Photo by Tom Caravaglia, from Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company's website

Last night I headed to Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea to see Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company’s Legacy Project and excerpts from ECHOES, a work in progress that weaves together Yiddish songs, text, and dance. The project celebrated Ms. Dorfman’s Eastern European-Jewish roots and closely examined themes such as community, survival, and grief. I was expecting to see a very abstract work that subtly conveyed a message about Ms. Dorfman’s heritage, but the performance had a whole storyline presented through dance, songs, images on a projection, and text. At the heart of the piece was Bente Kahan, a Norwegian-born Jewish actress and singer whose booming voice and powerful stage presence added to the dramatic quality of the evening.

In a series of duets, ensemble work, and solos, the eleven dancers fully immersed themselves in the movement and clearly portrayed a variety of emotions. Although the solos nicely conveyed isolation or pain, it seems that Ms. Dorfman excels at creating intricate and complex choreography for groups. Parts of the performance were far too literal and obvious, such as when one woman amongst a group collapses to the floor, with images of concentration camps projected on the scrim, and the others gently place her into a metal bucket and carry her away. Such scenes rely more on gesture and acting than rhythmic movement, and underestimate the audience’s imagination. Yet other sections – ones that were more abstract – beautifully captured the richness of Ms. Dorfman’s heritage. Pain and the separation of a community could be detected in the dancers’ deep contractions or when they pressed their hands over their stomachs and hung their heads low. The lighting design by Sean J. Perry often cast shadows on the backdrop, suggesting that many more people than the five or six bodies on stage were affected by the Holocaust.

The Legacy Project presented the same themes that I’ve seen in many other performances – musicals, plays, one-woman shows, dances, etc – that examine heritage, cultural roots, and particularly the Holocaust. Although my initial reaction to the piece was “been there, done that”, I realize that it’s unnecessary to demand that it bring something new to the table because a work about heritage inevitably addresses universal themes – survival, hope, and renewal, among others – to which anyone can relate. The piece clearly comes from a personal place for Ms. Dorfman, but conveys a story that is not only historically significant but also emotionally challenging and moving.

You can order tickets to tonight’s second and final performance here.  To read another review, visit Philip's blog. 

[You can also hear an Audio Version of this Blog, with Alu's music]

Ziggy Stardust came from Mars, Sun Ra came from Saturn.  Alu isn't from another planet, but sometimes she wants to be.

Alu: Ah, no, not really happy with earth, I sometimes not happy with the humans here, I think I’ve always felt like a bit of an outcast and you know, just, I think we all kind of want to go to that place where our family is, or the people who understand and support us are, and that’s kind of Mars to me.

You can hear Alu's trip to Mars on a song called "Martian Rendezvous." It's one of the quirky, atmospheric and theatrical songs from her sophomore album, Lobotomy Sessions. 

That seems like it might be an ironic punk title or the follow-up to Spinal Tap's Intravenous De Milo.  But although her song "Recluse" appears in the new Clive Barker film, The Midnight Meat Train, Alu isn't a morose Goth or raving headbanger. For the Los Angeles-raised singer, Lobotomy Sessions is more like therapy.

Alu: It is very healing for me and every, every song is very healing for me. They help me a lot.

Lobotomy Sessions doesn't remove part of Alu's head, but it does let us see the world inside it on songs like "Buzzin' in My Brain." It's a spiritual and musical descendent of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross's "Twisted," via Joni Mitchell.

Alu: Buzzin' in My Brain is kind of about my relationship with music and creation and insanity, you know, because it’s the process is kind of maddening, so it’s not directly about therapy, but it is in a way because it’s, it’s about my form of therapy which is creating.

She's a child of Hollywood animation artists and went to school at Cal Arts where she got the voice lessons that help set her apart. She's been compared to Bjork and Tori Amos, cabaret and The Addams Family. But rarely have those elements come together with the haunting, and haunted charm you hear on the three ring pyschosis of her song, "Circus Cosmos."

