Echoes Radio

2 weeks ago | echoes.org | John Diliberto

by John Diliberto 4/4/2025My journey to Big Ears Festival was unlike any of the other five I’ve attended in the last decade. It was the most Echoes-centric festival ever with Steve Roach, SUSS and Immersion, Explosions in the Sky, Laraaji, Flore Laurentiene, William Tyler, Mary Lattimore, Anoushka Shankar, Julia Holter and more performing. EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKYLet’s begin at the end. The last performance of the festival was the one that left me wanting more.

3 weeks ago | echoes.org | John Diliberto

by John Diliberto03-30-2025Major labels have jumped full bore into the ambient chamber music frontier although they may market it as neo-classical, new classical or post-classical. Artists like Max Richter, Olafur Arnalds and Peter Gregson have found homes at Sony, Decca and other label imprints. While critics have extolled this music, I rarely see Ludovico Einaudi mentioned in this context.

1 month ago | echoes.org | John Diliberto

by John Diliberto 3/26/2025The sold out Big Ears Festival 2025 takes place this weekend March 27-March 30 in Knoxville Tennessee and it is always a cornucopia spiral wrapped in electronic wires, overflowing with folk strings and free jazz horns. And that’s before you pour it out and find more. This year in particular is a feast of ambient, electronic and post-rock sounds, including Tortoise, Explosions in the Sky, Immersion, SUSS, Michael Rother, Anoushka Shankar, and topping it all, Steve Roach.

1 month ago | echoes.org | John Diliberto

by John Diliberto 2/28/2925I suspect that when they were at their recording peak, German bands like Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia and Can did not think that their music would still be influencing bands 50 years later. But their combinations of improvisation, motoric rhythms and stratospheric melodies are still charging the music of groups like Stereolab, Moby, Khruangbin, Hot Chip, Ulrich Schnauss and many more.

1 month ago | echoes.org | John Diliberto

by John Diliberto 2/25/2025New Zealand composer David Parsons has left the planet, departing off the Tibetan Plateau to join the Mothership. David Parsons was on the feathered edge of New Age, Ambient and World fusion music. He released his debut, Sounds of The Mothership in 1980. It was an album layering synthesizers with environmental sounds, which became de riquer in the New Age. But Parsons usually had a more darkly shadowed take, sometimes with dense and dissonant layers.