On "Like Rain" - by Joseph Trapanese

After his extremely evocative early period, Stravinsky would insist that his newer music was nothing more than just music.  But at a performance of his Symphony of Psalms, he softly wept to a friend during the third movement, confiding in him that the music represented his first wife’s passing and her passage to heaven.  Stravinsky later said of this movement, a setting of Psalm 150, “...never before had I written anything quite so literal as the triplets for horns and piano to suggest the horses and chariot.”

Regardless of what a composer might say, we can’t help but intertwine our emotions and our music.  I have made the deliberate choice to face this head on, making intent and evocation an important part of my work.  What drives me to write, and how can I convey an emotional journey to my audience?

Like Rain is a snapshot of a very personal and specific moment in my life.  It was time to reflect on it from afar, and invite my audience to be a part of it.  To illustrate my thoughts as I worked, I’ll break down the composition layer by layer.

Rain is evoked by a piano and synthesizer through heavy delay that gradually increases in density.

Suzanne Waters’ beautiful vocal harmonies are featured throughout as a heartbeat, providing a soft, emotional bed on which the main vocals can rest.

The synthesizers and percussion evoke a church-like atmosphere.  I wanted this moment to feel sacred and powerful.

The main vocal is my own, but heavily processed.  Rather than presenting the words clearly, I wanted mystery and depth, so I hid behind a vocoder, harmonizer, and several effects.

The epilogue is a gentle piano, EBowed electric guitar, and wordless vocal.  A meditation after the event.

One of my passions is to visit museums and observe specific paintings at different angles and distances multiple times throughout the day.  My goal is for the audience to absorb the complete emotional picture I’m illustrating through sound, but upon further listenings, to potentially discover the nuance and inspiration behind my choices.  The amount of depth observed is up to the listener, but at the most primary layer, to be successful composition, I feel that the emotional journey must be strong and alive.

On "Polymer" - by Jeremy Zuckerman

(note: this post was originally published in 2016 and has since been updated.)

I’m in love with natural systems whose individual constituents organize and transform to reveal something greater than their internal elements. I find it fascinating how these systems shift and change yet remain within the confines of some overarching form. Wind rippling through a field of grass, a murmuration of starlings, language, the workings of the human brain, clouds, a sky of stars, the universe…

Since the first Echo Society concert, I’ve been experimenting with composing musical systems inspired by natural systems. I've been motivated to create pieces that are not only interesting from an analytical perspective but also exciting and moving, foreign yet familiar--something to help us access our humanness. It’s been a complete change of perspective to switch from the traditional microscopic note-by-note way of composing to creating from a macroscopic view where each event (e.g. note) serves the whole but isn’t particularly musical on its own. 

Polymer was composed for The Echo Society’s fifth show, V (peep Nathan Johnson's beautiful post from 2016 for an explanation of the overarching theme for the show). Polymer is for a cappella mixed choir and was originally performed in surround. The text source is Yeats' The Song of Wandering Aengus. For those unfamiliar with the poem, it's a story of a man who experiences a brief, magical event in his youth, an event in which he spends the rest of his life wandering in search of. There is a beautiful sense of longing in the poem, as well as a duality which represents the dream/fantasy world ("the silver apples of the moon") versus the physical world ("the golden apples of the sun").

From the idea of endless wandering came my initial idea to compose a musical system in which its pitches and text are derived from random walk processes. Quickly, a random walk is a mathematical process. Being a math hack, I’ll do my best here… It's a formula that creates a path derived from a series of random steps. It progresses but sometimes moves backward, sometimes jumps ahead a certain number of steps, sometimes repeats its current step. The characteristics of the random walk can be controlled and changed over time. For instance, the chance of it going backwards two steps may go from 50% to zero over 30 seconds. (This is called a biased random walk because the randomness is weighted to be more likely to have one result over another.)

