A Blitz of Sounds from the Edge - Big Ears Festival 2026: the Echoes Interview with Ashley Capps

In the Echoes Podcast it’s our annual interview with Ashley Capps, the founder of Big Ears Festival. He also created Bonaroo and resurrected Moogfest. We cover Big Ears because they often have a lot of Echoes artists and they are just the best, most civilized and most surprising festival in America.

Ashley: what we’re trying to avoid is the bland and the innocuous, know, are just things that, know, you know, just nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, you know. That doesn’t really interest me.

Big Ears is anything but bland. It will take place in Knoxville, TN March 26-29, 2026. There will be over 200 acts including Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, SUSS, Pat Metheny, multiples of John Zorn, Hania Rani, Nik Bartsch’s Ronin and Nels Cline. The first hour of Echoes will be all music from the forthcoming Big Ears Festival 2026 and our interview with Ashley Capps who talks about putting the festival together. Ears are wide open on Echoes.

Head into Deepspace with Deepspace: The Echoes Podcast

When you name yourself deepspace you better live up to it. Mirko Ruckels, who is deepspace, has been doing that since 2007. His album, Neon Blue Utopia was a CD of the Month this past January and he has a new one called Water Planets. You might tell from those titles that Ruckels is influenced by science fiction.

Mirko Ruckels: “I’ve always loved science fiction and I’ve always loved, I’ve always been searching for that perfect kind of ambient science fiction scenario, you know, you know, exploring, exploring a planet by yourself, it speaks to that inner world.”

We talk to deepspace’s Mirko Ruckels about autism, Water Planets and of course, deepspace, on Echoes.

Read our review of Neon Blue Utopia, deepspace’s January 2025 Echoes CD of the Month

Hania Rani Storms the World: The Echoes Podcast

Polish composer and pianist Hania Rani has been quickly rising to the surface in a see of ambient chamber music and neo-classical composers going mellow. But her new album breaks from that movement even though she initially saw as rebellious to her own classical background.

Hania Rani This music was so simple and but also different and also intriguing from different reasons that I wanted to try it out myself. very soon after I understood it’s a little bit not boring, but a little bit, again, limited. And I really like to feel free in music.

The album is a tribute to Polish composer Josima Feldshuh, who died at 13 during the holocaust.  It’s also evoking the current political and global climate. Hania Rani sets herself free when we talk to her about Non-Fiction, Piano Concerto in Four Movements on Echoes.

Mike Oldfield's Ommadawn at 50: The Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast,Tubular Bells’ composer Mike Oldfield talks about Ommadawn, his two-sided epic from 1975. Mike Oldfield changed the world of progressive rock and instrumental music with his 1973 opus, Tubular Bells. But two years later he released this third album that many consider to be his masterpiece. It was released 50 years ago on September 25 or November 7. There’s a little dispute there. Today we revisit this epic work and our interview with Mike talking about an album that was inspired by his mother, who died during the recording, but left him her Irish heritage.

Mike Oldfield: I listened to music, Irish music, and there’s something in your blood.  It really is, if I hear something Celtic, something, my ears perk up and just, I identify with it. So it’s always been part of me.

We talked to Oldfield in 2017 about his album, Return to Ommadawn and of course, we talked a lot about the original Ommadawn recording. We’ll return to that interview and we’ll also hear both parts of Ommadawn on its 50th Anniversary in the Echoes Podcast.

Azam Ali's Synesthesia Therapy: The Echoes Podcast

Singer Azam Ali from Vas, and Niyaz graces the Echoes Podcast. The voice of Azam has been part of the Echoes soundscape for 3 decades. Her Persian fusion groups, Vas and Niyaz, were seminal acts and her solo albums have included chants of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, and hymns of Sephardic Jews sung in Ladino, to the electronic-driven sounds of her 2019 album, Phantoms. But after that release and the pandemic, she fell into depression and was thinking of leaving music.

Azam Ali: The music industry has just become a place that I didn’t relate to anymore and couldn’t find my place in this new world of becoming what I describe as an Instagram artist. I’m not an Instagram artist.

Definitely not. She has a brilliant new album, working out these themes called Synesthesia and we talk to her in an extended version of our broadcast feature in the Echoes Podcast.

