’s called Bloom. Bloom runs in two different modes: Listen, which plays an interactive generative composition, and Create, in which you create each note that plays in real time. Each tap of…
Reviews & Commentary
Echo Location: Sumner McKane’s Ambient Americana
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http://media.blubrry.com/echoespodcast/www.xpn.org/podcasts/echoes/echoes20081001.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSSIt’s been several years now that guitarist Sumner McKane has been releasing albums of evocative soundscapes dipped in Americana as cinematic as a John Ford western and as nuanced as Andrew Wyeth painting. But this isn’t pastoral nostalgia. His landscapes are tinged in ambient atmospheres and pulled by…
Reviews & Commentary
Music from the Hearts of Space makes 25th orbit around the sun
Hearts of Space Turns 25.Music from the Hearts of Space is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. They launched their nationally distributed show in 1983 although it originated 10 years earlier from the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California. To commemorate the anniversary, they’ve put out a CD with the music from their initial syndicated…
Reviews & Commentary
Echo Location: Solas and the Celtic Tradition
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http://media.blubrry.com/echoespodcast/www.xpn.org/podcasts/echoes/echoes20080924.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSSCeltic veterans Solas find new dimensions in a traditional sound when they play live on Echoes. You can hear an Audio Version of this blog with music. The Celtic boom of the Riverdance days are long over, leaving only the fructose sweetened foam of marketing campaigns like Celtic…
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Echo Location: Ludovico Einaudi’s Ambient Chamber Music
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http://media.blubrry.com/echoespodcast/www.xpn.org/podcasts/echoes/echoes20080917.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSSLudovico 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.…
Reviews & Commentary
The Ping of Echoes Passes: Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright Dies
Echoes the radio show owes its name to Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” and that song’s signature sound was the opening sonar pings of Floyd keyboardist, Richard Wright. He died today, September 15 at the age of 65, reportedly after a losing bout with cancer. The BBC has one of the earliest obituaries. Wright was an original…
Reviews & Commentary
The Nerve-Music & the Mind
On Echoes, I’ve frequently sought the answer to the big question, Why? Not the “Why do we exist?” question, but the “Why do we like the music we do? Why do we respond to it the way we do? Why do some people love crappy music and why doesn’t everyone like Echoes music, which of…