PRX: Echoes Interview Podcast

The Metamorphosis of Llynks in Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast, an interview with Llynks. She graduated from the Berklee School of Music, tried working as a model, started a music career with her birth name, Sara Kendall, then metamorphosed into Llynks, a dark, soul-revealing electronic pop project. She’s just released her debut album, Become the Root. Kendall talks about modeling, depression, uncertainty and crafting an electronic sound of cyberpunk sonority.

Echoes Podcast: The Moby Interview

Moby talks about his presciently timely new album, All Visible Objects. Written mostly in 2019, its themes of revolution, isolation and contemplation seem to fit right in with these pandemic and protesting times. All Visible Objects harkens back to his dance and DJ days in the 1990s and also goes in more introspective, forlorn directions.

Hear Moby’s 2016 Echoes Interview

Get Moby’s two memoirs  Porcelain: A Memoir and Then It All Fell Apart 

Four Albums from The Best of Echoes 2020, So Far by Austra, YPPAH, Grimes and Darshan Ambient

This past week we released The Best of Echoes So Far list, pausing at the midway point of an insane year to contemplate some of the music that has come out in the first six months. We picked 25 of our favorite albums. On this week’s Echoes Podcast, I want to pull out a few releases on the list and talk about them. I’ll take us in Hirudin by Austra, Sunset in the Deep End by YPPAH,  Miss Anthropocene by Grimes and A Day Like Any Other by Darshan Ambient.  See the complete The Best of Echoes So Far right here.

Tangerine Dream-50 Years of Electronic Meditations: The Echoes Documentary

50 years ago Tangerine Dream began recording their electronic music in what was then West Berlin.  Founded by Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream has epitomized the electronic age of music, recording over 150 albums of synthesized compositions.  Their film soundtracks include “Sorcerer” “Thief,” “Risky Business,” and “Legend.” Tangerine Dream founder and last original member, Edgar Froese left the planet in 2015, but the group continues on with music he composed. In the Echoes Podcast, we draw upon over a dozen interviews with the Dream members past and present including Froese, Peter Baumann, Christoph Franke, Klaus Schulze, Thorsten Quaeschning and Ulrich Schnauss as well as comments from Moby, Steve Reich, Steve Roach, Robert Rich and Ian Boddy to celebrate 50 years since the release of their debut album, Electronic Meditation.

And for you deep space divers there is In Search Of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973-1979 an 18-disc and book set,.that includes every album from Phaedra through to Force Majeure, with the complete albums, outtakes, live recordings, including entire concerts and some recordings that never came out like “Oedipus Tyrannus.” 

See John Diliberto’s updated Ten Tangerine Dream Albums to Blow Your Mind 2020

Taimane's Ukulele Fury in Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast, it’s a new generation of Ukulele player when we talk with Taimane. She’s a Hawaiian musician who studied with Jake Shimabukuro and is creating her own ukulele fusion that takes the instrument out of the luau and into the world on albums like Elemental and We Are Made of Stars..

Taimane: I grew up living in Hawaii and that’s all that I would ever hear, it was Hawaiian music.  And so I kind of grew numb to it, honestly.  And that’s kind of why I started exploring other types of music.

We hear from Taimane as well as Jake Shimabukuro in the Echoes Podcast.

Hear Taimane playing live on Echoes right here.

Emancipator's Electronic Folk and Jade Warrior-World Fusion Innovators in Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast Emancipator and Jade Warrior

Emancipator is an electronic musician who mixes synthesizers, sampled sounds and folk instruments into a hallucinatory sound. John Diliberto talks to Emancipator’s Douglas Appling about his father who made dulcimers and spun Orbital and how that shaped his unique sound which includes banjos and violin. His latest album is Mountain of Memory.

Then we go back to a seminal progressive rock group, Jade Warrior.

John Diliberto has recently been doing on of those list your 20 Most Influential albums, one each day, on Facebook things  His third selection was actually a quartet of albums by Jade Warrior which got a lot of response and prompted us to go back to a feature on this under-recognized band.

Before Peter Gabriel moved from drum machines to Senegalese drummers, and when Andreas Vollenweider was still doing music for poetry readings, Jade Warrior was orchestrating a world fusion built up from a host of exotic instruments and a frightening amount of overdubs.  Initially a power trio with arty pretensions, guitarist Tony Duhig and flutist/percussionist Jon Field reinvented themselves in 1974 with the first of a quartet of albums for island records: Floating World, Waves, Kites and Way of The Sun. Back in 1985 we talked to Jade Warrior for the radio series, Totally Wired and it remains one of our favorite and most memorable interviews.  Tony Duhig died five years later in 1990 and despite a few attempts by Field to keep the name going, Jade Warrior effectively stopped, gone and nearly forgotten. That is just wrong.  Find out why in our sound portrait in the Echoes Podcast.   

Michael Whalen's Syntheszier Fantasy: The Echoes Podcast Interview

Read John DIliberto’s CD of the Month Review of Michael Whalen’s Sacred Spaces.

Echoes Podcast: Kevin Braheny Fortune Talks to the Spirits

In the Echoes Podcast it’s the return of a New Age pioneer when we talk with Kevin Braheny Fortune. He went 22 years without a new album, but now he has four releases of ambient music including his Dreamwalker Meditation Music trilogy. In the 1980s his name was mentioned alongside Steve Roach, Robert Rich, Michael Stearns and Richard Burmer and his albums, The Way Home and Lullaby for the Hearts of Space are considered classics.  He’s a musician who is as comfortable soldering diodes into circuit boards as he is communing with spirit guides. He disappeared for about 20 years, during which he worked as a sex therapist. He talks about his name change, spirit guides, sex therapy, years of silence and his new music. That photo, by the way, is his Mighty Serge Syntheszier.

Air's Nicolas Godin and Naneum in Echoes Podcast

The French Band AIR was one of the seminal electronic pop groups of the 1990s and oughts. They’ve gone dormant, but founding member Nicolas Godin has a new solo album out, Concrete and Glass, that began as an architectural art project.  john Diliberto Talks to Godin while in quarantine in his home in Paris and goes over the blueprints  in the Echoes Podcast.

Then we’ll explore the ambient chamber music of Naneum. On his album, Life Cycle he recorded a local choir singing their traditional music but then sliced it up into his own arrangements. He’s also in the creaky piano zone with a new solo piano album, Narrative. Naneum’s Jon Solo talks about going from Angus and Julia Stone and Brett Dennen to ambient chamber music tonight on Echoes.

Catch Naneum’s Live Echoes Session

Poliça and Nicholas Gunn in Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast we talk to singer Channy Leaneagh of Poliça and electronic musician Nicholas Gunn.

Channy Leaneagh fell off a roof and broke her back, but that didn’t stop her from recording a great album with her group, Poliça . John Diliberto talks to Poliça’s Channy Leaneagh about her existential songs on the album, When We Stay Alive. You’ll also hear what its like to do an interview while a young child runs amok in the house during Corona Quarantine.

Then we’ll hear from Nicholas Gunn. He got bullied as a young flute player, but that’s not why he put down his instrument in favor of electronics. His last few albums, including Riding the Thermals and Pacific Blue, have had no flute at all, but a lot of downtempo moods and grooves and some vocals. With Pacific Blue just out, we return to an earlier interview with Gunn who talks about his electronic transformation.