A mass of text generated with a random walk process (which in this case is pretty useless but looks cool)

A sort-of-thorough yet totally-incomplete explanation of the compositional process:
I started with composing eight diatonic lines of pitches (one line per two voices) which begin with a narrow range and gradually widen (sopranos move up, basses move down). Using the audio programming language SuperCollider, I used these lines as source material to compose 16 independent random walks for each voice of the choir. The overall note duration shape is similar; the individual durations begin long and slowly shorten, then elongate again. 

Here’s a map to give a rough idea of the shape of the entire piece:

The x-axis is the timeline and the y-axis is general pitch range

The text begins with meaningless syllables. After a bit, a system of text derived from a line from the poem is introduced. The lyric streams divide into four, then eight, and finally 16 as the pitch ranges reach their widest and the durations reach their shortest. (Each new text stream uses a different line from the poem.) Gradually, the streams converge (eight, four, two) and finally return back to the syllables. As the text converges, the pitch range narrows, and the durations elongate. 

some of the SuperCollider code for generating Polymer’s text

To spice up the texture and to add another layer of transformation and because the human voice sounds so freaking beautiful the way it articulates phonemes, I introduced into the system several different rhythmic figures whose occurrences were determined by weighted randomness (i.e. the chance or likelihood of something happening). Because I wanted Polymer to begin very placidly, gradually increase in complexity and then return to placidity, there is no chance of a rhythmic figure at the beginning. As the piece progresses, the chance of the rhythmic figures occurring increases. At Polymer’s peak, the number of rhythmic figure occurrences is highest. Gradually, the chance of occurrences decreases till it reaches a chance of zero (no rhythmic figures).

some of Polymer's rhythmic figures

Like the pitches, the text was generated via a random walk process. Here’s an early example that never found its way into the piece but I find really beautiful:

“fi-
re was in my head,
moth- like my head, moth-
like moth- like in my
head, was a a fi-
re was fi- re in
in in was in fi-
re in my head, moth-
like stars were moth- like
in my head, moth- like
my head, moth- like stars
were flick- er- ing out,
some- one flick- er- ing
out, were were flick- er-
ing out, some- one were
moth- like in in fi-
re in my head, moth-
like stars my head, in
my head, moth- like in
my head”

The recording heard on the album Vol. 1 was performed by the virtuosic and adventurous C3LA vocal ensemble. I love C3LA so much. They perform predominantly, if not solely, the work of living composers. In fact, several of the members are composers themselves. I had been wanting to collaborate with them since I first saw them perform circa 2016. Jaco Wong was indispensable in his role as choral director and conductor, Ben Maas created a rock-solid location recording studio and captured the performance beautifully, and Michael Feldman mixed the recording and spent hours meticulously removing all the crackling sounds the church’s roof window decided to make that day.

A polymer is a molecule made up of repeating components. ‘Polymer’ means many parts. Polymers are represented with random walk models. Polystyrene is a polymer. So is DNA.

...Everything is wandering.

-JZ

---

“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.”

— The Song of Wandering Aengus - W.B. Yeats

More on random walks
More on complex systems

On "Metal // Skin // Cones" - by Deru

I wrote my piece on our new album, “Metal // Skin // Cones” for our fifth show at the Ace Theatre in 2016. I’d been exploring Spectral composition around that time, which is a form of composition where you analyze acoustic sounds to identify their harmonic content, and then use those frequencies as the basis for new music (link to one of my favorite Spectral pieces). Complex sounds can be thought of as a series of pure sine tones at various frequencies and amplitudes. Each frequency that is stacked on top of each other is called a partial, or harmonic. Spectral composition is the idea that you can use the frequencies of the partials to compose a new piece of music that will have acoustic properties from the original acoustic sound. The end result is microtonal music, as the frequencies inevitably don’t fall inline with the twelve discrete pitches in our most often used Western scale, but that strucure is replaced with one derived from the acoustic sound itself. The compositional process then becomes playing with and transforming the partial data, so the similarities to the original sound can be left intact or abstracted as desired.

