Ambient Chamber Music Dream Pop: Ólafur Arnalds and Loreen - The Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast, a meeting of ambient classical and pure pop when I talk with Ólafur Arnalds and Loreen. Ólafur Arnalds you know from his deeply atmospheric ambient chamber music. Loreen is a Swedish singer who is huge in Europe, where she has won the Eurovision Song Contest twice. They get together on an introspective EP  called Sages.

Ólafur Arnalds: I connected emotionally with it and her voice and her sensibilities in how she actually writes and performs her stuff. It felt very almost animalistic, spiritualistic.

Ólafur Arnalds has been a staple on Echoes since his second album, For Now I Am Winter. He’s had multiple CD of the Month albums, played live on the show three times, and been interviewed even more, for his own music and for his electronic duo with Jonas Rasmussen, Kiasmos. Ólafur is one of the leading figures in ambient chamber music. Loreen is in another world. She’s a powerhouse singer more attuned to EDM-inflected pop songs, and has a wild stage persona. She won the Eurovision Song Contest not once, but twice. But they found common ground on an EP  called Sages. I talk to them about this small, but beautiful work, and loved it even more after.

OLAFUR ARNALDS & LOREEN FEATURE PLAYLIST

Artist – Song – Album

Michael Rother, Bob Holmes & Mary Lattimore in Big Ears Session

Hear the second of John Diliberto’s two Big Ears Festival 2025 sessions in the Echoes Podcast. This one featured German guitarist Michael Rother from the influential bands Neu! and Harmonia.  He created one of the most distinct guitar sounds of the 70s and also deployed the classic motoric rhythm with Can’s Jaki Liebezeit on drums. And he’s still making great music. Joining Michael on stage are electric harpist Mary Lattimore who has several solo releases out and has collaborated with many artists including guitarist William Tyler.  Also on stage is guitarist Bob Holmes from the Ambient Country band Suss, who had a big footprint at Big Ears and was the catalyst for this panel, under the banner of his project, Across the Horizon. The title of the panel was The Third Wave of Ambient, but we quickly went off the rails as you’ll hear including a deep discussion of Spotify and AI. We’ll get a lot of history from Rother about Neu, Harmonia and Kraftwerk and a lot of insight into the creation of music.

Thanks to Big Ears Festival and Ashley Capps for use of this panel in the Echoes Podcast.

Back to the Ancient Future: The Echoes Podcast

If I wanted to play you an example of world fusion, the first group I would go to is Ancient Future. Not only are they the definition of the term, they actually coined it back in 1978.

Matthew Montfort: Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t trademark the term or anything ’cause I wanted it to become a movement. It didn’t become as much of a movement as I would like, but it did kind of happen. So I’m happy about that.

Guitarist Matthew Montfort, is a  co-founder of Ancient Future.  They were active bringing world fusion to the world from 1979 to 2001 and their 7th album, Planet Passion. After a quarter century of relative silence, they’ve returned with a new EP that is keeping the Ancient Future spirit moving forward.  Today, I’ll talk to founding members, Mathew Montfort and tabla and esraj player Benjy Wertheimer, who take us into the history of the band and their new EP. Purple Nirvana,  which features covers of Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, but not like you’d expect them to sound.  Hear it in the Echoes Podcast.

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A Journey from Space Music to Ambient & Beyond with Steve Roach in Echoes Podcast

John Diliberto – Steve Roach – Linda Kohanov at Big Ears Festival 2025

This year at the Big Ears Festival 2025, John Diliberto moderated two panels with some of the leading musicians of our time. In today’s podcast, we’ll hear his session with Steve Roach and Linda Kohanov.

Steve Roach is a seminal American ambient and electronic composer whose career spans over four decades and more than 150 releases. Coming out of Progressive Rock and bands like Yes, Roach was profoundly influenced by the deep space moods of German electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Their extended analog explorations and sequencing laid the groundwork for his own immersive, long-form compositions.