Alu is the latest in a string of idiosyncratic, introspective and provocative singers following in the tradition of Kate Bush. It's a tradition that includes Happy Rhodes, Tori Amos, and Bjork. On her new CD is Lobotomy Sessions, Alu creates yet another new and inventive iteration of that muse.

You can hear an extended interview with her on Echoes Monday, July 21. You can also listen to an Audio Version of this Echo Location blog with music.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Echoes listeners will hear an interview with Aes Dana and Solar Fields a.k.a. Vincent Villuis and Magnus Birgesson on Monday, July 14. They produce a brand of ambient music that has its roots in the 1970s space music made by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Jean-Michel Jarre. Unlike many artists that fit that description, Aes Dana and Solar Fields aren't making retro-space music that sounds like it could've been synthesized 30 years ago, about the time they were all toddlers. Instead, their music is suffused with contemporary electronica, laptop composing and glitch edges.

They all record for the Ultimae label, run by Villuis and his wife, Sandrine Gryson, also known as Sunny, Sunbeam and when she DJ's, Mahiane. They've got a lot of CDs out. Here's a few I'd recommend.

AES DANA
Memory Shell is the latest full-length disc from Aes Dana and it's a nonstop journey of down-tempo kinetic grooves that moves as relentlessly as a train while environmental sounds, undulating synth pads and pulsing bass-lines carry you through these imaginary landscapes.

I'd also recommend Season 5, an enveloping journey with a mix of dark, stalking rhythms that suggest danger around every corner even as they propel you towards it, and bright, major key pads and melodic shards that reveal the wonders beyond.

SOLAR FIELDS
Solar Fields can create totally free-floating ambient music as he did on Extended or head into dancey, techno terrain, which he does on Earth Shine, a new CD of pure techno trance. But he's best when he poises himself between the two poles. Solar Field's earlier music, heard on Blue Moon Station and Reflective Frequencies actually sounds like recent Ulrich Schnauss, with haunting, major key synth pads and sounds run through the electro-distortion mill. But for starters, I'd head to his most recent album, Leaving Home. Leaving Home is more melodic, less dissonant and songs like "Time Slide" are almost heroic, with organic touches like the vina and acoustic guitar.

H.U.V.A Network
This is a collaboration between Aes Dana and Solar Fields. It merges both sides of these artists with Aes Dana's laptop sound design mixed with Solar Field's more organic, hands on approach.  On their only album to date, Distances, they work, slow, ominous grooves on "Rain Geometries" and "Symmetric Lifes" and head into the electronic swamps on "Time Circles."

Fahrenheit Project
They've released 6 albums in the Fahrenheit Project series, anthologies with all original music that defines the contours of Ultimae's down-tempo ambient space approach. Part Five might be the best one to leap into with great tracks from Jaia, Cell and Carbon Based Lifeforms.

For the complete Ultimae experience, go to their website.

John Diliberto
(((echoes)))

You can also hear an Audio version of this Echo Location, with music.

If you think one acoustic guitar is good, there are some musicians who think 2, 3 or 4 is even better. The California Guitar Trio has embraced this concept. As the name suggests, there are three of them, Paul Richards, Bert Lams and Hideyo Moriya, but despite the name, none of them live in California. They're graduates of Robert Fripp's League of Crafty Guitarists and for seventeen years they've been making music that sounds like one musician, with 30 fingers. Their new album is a CD of cover tunes called Echoes.

They cover Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," Lynard Skynard's "Freebird" (probably in response to smart-assed requests from the audience), and something from a guy named Ludwig Van Beethoven.
CGT write some beautiful original tunes, but they've always done a lot of covers in their music, creating unlikely adaptations like this for their 3 guitars. They expand a little bit with a few other musicians and really stand out on remakes of Pink Floyd's "Echoes" and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells."
CGT haven't been acoustic purists for a while. They amp up their acoustics so they sound like
electrics at times and aren't wary of using some electronic processing and a few other musicians to obtain the sound they want.
Unlike the California Guitar Trio, David Pritchard actually lives in the Golden State. He started doing the multiple guitar thing just before CGT in 1990 with his album, Air Patterns. Sometimes he plays one guitar. Sometimes he plays five. He's a jazz guitarist with classical chops composing a lush minimalist music for multiple guitar players, although sometimes they are all named David Pritchard.