About a year before beginning this piece I began working on software that could analyze and re-synthesize these partials, and the software allowed me to play with the pitch and timbre of the partials that make up the sound.

The show was taking place at the Ace Theatre, which is a large, beautiful old theater in Downtown LA. I thought it would be cool to do a piece using 4 percussionists surrounding the audience. I wanted their instruments to be un-amplified so that I could play with the psychoacoustic effects of the space. I decided to place a speaker by each performer so that the electronics would emirate from the same space as the acoustic instruments, so I could therefore play with the blending of acoustics and electronics. Coming out of each speaker would be re-synthesized partials that were taken from each instrument, and because I knew the frequencies that made up each instrument I could blend in and be as invisible as I wanted, or morph the partials into transformed versions of those instruments.

Design by Tobias G. Rylander

Design by Tobias G. Rylander

I decided that each musician would have the same instruments (brake drum, snare drum, bass drum, and cymbal) and would be structured around the same core phrases. I added textural complexity to those phrases by giving each player their own click track, which diverged and re-converged as part of the compositional process. I could have them start together, slip out of time, and then slam back together at various moments, for instance.

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During the planning process for the show we conceptualized the flow of the evening, including a few sonic 'surprises' in instrumentation throughout the evening. We realized that percussion embedded in the audience would be a nice break from the orchestra on stage, and we had brass and choir in the audience that were only used for certain pieces as well.

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Being able to blend electronic sounds into acoustic ones and then morph states to something else entirely has been a goal of mine from the time I first began to make music. The end result of this type of spectral exploration is that it’s effectively another tool I can use towards this goal.

I’d like to thank the entire Echo Society family, and especially the players that helped me realize this piece - Petri Korpela, Hal Rosenfeld, Hyke H Shirinian, and Nick Stone. Without their collaboration it would not have been possible. The amazing Petri Korpela recorded all 4 parts of the piece for the studio version.

By Tim Navis

By Tim Navis

By Tim Navis

By Tim Navis

By Tim Navis

By Tim Navis

- Benjamin Wynn (Deru)

On "Aether" - by Brendan Angelides

Video clip of “Aether” live at the Theater at Ace Hotel, Los Angeles

“Aether” was originally written for our fifth Echo event “V.”

In early 2016, I experienced Ravel’s “Bolero” at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles for the first time. It was truly captivating. Unlike some of my fellow Echo friends, I’m far less versed in classical music and my knowledge is beyond limited. I hadn’t known that composers had been writing hypnotic, pulsating and rhythmically alive music like that. I got home and googled more about him and the piece. I came across these odd articles in NPR and this Nature.

“the repetition in Boléro could reflect a manifestation of Alzheimer's disease, or some other serious mental deterioration.

Perseveration, an Alzheimer's symptom, is the obsession of repeating words or actions, and could have been the mastermind behind Ravel's infamous masterpiece.”

This hypothesis of repetition being wrong hit me sideways.

Having been previously introduced to soul moving Native American church songs, music from Gonda in the Central African Republic and the Ikaros in South America, I have listened to and enjoyed repetitive traditional works from a wide range of backgrounds. I’ve heard the same critiques about electronic music and rap. It read as the same old Western perspective. Perhaps Ravel’s condition contributed to his output at a certain time but that was beyond the point.

Deborah Mawer, a music researcher at Lancaster University, UK cautioned “Ravel became interested in mechanization and modern machinery at the end of his life, which could account for the repetitiveness of the piece.” This seems like a balanced approach to viewing his work.

I felt called to take the inspiration I felt for his “Bolero” piece along with my views towards these articles and create something. Our upcoming fifth Echo Society show “V" would be the outlet.

The orchestra we planned to work with for our “V” show was a 40-piece group with an additional 16-piece choir on top. It was the largest group of musicians I had ever written music for - a thrill and terrifying. Working with The Echo Society had always pushed me into scary new worlds and this was definitely one of those moments. I set out to create something that fused synthesis and orchestral while using the number 5 as an anchor.