The Echoes Podcast: Bluetech Takes Us to the Spacehop

Bluetech’s album, Spacehop Chronicles 2 is the Echoes CD of the Month for October and in the Echoes Podcast, we have Bluetech himself, Evan Bartholomew, talking about this electronic journey into orbit that sits between space music and trip-hop, all meditating on the journey of Laika, the canine cosmonaut that died in space.

Bluetech: For me, creating hope and the possibility of beauty and talking about fantastic sci-fi worlds and giving people a moment to escape and to feel larger than their lives is my approach and the only thing that I know how to do in response to chaos and what’s kind of going on around us.

In our review, we called Spacehop Chronicles 2 “definitive head-trip music for the 21st century.”  Bluetech takes us on a trip when we talk to him tonight on Echoes from PRX.

Read our review of Spacehop Chronicles 2

Echoes Podcast: Marissa Nadler Attains Escape Velocity

September’s CD of the Month was New Radiations by Marissa Nadler and in the Echoes Podcast we’ve got her talking about this album which is one of her most personal releases.

Marissa Nadler: The whole record is really a heartbreak record. It kind of examines both sides through distance and time. And so New Radiations is really moving on in my head completely into a new world.

Marissa Nadler is not your typical singer-songwriter. Yes, she sings and plays guitar, and that has been the central voice of her music since she began recording in 2004. But she’s darker. Her voice is bathed in reverb, as is her guitar, which she plays fingerstyle, sending symmetries of delay into even more reverb. There’s a reason I’ve dubbed her The Diva of the Downer. That’s not an insult. She exults in reveries from the darker corners of the mind and seems to sing them from the pillow right next to you. We hear her talk about it on Echoes.

Read our review of New Radiations

Echoes Podcast: 40 Years of Ancient Dreams with Patrick O'Hearn - The Echoes Interview

We celebrate the 40th anniversary of Patrick O’Hearn’s debut album, Ancient Dreams. Patrick O’Hearn has been one of the defining voices of modern electronic music. Until the rise of Yanni, he was one of the signature artists of the Private Music label. Since his debut album, Ancient Dreams in 1985, he’s continued releasing finely crafted, deeply textured music on CDs like El Dorado and So Flows the Current. There’s a depth to Patrick O’Hearn’s music that comes from a wide range of experience, from straight ahead jazz with Charles Lloyd to MTV pop with Missing Persons; from sarcastic rock and roll with Frank Zappa to ethereal ambient music on his own. The fact that he’s a fine bassist as well as keyboardist has always given O’Hearn’s music a darker, soulful edge. Patrick is one of the 35 Icons of Echoes, and 50 years later, his first album still sounds as seductive and timeless as his latest, which sadly is from 2011. O’Hearn has been keeping a low profile for most of this century. Of his 13 proper solo albums, there is not a dud in the batch. Not even close. This signature release, Ancient Dramswas a road map of mood and mystery and set the tone for the Private Music label. We’ll hear music from this classic album and an interview with Patrick.  Join John Diliberto for an ancient dream made 40 years ago.

See our list of Five Essential Patrick O’Hearn Albums.

Mixing It Up with Master Dub Mixer - Adrian Sherwood: The Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast, a legend of dub on the next Echoes when we talk to producer Adrian Sherwood. Sherwood is a Dub Master. The English musician has been manipulating sound for over 5 decades, working with masters of the Jamaican dub style like Lee “Scratch” Perry, and creating his own music in projects that include African Head Charge, Tackhead, Dub Syndicate, Creation Rebel and many more. Although he’s recorded hundreds of records, he’s only released four albums under his own name. His latest is The Collapse of Everything. Never has the apocalypse sounded so trippy. John Diliberto mixes it up with Adrian Sherwood in the Echoes Podcast from PRX.   

Nicholas Gunn Goes Trance: The Echoes Interview

Our August CD of the Month was the album, 30 by Nicholas Gunn. In the Echoes Podcast, I’ve got him talking about it. Nick has been a part of Echoes since his self-released debut album, Afternoon in Sedona in 1993, but around 2012, he changed, giving his flute a rest and plugged into software synths and computer generated music for the dance floor.

Nicholas Gunn: In the early 2000s, I was going to the clubs and I was standing in the floor and I was listening to this new thing called Trance. Paul Oakenfold’s “Southern Sun,” Armin Van Buren’s “Rain,” and I was thinking to myself at that time, I should be doing this kind of music.

I’ll be talking to him about 30 , an album on which after nearly a decade, his flute returns. Hear it in the Echoes Podcast from PRX

Read John Diliberto’s review of 30