I know all of you were tuned into the Teen Choice Awards recently so you might have caught this already, but in case you’er like most people over 15, you probably missed it. In researching some of the claims made by John Foxx in his recent Echoes interview, I stumbled across a myspace site that…
Category: Reviews & Commentary
Reviews & Commentary
Loreena McKennitt Returns
It’s been nearly a decade since Loreena McKennitt’s last studio album, The Book of Secrets. But after some personal travails, including the death of her fiancé, she has returned with an album that picks up where Secrets left off. On An Ancient Muse, McKennitt is still mining middle eastern themes and creating exotic stories of…
Reviews & Commentary
John Foxx Today and a Quarter Century Back: Still Totally Wired After All These Years
Next week we’ll be running two features on John Foxx. He’s not a mainstream Echoes, artist, but he’s a musician whom I’ve admired for nearly 30 years now. We almost never do two part features, but John just has too many good things to say and I also wanted to give a retrospective profile and…
Reviews & Commentary
885 All Time Greatest Artists: From Eno to Shankar
How do you vote for the Ten Greatest Artists of all Time? Not just rock artists or contemporary artists or electronic artists, but ALL artists from ALL time. That’s the proposition put forward by Echoes affiliate WXPN in Philadelphia. Their frequency is 88.5 so they’ve been doing the 885 greatest, best, whatever over the last…
Reviews & Commentary
Arthur Lee Leaves the Planet to Find Love
Arthur Lee is the latest musician to leave the planet. The founder of the 60s psychedelic band, Love, died on August 3 of leukemia. His was 61. Lee wrote some great tunes, and played a mean guitar. Even Hendrix liked him and they played together on one song, “The Everlasting First.” Reportedly an eccentric and…
Reviews & Commentary
Farewell CD? Leo Abrahams & Patrick O’Hearn Join the On-Line Only Movement
The change is slowly, but surely happening. Music is moving off of physical mediums like the CD and into exclusive, on-line distribution. Yes, we all know about iTunes, Rhapsody etc. But artists are beginning to move into an exclusive on-line mode. Often this is simply a marketing and promotion move with big acts like those…
Reviews & Commentary
Whither Virtuosity? Can George Winston Boogie?
I was recently on an arts panel judging musical acts that ranged from one of the best-known orchestras in the world to a protest folksinger and all points in between. I can’t mention the names because the process is still in progress. On the panel were classical musicians, scholars and academics, one world music expert,…
Reviews & Commentary
WEATHER SUCKS, BUT THE SUN IS OUT AND ALL IS GOOD!
I know it’s not a Katrina hurricane or San Francisco earthquake, but the weather we’ve been getting in the Philadelphia area this summer simply blows. We got flooded out two weeks ago with torrential downpours that caused us to lose power twice. The aforementioned hurricane-force storm that whipped through caused us to lose power again…
Reviews & Commentary
Echoes is Turned Off
Don’t panic! Echoes is still here, but for the third time in two weeks our power has gone out. A vicious storm with hurricane strength winds whipped through our area Tuesday night (July 18) and took out power lines across several counties, putting 500,000 homes in the dark, including Echoes. Jeff Towne was mixing out…
Reviews & Commentary
Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett Leaves the Planet
Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett leaves the planet although some would say he was never quite on it. He died this past weekend on July 7, of that most earthly disease, cancer. Syd Barrett was a founding member of Pink Floyd and the principal architect of it’s early sound on the album, Piper at the Gates…