For this new updated studio recording version, I had learned more since that original version from 2016 and so I carefully and gently revisited the piece. I refined the mixing, layered in cello for texture, expanded the main synth lines and redid some of the orchestration now that it was to be with a smaller ensemble. I remove the choir bits as they were essentially live in-person accents for the show itself. I made things fit.

Below are some screenshots of the Logic sessions. Each player is on a separate channel. I'm not really a fan of keyswitching. The main synth was 3 Serums (and sub) stacked and sending to a handful of buses each. Some of the buses are layered and fighting for space. One of them was run through the Modular Channel from Overstayer (below). I focused on one particular pattern of five that shifts and evolves through the entire piece. I played with callbacks, long builds and some simple time signature stuff.

After finishing the mixing process, I ran everything through a chain of tube and solid state outboard gear that I love. The Foote P4S Plus LE Compressor, Highland Dynamics BG1, Hendyamps Michelangelo and the Modular Channel.

“Aether” Live at the Theater at Ace Hotel, Los Angeles

PS:

Interesting timing occurred with the release of this Echo Society album.

When we designed the album, I was going by the name “ESKMO” as I had been for almost 20 years. Little did everyone else know in the group that I had been thinking about changing my name but unsure of when that might happen. Direct conversations with friends and people in Canada & Alaska reached out to me about the concerns with the name. This had been weighing on me for some time, unsure of what to do about it or the correct way to make a shift. Not until the wave of change that occurred (and is still occurring in 2020) was it clear to me that I had to make this switch and do so clearly and vocally.

Below is the posting I made on all the socials online. This means the Echo compilation album is the last piece of physical product that will ever have the ESKMO name written on it. It’s special to me and sort of a farewell in a way. Onwards and upwards. - B

My friends,

I have changed my artist name to Brendan Angelides.

When I was 19, I made an album as a project to complete high school. I named it “ESKMO” and just kept going, not grasping or understanding the weight that it has for the First Peoples of Canada, Alaska and beyond.

People have reached out to share their views and historical context and I want to publicly acknowledge them. I hear you. It was my privilege that allowed me to take too long and overlook any harm this may have caused. I apologize to anyone whom I may have disrespected in the process, it wasn’t my intention. 

This year has been a wake up call for a lot of us, that combined with the fact that I became a dad snapped me to attention with the role I play out there. I want to be transparent and honest with you. This is all about being a part of a community that does its best to respect each other. 

I appreciate all of you more than you know and I’m excited to share this new chapter with you. 

All love
Brendan Angelides

On "The Fog of Memories" - by Nathan Johnson

I wrote “The Fog of Memories” for The Echo Society’s sixth show, Family. Sometimes we try to scale everything up. I mean, let’s be honest, usually we try to scale everything up. But for this performance, the idea was all about intimacy. It was a year after the 2016 election and I don’t think anyone felt much like a bombastic performance. So we decided to look inward, and wondered about using the concept of a family to loosely explore what was happening in our country. Like disparate personalities and perspectives all stuck inside the same house.

We started looking for a big old family house that could be transformed into a venue, and though we considered a handful of different spots, when we saw the Paramour Estate, there was a palpable sense of excitement. As we wandered around the sprawling mansion, it was buzzing with possibility.

Five acres of lawns surrounding a 1920s villa from Hollywood’s golden age… If we could use this space, we could host a magical choose-your-own-adventure evening with guests wandering through hallways and staircases to find hidden rooms of musical surprises – perhaps a quartet in a bedroom or a harmonium and gramophone installation in the dining area. There was even a stunning pool, practically begging to be used as an immersive underwater installation for the bravest of guests.

The Paramour Mansion, circa black and white times

The Bravest of Guests. Photo by Michelle Shiers

As everyone explored the estate, I was drawn to a little room that wasn’t even labeled on the floorpan – a tiny sitting area next to the giant ballroom. Barely big enough to hold seven people, it was lined with books, a comfy leather chair, and at one end, a tiny bar.