On the title track to his new album, Vertical Eden, he overdubs himself playing 5 acoustic guitars. But he brings in four other guitarists when he plays live. Like the California Guitar Trio, he's expanded his palette on CD with other musicians, but multiple guitars, contrapuntal arrangements and what Guitar Player magazine once called "arpeggios from hell," remain the cornerstone of his music.
You can get tangled up in strings with David Pritchard's Vertical Eden and the California Guitar Trio's Echoes.

You can also hear an Audio version of this Echo Location, soundings for new music.

John Diliberto July, 2008
(((echoes)))

Tracking...like echoes, echoes like dolphins use...dolphinese? Oh, I am getting off track aren't I? My daughter called a few minutes before I started this post. Though she could not hear the echo my entire portion of the conversation (my voice) was echoed the whole time I was on the phone. Fifteen minutes of that is enough to drive you nuts. I was using a regular old-fashioned hard-line telephone, too, so I was not pleased. I don't even have to put up with that on the cell phone. Echoes...and I jump a bit.

From echoes to Carbon Nanotube Electron Windmills CNT "wind". Just reading my mail. They say the device looks like a telescope, not the typical "windmill" one might picture. I guess it doesn't resemble a windmill cookie then either. I haven't seen a CNT windmill, but realize there has been conversation about this for a number of years. According to the article that comes up, "The devices are called windmills because they’re powered by an applied dc voltage between the electrodes, which produces a “wind” of electrons." Maybe there is hope for us yet...

Tracking...devices...dolphins...echoes...windmills...where am I going? Hmmm, I wonder how the pod of bottlenose dolphins swimming the Shrewsbury River for the past few weeks is at this point. I do a quick check and I found this link and a photo of a few members of the pod. I guess NOAA is taking good care of them. While looking for links I also found out that there is a barcode tracker called a dolphin. Hmmm. My brain says there is more for another day.

ECHOES TOP 25 FOR JUNE

1 - Biomusique - The 10000 Steps  <Listen>
2 - Jami Sieber - Unspoken  <Listen>
3 - William Ackerman - Meditations
4 - Ronn McFarlane - Indigo Road
5 - Fernwood - Almeria
6 - California Guitar Trio - Echoes
7 - Ludovico Einaudi - Divenire
8 - Niyaz - Nine Heavens
9 - Eldad Lidor - Closer
10 - Gerry O'Beirne - The Bog Bodies and Other Stories <Listen>
11 - Qntal - Translucida
12 - Ahn Trio - Lullaby For My Favorite Insomniac <Listen>
13 - Don Peyote - Peyote Dreaming
14 - Richard Bone - Short Waves
15 - Christopher Young - Sleepwalking
16 - v/a - Future Memories (v/a)
17 - Lisa Lynne & Aryeh Frankfurter - Two Worlds One
18 - Robert Rich & Ian Boddy - React
19 - The Orb - The Dream  <Listen>
 20 - Michel Banabila - Traces
21 - Bill Frisell - History Mystery
22 - Deobrat Mishra & David Michael - Himilayan Crossroad
23 - Kevin Bartlett - Glow in the Dark
24 - David Arkenstone - Echoes of Light and Shadow
25 - Rudy Perrone - The Language of Spirits

It's an album of electric slide guitar and dobro married to strings and rhythm loops that conjure up an atmosphere that's palpable. I've got another opportunity to sing his praises when he plays live on Ghost Trails & Ambient Americana, an Echoes Soundscape for July 4th.

(You can also hear an audio version of this blog, with music)

Back in February, we gathered in an expansive Hollywood Hills home with floor to 18 foot ceiling windows, an ornate fireplace and massive crystal chandelier. Mixed in with construction equipment and sawdust amidst a renovation project was a clutter of amplifiers, guitars, dobro, drums, a string quartet, a French horn player and vibraphone. It's the home of Tom Rothrock. He's the one with the dobro. It looks like an acoustic guitar except instead of a soundhole there is an ornate, acoustically driven, metal speaker.

