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.

Krautrock Country with Immersion and SUSS: The Echoes Podcast

The Echoes CD of the Month in March is going to be Nanocluster Volume 3. by Immersion and Suss and today in the podcast, I’ve got an interview with them. Immersion is the duo of Colin Newman from the iconic new wave band Wire and Malka Spigel from the Israeli new wave band Minimal Compact. SUSS is the American Ambient Country group with guitarist Bob Holmes, guitarist Pat Irwin of The Raybeats, The B-52s and soundtracks for the last two Dexter Series among many other, and pedal steel guitarist Jonathan Gregg of Jonathan Gregg & the Lonesome Debonaires.

This unlikely pairing has produced an album that’s a true meeting of ambient, country and Krautrock aesthetics and a style I might have to dub Krautrock Country. It’s spaghetti western music in space.

Colin Newman: There is a part of Malka and I that we do love, that motoric beat. And there is definitely a side of immersion that is, you know, we are quite… Into rhythm. Into rhythm. And that is the very opposite of SUSS.

Bob Holmes: . . . my goodness, they’re going to give us a song like State of Motion that has all of this rhythm in it. What happens if we give them a track that has all this air and openness in it.

Colin Newman and Bob Holmes. I talk to all members of Suss and immersion in the Echoes Podcast.

Immersion 2024 Echoes Podcast.

Electronic Explorer Steve Roach Turns 70.

In 2019 Steve Roach was voted #2 of 30 Icons of Echoes for our 30 year anniversary. Five years later, he was still #2 for our 35th Anniversary and the 35 Icons of Echoes. For the 30th, we created a profile of Steve, and now that he is turning 70 on February 16, 2025,  I thought we’d take a look back at that feature. When we created Echoes, Steve Roach was one of the artists at the forefront of our thoughts.  In fact, he was the first artist ever heard on the show, since he composed the theme song we used in our early years. He has continued evolving his sound across that time, chronicled with a prolific outpouring of releases. And while other artists from the early years of Echoes have faded away, Steve Roach has remained vital. Hear his story from Berlin School sequencers to techno-tribal and back again, in the Echoes Podcast.

For More Steve Roach on Echoes

Amon Tobin's psychedelic Dreams: The Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast I have a lost interview when I talk to the bands Figueroa, Two Fingers and Only Child Tyrant. The only thing is, those aren’t bands, but the various recording personas of Amon Tobin, the electronic composer who is pretty eclectic under his own name. His music has evolved, but at the core, he’s still doing what he did when he started as Cujo in 1996.

Amon Tobin: I’ll take something that’s an established form, and I’ll remove it from its understood context. And I’ll put it in an electronic world and see what happens.

Tobin specializes in a modern version of musique concrete, but he also has a project as Figueroa that is purely psychedelic. So much that you might think you’ve traveled to San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium circa 1968.

We ran this interview on the Echoes broadcast in September of 2020, but for some reason, it did not make it into the Podcast. I was tipped to this when I read a nice retrospective piece in Tom Moon’s Echolocator Substack Blog. I thought, I should send Tom a link to the podcast, he’d probably enjoy it. Only to discover it never made it into the podcast. I do not know why. But today, I’m rectifying that. So get ready for a deep dive into Amon Tobin talking about his music in the Echoes Podcast.

This one is a crappy photo for the gearheads: Amon Tobin’s studio 2020

Explore the Big Ears Festival 2025 with founder Ashley Capps in Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast we preview the Big Ears Festival 2025 taking place in Knoxville at the end of March. This is an enormous event with over a hundred artists all on the leading edge of whatever music genre they are in and at Big Ears, there are a lot of music genres, all in abundance. This year features more artists from the Echoesphere than ever including Steve Roach, Michael Rother, Marissa Nadler and more. Every year I talk to Big Ears founder Ashley Capps to preview the event.  Although Big Ears is thought of as a bleeding edge festival sometimes, this year it embraces artists from the new Age including Laraaji, who has been there before, and Steve Roach who is the first true representative here of the ambient new age explosion that began around 1980.

Ashley Capps: And really, new age music isn’t an outlier. We’ve had elements of what many people would consider to be new age for many, many years, I think. So, you know, I feel like it’s an important part of these exploratory music traditions.

Ashley Capps. With artists like Roach, Explosions in the Sky, Rich Ruth, SUSS, Immersion and Anoushka Shankar, it’s almost an Echoes Festival.

We will hear the complete interview with Ashley Capps.  The Big Ears Festival takes place March 27-30 in Knoxville, TN bigearsfestival.org