I was immediately sold.

Scouting trip, August 2017 - The Parlor Bar

I knew it would be too small for a proper ensemble, but I figured there might be a way to make it work if I really leaned into the theme of family intimacy. And something about it reminded me of my own past…

I grew up in a huge extended family, and I remember numerous gatherings at my grandparents’ house. Dinner and Christmas presents and the chaos of forty grandkids causing a ruckus. But crammed into a back hallway was a tiny wet bar. Always full of too many aunts and uncles, deeply engaged in random conversations while making drinks. It was a little bottleneck where you happily got stuck. Hazy memories of late night conversations, enhanced by the close proximity and cabinets full of dusty sherry.

With this in mind, I began scheming.

I knew we’d only be able to welcome a few people at a time, so I wanted to keep the instrumentation stripped down. And inspired by foggy memories, I enlisted two of my oldest musical collaborators to join me.

I first met Aaron Esposito in England when he was 15 or 16. I was in the middle of recording a record for The Cinematic Underground and one day I heard this amazing kid playing a trumpet in an old factory building. I poked my head in and asked if he wanted to lay down some tracks. I’m not sure he’d ever recorded anything before that day. He certainly didn’t know what I meant by “lay down some tracks.” But like any bored kid, he said yes. 

Aaron Esposito - Photo by Michelle Shiers

Jonny Rodgers in the Parlor

Around the same time, I had been experimenting with tuned wine glasses. I’d employed the technique on a few projects, but when my band shared a bill with Jonny Rodgers, I suddenly realized I had met the master. It was a perfect match: I gave him the idea of illuminating his glasses with a strand of Christmas lights and he gave me the idea of just hiring him for the rest of my life.

Photo by Michelle Shiers

We tucked into the room, Aaron playing from the leather chair while I perched on a window sill. Jonny built a special two-tier array of tuned glasses to fit into the bar. And speaking of the bar, I decided to make drinks for the guests who were game enough to squeeze into the room and sit cross-legged on the floor. This piece was about the fog of memories, so why not add a little extra fog is what I figured.

Jonny and Nathan behind the bar.

When we got around to recording the album, I decided to bring in one more old friend to produce the whole track. I met Jake Sinclair when he was a scrawny teenager playing bass in a church band… Strong Beck vibes, which didn’t do much for the church music. We struck up a fast friendship. 

Jake is an accomplished producer and I figured he’d be perfect for this song. Partly because of how much he prizes speed. My tendency is to twiddle and tinker and overthink, but Jake just hits the ground running.

Jake Sinclair. He runs hot.

So… when I showed up in his studio to record a simple guide track, he convinced me that the first sketch should be the keeper. Aaron dropped by with his trumpet and laid down a couple tracks (he knows what that means now) and then Jake added the final touches with some bass, background vocals, and a big old marching band drum that was lying in the corner of the room.

Definitely a marching band drum.

By this point, Jonny was working on a project in a remote cabin somewhere in Oregon, so he recorded his glass parts up there and sent them over.

The final recording that ended up on the album isn’t all that much different from the original performance in that estate… a handful of old friends laying down an impressionistic sketch about memories. But if you want to go the extra mile and really recreate the magic, just make yourself a cocktail and crawl into a closet.

ON "REFRACTION" - BY ROB SIMONSEN

“Refraction” was written for our sixth Echo Society show, “Family”, held in an old mansion perched on a hill in Silver Lake. When we divided up the performance spaces, I chose a room overlooking the tree-covered hillside which led down to homes and buildings below. Looking out the windows and thinking about the theme of family, I was reminded of moments from childhood- feelings had while looking out windows, being in my corner of the world and imaging what life was like out there in the world.

