Still: Echoes - The Echoes Living Room Concerts Volume 15

The title of this CD, the 15th in 20 years, has a few meanings. There's an oblique reference to Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years as well as the old-rockers-reforming movie, Still Crazy. Its deeper meaning though is, we're still here, and still doing what we set out to accomplish 20 years ago: creating a soundscape of music that sets an entrancing, intoxicating mood, slipping through the cracks of consciousness and into a new world where ancient and future, technology and primitivism, virtuosity of technique and purity of spirit converge. Still: Echoes, like our 14 previous Living Room Concert CDs, continues to exemplify the Echoes soundscape, bringing together music that is as ancient as a Renaissance lute and Indian sitar and as futuristic as a mutantrumpet and looping cellos. All those elements appear on Still: Echoes with Ronn McFarlane, Fernwood, Ben Neill and Matthew Schoening. Still: Echoes is a journey through pastoral fields and Blade Runner dreams, world music fusions and Celtic reveries. Like every Echoes CD, there's a mixture of longtime Echoes stalwarts and new artists. Familiar voices include Jesse Cook, Solas, Ben Neill, Al Di Meola, Aine Minogue, Lisa Lynne & Aryeh Frankfurter. Many of them have been part of the Echoes soundscape from the beginning. But Echoes is never sitting still and jumping into the current in the last year has been Italian pianist/composer Ludovico Einaudi in the form of Whitetree, his ambient chamber music trio with Robert & Ronald Lippok; The Mandrake Project, a progressive band from Pittsburgh; Alu, a striking, poetically entrancing LA singer; Fernwood, an acoustic chamber offshoot of Djam Karet; Canadian fingerstyle player Antoine DuFour; Polish chamber jazz group the Marcin Wasilewski Trio, and lutenist Ronn McFarlane from Maryland. All those artists were new to Echoes in the last year. Those descriptions make them sound like artists from different music universes, but in the unified field theory of Echoes they all come together, linked by a common musical DNA. And now you can hear them in a perfectly programmed 72 minutes of music. Put it on, turn it up and enter the bliss that Echoes can bring you. Dedicated to Les Paul (June 9, 1915 – August 13, 2009) He invented the solid body electric guitar, created multi-track recording and paved the way for everything you hear on Echoes.