Interview Podcast – Echoes

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

Klaus Schulze-An Icon of Electronic Music in Echoes Podcast

The 50th Anniversary of Timewind, the 1975 album by Klaus Schulze is coming up on August 25. In the Echoes Podcast hear a documentary on this legendary artist who helped launch a new genre not just in electronic music, but music period.

Klaus is one of the Icons of Echoes. He sadly left the planet in 2022.   Before Techno, Electronica, Synth-pop and Ambient music; before synthesizers were as commonplace as electric guitars, Klaus Schulze was creating a music unlike any that had been heard before. Over the course of six decades, he made over 50 proper albums, solo recordings with evocative Titles like Moondawn, Mirage, Timewind and Cyborg. There’s also been several collaborations and a trove of multi-CD box sets. These albums have influenced multiple generations beginning with artists like Steve Roach, Ian Boddy, and Mark Shreeve in the early 80s, then Moby in the late-80s and TV composers in the new millennium like Brian Reitzell of Mr. Robot and Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of Stranger Things. In fact, whenever I play Klaus in the house my kids ask me if it’s the soundtrack to Stranger Things. He even influenced Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance who collaborated with Schulze on a pair of albums. Klaus left the planet in 202.  We had two extensive interviews with Klaus in the 1980s and we’ve talked to many people in his orbit and those he influenced. We’ll hear them in a documentary that goes from Tangerine Dream to Trancefer,” Cosmic Couriers to truly cosmic music.  It’s an Echoes Podcast that takes you to another time pointing toward the future.

Echoes Podcast: Electric Chamber Music on Edge with AVAWAVES

In the Echoes Podcast, AVAWAVES talk about their new album, Heartbeat. AVAWAVES is the British electric chamber music duo of violinist Anna Phoebe and keyboardist Aisling Brouwer. Their fusion of electronic and music and compositional verve can be heard on their soundtrack to Apple TV series, The Buccaneers and their new album, Heartbeat. All three of their recordings have been linked to tumultuous times: Brexit, Covid Lockdown and now, political, social and global uncertainty. They aren’t ready to make nice.

Anna Phoebe: “And at the moment . . . the wars and what’s going on. You can’t not be affected by that. And I think making nice music with violin and piano is good for the soul sometimes, but then there is a little bit more rawness and it feels like this now is not the time to hide behind the sheen of lots of reverb.”

Join John Diliberto when he talks to AVAWAVES in the Echoes Podcast from PRX.

Trauma, Medicine, Pain and Beauty with Jessica Robbins of Course: The Echoes Podcast

John Diliberto and Course’s Jessica Robbins

In the Echoes Podcast, Ankylosing Spondylitis, a spinal disease causing immense pain. But Jessica Robbins, who records as Course, creates some beautiful music out of that pain on her album, Hue Mirror.  It’s an exploration of her years-long journey to find a diagnosis, a treatment and relief, if not a full cure. Medical travails have rarely sounded so haunting and beautiful.

Jess Robbins: I didn’t want to dwell on the pain, even though it’s in there. I didn’t want to be so on the nose with all the songs, besides MRI.

Join John Diliberto when he brings us the fascinating story of Jessica Robbins and Course, on Echoes from PRX. You can purchase her album exclusively from the Spondylitis Association of America              

Anoushka Shankar's Sitar Evolution: The Echoes Podcast

Anoushka Shankar has released an impressive trilogy of EPs in the last year that take her sitar in different directions. Chapter I: Forever For Now; Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before the Dawn; and Chapter III: We Return to Light, find Shankar in 3 different settings: World Fusion, Ambient and Improvisation. She also has three different producers including Pakistani-American singer and producer, Arooj Aftab. Over the last 2 decades or so Anoushka has found her own path in the music world that draws on the traditions her father, sitarist Ravi Shankar taught as well as his sense of experimentation. She’s taking the sitar in such new directions that sometimes you don’t know it’s a sitar at all.