That got the wheels turning in the search for something tangible to draw upon for my piece relating to family. At first I went to a little darker side, working on a musical representation of family dysfunction: fighting parents in one room while a child sits in the other room, checked out and trying to escape through music. Emo, I know.

*not my family

But when I dug into a box of audio cassettes sent to me by my mother, I discovered a different viewpoint, and a better idea emerged.

Photo: John Simonsen

On one tape, my mother, who was in her early 30’s at the time, had the whole family together, and was interacting with my sister (3 yrs old) and I (6 months old), getting my sister to sing and me to make noises. Here was a snapshot of a moment in time, so pure. Pure and before the accumulation of childhood/parent frustrations, teenage rebellions…before accumulating decades of memories and interactions. Listening back was very emotional experience.

What struck me was how my brain went to the dark side first when thinking about family. And how memory and emotions can color and distort a reality of love that was there. About how people who love each other can end up doing things that aren’t loving at all, and getting in weird juxtaposed positions, engaged in fights, frustrations, miscommunications, grudges…unresolved issues that manifest as blocks and refractors of a more pure, original impulse of love. Unfortunately for some people, some really terrible things can be done by people who, at least at one time held love for them.

Whoo, heavy. I have no answers. But I liked the idea of a pure impulse of energy like love (or light) and how it can get refracted through our imperfect human brain and psychological systems (similar to how a prism refracts light). In a prism, that pure beam of light gets broken apart into different colors.

I sat at my piano and improvised along with the recordings, reacting and responding to all of this. That seemed to be the idea to run with.

Naturally, my next step was to buy a Fisher Price tape machine. I am a child of the 80’s after all, and that was one of my favorites growing up. 

Boomin system

I bought two off ebay and rigged them up to be speakers to play the recordings, which I had digitized and looped in Logic. I then used AlterBoy from SoundToys to tune all the audio from the recordings onto a single note, which I could change the pitch of in real time using a midi keyboard. Kind of a vocoder of sorts. Those tuned recordings came out of my laptop to the Fisher Price speakers. I put the speakers on top of my piano, and there was my rig. 

Photo: Karma McCartney

The piece was very cathartic to perform but intimidating on a number of levels. It was very intimate, exposing these recordings of my family (don’t worry I got their permission), and trying to be vulnerable to them in front of a room full of strangers wandering in and out for two shows, 90 mins each. Also the anxiety of keeping up enough interesting improvisations.

Photo: Michelle Shiers

I found certain chord progressions and melodies I kept coming back to. That’s what crystallized into this recorded version. I hope you enjoy the result. 

Photo: Ben Wynn

On "Loire" - by Judson Crane

While the majority of music that is heard on The Echo Society’s first compilation album “Vol. 1” are compositions that were written for our live shows, I chose to create something new. I wanted to dig into spaces I hadn’t explored with any Echo Society repertoire previously, and the album was a great opportunity to do that. I challenged myself to write a mostly textural piece, while retaining the shape, form, and arc that you might expect from something more traditional. Loire’s chamber orchestra is made up of a small string group, piano, harp, trumpet, woodwinds, marimba, metallic percussion, timpani and electronics.

Two musical goals I had while composing Loire were 1) incorporate an instrument that I hadn’t personally recorded before and 2) avoid a more traditional melodic-thematic approach as to the way it would be crafted, instead leaning on other devices to convey form and shape. The piece is mostly based on these five chord voicings performed over a common G drone that operates as the major 7th in the first chord:

For the opening presentation of these chords, I have the winds, harp, piano, and timpani performing a “texture cloud” of each voicing, established by having them perform the notes in the chord at an improvised pace and dynamic. After a prescribed amount of time, the musicians change to the next voicing. 

These voicings are repeated in three different sections of the piece, each time in a different key and orchestrated slightly differently. They operate as the harmonic theme for Loire.

