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Thursday, Oct 22, 2026 – Echoes Program 2642D

John Diliberto, Michael Stearns and Robert Rich

Today, two electronic musicians who were part of the original 1980s California new age and space music scenes. Michael Stearns and Robert Rich are icons of electronic music and have recorded their first album ever together, Reunion of Breath and Waves. And they did it in person face to face, synth to synth.

Robert Rich: I’ve been using a term for twenty-five plus years now that I refer to as embodiment, which, having lived my life in Silicon Valley until recently, getting extremely tired of the push towards virtualization going on in technology and feeling that to push back, one needs to find a language of physicality, of non-virtual non-virtuality. I think many of the problems that we’re entering into in our civilization has to do with  a denunciation of physicality, a denunciation of our animal nature.

We hear some deep musical explorations when John Diliberto talks with Michael Stearns and Robert Rich. Michaels Stearns recordings like Planetary Unfolding, Chronos and Baraka are albums that influenced a generation. Robert Rich has a charted a singular course through electronic music traverses abstract realms, world fusion and electronic dreams from his breakthrough release, Rainforest through his seven-hour album inspired by his sleep concerts, Somnium to his recent CD of the Month, Travelers’ Cloth. Even though they travel in the same music circles and have known each other for 40 years, they’ve never recorded together until now and the results are a spectacular album, Reunion of Breath and Waves.

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Friday, October 23, 2026 – Echoes Program 2642E

On a Slow Flow Echoes, we go ambient country. One selection is from guitarist Carl Weingarten’s  album Stop Me Try. The other is from The Royal Arctic Institute, who twang in ambience on From Catnap To Coma. Stay awake on a Slow Flow Echoes.

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Monday, Oct 26, 2026 – Program 2643A

Agnes Obel sings songs that seem to have emerged from the forgotten chambers of an ancient church. The voices are mysterious, the words not always intelligible, and the weight of years seems to rise from them. That’s the sound of Obel’s first album in six years, The Meaning of Flowers. That might make it sound forbidding, but it’s beautifully composed music, with melodies that linger in your memory long after they’ve faded away.

Obel’s previous album, Myopia, was released in 2020. So it’s hardly surprising that the pandemic became part of the story behind this recording. She began making an album about technology, but along the way, something changed.

Agnes Obel: And then I discovered I was pregnant in, I think it was June 2020. And I immediately felt like I had to sort of document just what was happening in my mind. Musically, that’s the best way I know how to sort of journal things in a way.

We talk to Agnes Obel on Echoes.

Read our review of Agnes Obel’s The Meaning of Flowers
Read our review of Agnes Obel’s Myopia