Roach released his debut album, Now, in 1982 and broke through with Structures from Silence (1984), a landmark recording that is the template for serene, contemplative music with its slowly evolving melodies and textures. He expanded the genre further with Dreamtime Return (1988), merging synthesizers with acoustic instruments and field recordings, inspired by his journey into Aboriginal culture and the Australian outback. Since then his music has traversed ambient Americana, drone zone, and sequencer-driven works. His return to analog modular synthesis created landmark albums like Skeleton Keys.

Steve Roach at Big Ears Festival in Church Street United Methodist Church

Based in the desert southwest, Roach’s music often reflects the vastness and solitude of the landscapes around him. He is catholic in his approach, embracing modular and analog synths, digital instruments, computers, and organic instrumentation including the didgeridoo and fujara, to create deeply meditative and trance-inducing sound worlds. His work continues to influence ambient, new age, and electronic artists worldwide, and he remains an active performer and recording artist from his Timehouse studio in Arizona. He performed for three consecutive nights at Big Ears Festival 2025.

Linda Kohanov is an author, speaker, and equine-facilitated learning pioneer whose work bridges the worlds of psychology, animal communication, and leadership development. She emerged in the 1990s with a background in radio and music journalism. She was program director of Echoes affiliate WUWF-FM, Pensacola and she’s written for Jazziz, Pulse, Downbeat and CD Review, among others. An equestrian, her book The Tao of Equus (2001) introduced a new paradigm of human-animal relationships, blending myth, neuroscience, and personal narrative into an exploration of the horse as teacher. The wife of Steve Roach, she has recently returned to her original passion for music. She studied classical violin and played in symphonic orchestras, and now has taken up the 5-string electric violin and begun performing with Roach.

They joined John Diliberto on-stage at Big Ears Festival on a panel called A Journey from Space Music to Ambient & Beyond with Steve Roach. We’ll hear our wide-ranging conversation.

Thanks to Big Ears Festival, founder Ashley Capps and the BE crew for setting up this session and allowing us to put it in the podcast. Watch in the next two weeks for my Big Ears session with Michael Rother, Bob Holmes and Mary Lattimore.

Electronic History - Synergy at 50: The Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast we go back 50 years to a turning point in electronic music history.  That’s when the album, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra by Synergy was released. It was a project by Larry Fast, and there were no guitars or drums on the album, just synthesizers creating epic, orchestral tracks that still resonate today. Fast worked with Peter Gabriel extensively in the 1970s and 80s and was responsible for much of the innovative sound of the singer’s seminal 3rd and 4th albums.   John Diliberto takes a trip in electronic time with Larry Fast of Synergy, as well as Marty Scott, founder of Jem and Passport Records and veteran electronic artist Jonn Serrie, on Echoes from PRX.

Days of Genius Past: Sasha's Da Vinci Genius - The Echoes Interview

In the Echoes Podcast, we take another listen to the spirit of Leonardo Da Vinci, transformed into electronic sound by DJ and producer Sasha. Da Vinci Genius is an immersive exhibit on the life of the Renaissance polymath. Sasha created a score that ranges from orchestrally cinematic to electronically grooving.  You won’t find the Renaissance music of Da Vinci’s era here.

Sasha: We did try taking kind of our modern instruments, our modern melodies and putting them onto kind of medieval instruments, but it ended up sounding like a bit of a pastiche, you know? The show itself is very technological and future-facing.

So is the music.

Sasha is a renowned DJ and record producer. He began his career in the late 1980s, playing acid house music, and rose to prominence in the 1990s through his partnership with fellow DJ John Digweed. Together, they produced influential mix albums like Renaissance: The Mix Collection and the Northern Exposure series, significantly shaping the progressive house and trance genres.  As a solo artist, Sasha has released notable albums, including Airdrawndagger and Scene Delete. He has also remixed tracks for artists such as Madonna, Moby, and The Chemical Brothers. He was voted World No. 1 DJ in 2000 by DJ Magazine and receiving a Grammy nomination for his remix of Felix da Housecat’s “Watching Cars Go By.”  He released a beautiful ambient compilation, The EmFire Collection, that included his score to the surfing movie, New Emissions of Light and Sound.