Anouska Shankar: So suddenly I could play one note and have it ring for 50 seconds and then become more orchestral than I usually am as a lead instrument, because I can layer these long, long 50 second reverb notes and think in that way where I’m creating a bed of sound.

Anoushka Shankar. She could’ve just been a classical Indian sitarist, but she was brought up on pop and EDM music as well as Indian classical. She talks about it with John Diliberto in the Echoes Podcast.

Fear, Loss and Sticking the Landing; Marconi Union: The Echoes Interview

In the Echoes podcast, Marconi Union talk about their CD of the Month, The Fear of Never Landing.  The British electronic band has been providing ambient atmospheres and deep groove on the show for 20 years and they are still creating with their latest album, The Fear of Never Landing, Echoes June CD of the Month. After losing a founding member, Jamie Crossley and Duncan Meadows have continued on with a new, refreshed sound for this ensemble. It’s not music for Tik Tok.

Jamie Crossley: It’s not youth music is, it’s not for teenagers probably. That’s not to say that teenagers shouldn’t listen to it, but it’s  probably more on the kind of demographic of where we are, where we are at ourselves.

John Diliberto is no kid. He talks to Jamie Crossley and Duncan Meadows about Marconi Union Mark 3.0 in the Echoes Podcast from PRX.

Read John’s review of The Fear of Never Landing

The Hedonistic Hit Factory: Buzz Me In - Inside the Record Plant Studios with David Goggin and Martin Porter in Echoes Podcast.

John Diliberto, David “Mr Bonzai” Goggin, Martin Porter

I’ve got something different for you in this weeks Echoes Podcast. I’m going to talk with Martin Porter and David Goggin about their new book, Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios.  They look at the history of the Record Plant studios in New York, LA, and Sausalito, where many of the biggest records of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s were made. Think Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland, Aerosmith “Walk This Way” and The Eagles Hotel California, as well as records from Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith and oh yeah, John Lennon, who recorded most of his solo albums there including the last one. Martin Porter and David Goggin talked to dozens of people who worked there, from secretaries to engineers to producers, and they have all the drug-fueled, sex and crazed producer stories, as well as the tales behind classic tracks and albums.

David Goggin: We just got in touch with Ed Freeman because he helped us out on the book a lot. He produced American Pie and all. He describes when he was working at Sausalito, there was a guy who would come in every morning with a briefcase with your choice of whatever you wanted. Ed asked this mysterious guy, “what do you have?” And he says, “Well, what do you want?” And opened up the briefcase and there was every variety of pot, of uppers and downers, whatever you were looking at. It was like a little inventory case.

David Goggin and Martin Porter talk to me about The Record Plant studios which were founded by businessman Chris Stone and engineer, Gary Kellgren, who turned it into the most hedonistic hit machine of the era. The stories they could tell. And they will.

Tape Loops and Life Loops-Terry Riley turns 90

Terry Riley, along with Philip Glass and Steve Reich, is among the holy trinity of minimalism. His compositions In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air are seminal works of that genre. He was creating tape loops works in the early 1960s, laying the foundation for over 50 years of looping artists. Without Terry Riley, there are no Fripp & Eno albums, ambient music or the legions of looping musicians around today. He was a seminal influence on Eno, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream, Robert Rich and many others. It was a sound that emerged from the 60s counter culture and mind expansion.

Terry Riley: I think that echo and all these devices which change the ambience of music are drug-like in the sense that they pull the listener in deeper than he would get otherwise.  I mean it goes back to if you’ve ever sung in a cave or gotten in the Taj Mahal and whooped and hollered. I mean those experiences are very deep and moving.

He has continued composing and performing, notably working with Kronos Quartet on several collaborations. We celebrate the incredible, enduring legacy of this new music icon as he turns 90. In the Echoes Podcast we have a mini-documentary featuring interviews with Terry, Steve Reich, Robert Rich, Daevid Allen (Gong), Mike Oldfield, Jon Hassell and La Monte Young. Terry Riley turns 90 and John Diliberto celebrates enduring and continuing legacy of his music in the Echoes Podcast.