Tom Rothrock: Hear that. That's the 1930s, this is the technology we're talking about. (Squeeky tuning pegs) These guitars were made in the big band era for soloists and they had a speaker to make them cut through and they traded the tone of a nice instrument for the projection of a metal speaker...

On an album called Resonator, Tom Rothrock projects his dobro into an Americana Electronica. Rothrock is usually found behind the boards as a producer. He cut James Blunt's multimillion selling CD, Back to Bedlam and its worldwide number one hit single, "You're Beautiful."  Before that, all he did was produce Elliott Smith and discover Beck and produce his debut, Mellow Gold. It's the sound of "Loser," that planted the seed of Tom Rothrock's CD, Resonator.

That slide guitar on "Loser?" that was Rothrock.

Tom Rothrock: ....that is a guitar that Beck had back then. It’s a Japanese kind of what we, maybe someone of the 60s someone would call a beach guitar or something . . . and that was the first time we had recorded a slide lick, I think that really, so that really sort of started it for me.

Resonator is an album raunchy slide guitar, elegant strings, bristling textures and driving rhythms that could be the soundtrack for Bladerunner in the west. Tom Rothrock continues to produce, releasing an album by Roman Carter on his own Bongload record label and producing the latest James Blunt album, All the Lost Souls. You can hear Rothrock's Electronica Americana on the album, Resonator. Right now, it's only available online from iTunes.

Tune in to Echoes on July 4th and you can hear that group gathered in Tom Rothrock's living room when they play their only live performance ever on Ghost Trails and Ambient Americana, a July Fourth Soundscape from Echoes. This has been an Echo Location, soundings for new music.
 
 And once again, you can also hear an Audio version of this blog, with music.

John Diliberto

July 2008(((echoes)))

(Hear an Audio version of this blog with music)

On a new project called Sacred Earth, pianist Peter Kater expands his reputation as one of the leading purveyors of Native American fusion. With Sacred Earth, he's created four albums from four compass points, each featuring different Native musicians including Rita Coolidge, Bill Miller and Kevin Locke. The latest and third in the series is called Wind of the East and on that CD, Kater collaborates with Cheyenne flute player Joseph Fire Crow and Paiute violinist Arvel Bird.

Wind of the East oscillates between spacious, contemplative themes like "The Greeting" to more rhythmically driven, instrumentally ornate works like "Sunrise." Echoes of Kater's Natives, his pioneering CD of duets with Native flute player R. Carlos Nakai, are heard in an intimate duet with Fire Crow on "Seeds and Ceremony." But this collaboration has more of an ensemble feel than his chamber music designs with Nakai.

Arvel Bird’s violin has a warm melodic tone and lyrical sound that whirls through Kater's arrangements. While there's little intrinsically "native" in the violin, Joseph Fire Crow is a student of traditional flute songs who nevertheless plays freely within this music, creating soulful melodies and bird-like calls. I love the way the flute and violin lines interweave. On "The Eagle's Story," Bird's short, arcing violin sounds like a call out to Fire Crow, whose flute emerges out of the violin echo at the beginning. It’s one of the more energized tunes on the album, with melodies that spin between the two native musicians and guitarist Mike Hamilton, the unsung hero of this recording. His rhythm comping and finger-picked interplay tie many of these tracks together.

Wind of the South is still waiting to waft in, but in the meantime, Wind of the East blows a gentle, intricately detailed breeze through the native landscape and it's our Echoes CD of the Month for July.

We'll be featuring it on Echoes on July 7. You can hear an audio version of this review with music here. And definitely put July 22 in your datebook. That's when we run an Echoes Living Room Concert with Sacred Earth, recorded in Peter Kater's living room.

John Diliberto

(((echoes)))

Kurt Cobain's death held meaning.

Dave Grohl now set free.

City spank Tottenham whilst I apparently purloin three more albums to commit to tape...