Sasha talks about sculpting a soundtrack that finds Da Vinci in the future he helped create, in the Echoes Podcast.

A Global Music Journey with Joe Boyd: The Echoes Podcast

Back n September of 2024, we brought you the broadcast version of our interview with Joe Boyd. It was was a deep, wide-ranging interview that was hard to condense into 15 minutes, so we also presented our entire conversation in the Echoes Podcast. Joe’s most recent book, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain – A Journey Through Global Music, has just been published in paperback, so we thought it would be a good time to revisit this fascinating interview in is entirety.

Just to remind you you, Joe Boyd is a legendary producer and discoverer of new music, from Pink Floyd (“Arnold Lane”), Nick Drake, Maria Muldaur, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and Muzsikás, to his Hannibal world music label, and beyond. A few years ago, he wrote a great memoir of his life in the rock and roll world, called White Bicycles. Now he’s taken a deep dive into the influence of world music on western culture. And the Roots of Rhythm Remain – A Journey Through Global Music  explores music from around the world, from Ravi Shankar, to Flamenco, from South African musicians to Paul Simon, from Desi Arnaz to Dizzy Gillespie, It’s a long, sometimes convoluted trip, all in search of an authentic music presence. We bring you our complete interview with this global traveler in the Echoes Podcast from PRX.

Peter Gregson's 21st Century Orchestra: The Echoes Podcast

Peter Gregson is a classically-trained cellist.  He’s recorded with orchestras as well as composers Max Richter and the late-Jóhann Jóhannsson. He’s also composed music for film and video games including, Ammonite. Back in 2021, We talked to him about the ambient chamber music on his recording Patina, which mixed synthesizers and electronic processing, and his cello run through a vocoder.  In 2025, he has a new recording simply titled Peter Gregson, so we return to that first interview in 2021 to hear about this fascinating artist. .

A Meeting of Electronic Generations with Ian Boddy & Harald Grosskopf in the Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast, It’s a meeting of electronic generations with Ian Boddy and Harald Grosskopf, drummer for Klaus Schulze and Ashra. Ian grew up traveling the spaceways of Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Harald Grosskopf was the drummer for Klaus Schulze and Ashra back then before turning to electronic music.

Harald Grosskopf: When I heard the first time a sequencer, I was completely out of my mind. I had goosebumps and the groove was so intense. I remember that was in the basement of the house of Klaus Schulze in the early 70s. he started the sequencer and it blew my mind.

Ian Boddy and Harald Grosskopf talk about their new album, Doppelganger and the golden age of German electronic music today on Echoes.

Mutantrumpet Creator Ben Neill Proposes an Age of Music Democratization: Echoes Podcast

If you’ve listened to Echoes over the last 30 years, you’ve heard the music of Ben Neill a lot. He plays an instrument called the mutantrumpet which has 3 trumpet bells, a trombone slide, two sets of valves and a lot of electronics. He’s been making music on the edges of electronica since his 1995 album, Green Machine. In the main part of the Echoes Podcast, I’m not going to talk to Ben about the trumpet, but about his new book, Diffusing Music – Trajectories of Sonic Democratization, Ben Neill talks about a history of opening up music to everyone, from the Futurists to Fluxus to AI. You don’t need traditional skill to make music anymore.

Ben Neill: Yeah, de-skilling and re-skilling, so that technology takes over and makes it so that a lot of the skills that were required are just not valid anymore or they’re not needed anymore.

I’ll be talking to Ben Neill about his book and as a bonus, after the regular interview, we’ll have Ben demonstrating his mutantrumpet.

Hear the Ben Neill and his mutantrumpet in a live Echoes performance here.