Pink Floyd's Meddle was the band's 1971 precursor to "Dark Side of the Moon". It includes amongst its 6 cuts the fantastic freefall 24-minute opus, "Echoes", which is an ambitious meandering testament to 'all that is prog'. 

Meddle is an album recorded so perfectly - at least to my ears - that I actually used (Side 1, Track 1) "One of These Days" as my 'hi-fi tester' for years afterwards, the cut's sonic extremes often pushing speakers to their limits, proving their worth or (more often) not.

(Sidenote:- I herein wish to unreservedly apologise to all those 'stereo salesmen' who I have inadvertently pissed off over the past 3½ decades!)

Meddle also features the track "Fearless", which sticks in most people's minds - including mine - not just for Waters & Gilmour's self composition but also for interpolating a recording of an emotional (is there another kind?) kop-full of Liverpool FC supporters singing the football 'hymn' "You'll Never Walk Alone".

Trivia freaks may care to know that "You'll Never Walk Alone", far from being a Gerry Marsden composition (as many people wrongly assume), was actually written by Rodgers & Hammerstein for the cheesy 1945 musical "Carousel"

Personally, I deem Meddle to be WAY up there with Floyd's best output and I think it has benefited over the years from not being over-exposed like DarkSOTM. (American "classic rock" radio really does have a way of overplaying such a tiny handful of songs until you are completely sick of them... I count Floyd's "Money" amongst that handful)

Voted Sounds' Best Rock album of 1972, Argus was the big one for Devon's Wishbone Ash.

The band's twin-guitar sound (guitarists Ted Turner and Andy Powell) - an idea ripped off, but not copied, from The Allman Brothers - finally paid dividends on Argus, with cuts such as "Time Was" and "Blowin' Free" ensuring the album its rightful place amongst prog rock classics.

More recently I have - for want of a better phrase - 'rediscovered' this album. I've found it to be the perfect accompaniment to my early morning walks in and around the neighbourhood we now live, it's rhythms often marrying my stride beat for beat. Now, considering I have almost 900 albums loaded on my i-Pod that's no small testimony to how well it has stood the test of time!

The band if  (they always wanted it spelled in lower case) are hardly a household name some 36-years later, but in the seventies they were the closest thing the UK had to mirroring the jazz/rock brassy rhythms US bands such as Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago were pumping out across the Atlantic.

To be fair, it was probably their very diversity that stifled them from becoming a mainstream success. They didn't exactly fit the 'prog rock' category very well - too many horns - and they were far too heavy a sound for jazz purists.

I don't know how long I kept my tape recording of if2, but I'm being honest when I say I couldn't name you one cut or recognise one track from this album if it was played to me now. However, remembering it via this diary entry has made me somewhat nostalgically curious as to what it sounded like, so I think I may have to find a preview or two online for old times sake... if only to discover if what I hear stirs up any memories.

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine.

And no-one called us to the land
And no-one knows the wheres or whys
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can

And no-one calls us to move on
And no-one forces down our eyes
And no-one speaks and no-one tries
And no-one flies around the sun

Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes
inciting and inviting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no-one sings me lullabies
And no-one makes me close my eyes
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky

Para todos esos fanaticos de los juegos, y que vibran en especial con "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes", entonces te gustara ver esta muy buena escultura de "Samus Aran's Zero Suit".

Aunque la figura original que habia mostrado F4F fue remozada, se le realizaron cambios en la cara, el traje y el cuerpo para que quedara mucho mas similar al original. Ya existe ademas una version Exclusiva (la razon de la noticia), que nos deja mas perplejos de su belleza, ya que podremos apreciarla incluso sin luz en donde se encuentre, ya que tiene un sistema de luces que sale desde la base de la figura, y que ilumina todo el simbolo.

Revisen las fotos y opinen:

Samus Aran's Zero Suit
High quality Polystone Statue
Artistas : Jiang Di.
Medidas : 9.5" Alto
Precio : US$134.99
Fecha de Lanzamiento : Segundo semestre 2008

Extra : Vista en 360º

Mantenganse Informados!!

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