While I had written for timpani in an orchestral context in the past, it was within the traditional bombastic style timpani are most known for and I had never actually recorded or featured a live timpani before. So I was excited to get my friend and brilliant percussionist Pete Korpela into the studio with a large timpani set. My goal with the instrument was to really explore its dynamic extremes--crafting extended sections where Pete would play the drums as quietly as absolutely possible, nearly to the point of silence, as well as creating dynamic builds where he could slam away. In Pete’s words:

We recorded the timpani separately which allowed us a chance to experiment with a few alternative takes, and while at times recording timpani alone can be a challenge, I feel that we were able to utilize the positives that this method offers, providing a fantastic end result.

- @petekorpela

Whenever I have a project that needs extra attention on the sonics, I rope in my dear friend and mixing maestro Richard Furch. Richard recorded the timpani, mallets, and winds for Loire and provided the final mix. In Richard’s words:

A big acoustic space is vital to capturing the low end of timpani and also the full dynamic range of the instrument in a masterful player's hands. One of the big rooms at Capitol Studios was the perfect spot to get the music recorded right with the best musicians this city has to offer.

I tend to use ORTF configurations of large diaphragm mics (Neumann M49 tube condensers) to capture the body and size of the entire layout while close mic'ing the individual drums with more modern designs like the AKG C414. Given that the player has collected 6 timpani that are closely matched to each other in overall timbre and considering the player's personal touch as well, it's important to me to use the same mics on the individual drums as to arrive at a cohesive unit. That's another advantage of the grand studios, they just have all the gear, and many duplicates always.

I added room mics to the equation to really make the sound bloom and also the magical chambers that Capitol studios provides for a very special reverb space that's hard to recreate with software alone. Every pass of the timpani became a 14 track overdub, so the session became huge quickly.

To really hone in on the extreme dynamics and timbre of the piece, no compression was used but instead, I rode every part on the faders while keeping the score in mind. My job is to give the player and composer room to be creative and capture their musicality, and enhance it subtly where it's needed.

In the mix most of the parts fell into place effortlessly because this kind of attention was paid at the point of creation. Merely deciding how much of the Capitol chambers was used and a little overall eq to match the sonics of the other parts.

I'm a huge fan of enhancing dynamics in the final mix, so you would see my sessions with a lot of fader rides to push towards the dense spots and relax in the space between. Using a control surface makes this task easy and natural, with my musicality (a pianist myself) becoming a part of the overall picture.” - @richardfurchmix 

Here is an excerpt from the timpani part where I instructed Pete to use these pitches and rhythms as a guide while performing loosely in an improvisational manner and at an extremely quiet dynamic. This section happens at 2:34 in the piece. 

Pete on the marimba:

The uber-talented multi-instrumentalist and composer Mark Hollingsworth covered the winds in Loire. Here is an excerpt from near the end of the piece. One important detail was how the dynamic arc of the wind pulses worked in reverse of the strings, so that the winds seemingly “morphed” into strings with each cycle of the pulse. Listen from 5:03 in the piece to hear how this dynamic transition is executed.  

Mark playing his Bass Saxophone:

I hope you enjoy “Loire” and The Echo Society’s first compilation album, “Vol.1”! More to come!

ECHO VI: FAMILY

Hello Family,

So much has happened since we gathered together last year for our show at the Ace – both for us, personally, and in the world at large.

As a result of this, we’ve spent the last year reflecting on the ever-changing notion of “family,” especially as it relates to the recent fragmentation we’ve felt in our country. In a way, our country feels a lot like a family – we all live under the same roof, and though we may not agree with each other, our lives are tied together.

With this in mind, we’re deeply excited to announce our most intimate and complex experience yet. 

ECHO VI: FAMILY will take place on October 20, 21, and 22 at a legendary residence from the Golden Age of Hollywood, nestled atop the hills of Silverlake with breathtaking views of surrounding Los Angeles. 

The festival will feature original works by 21 Los Angeles-based composers and special guests exploring the theme of Family. Each evening, 7 different composers will present or perform original works simultaneously in 7 rooms of the house for (mostly) unamplified instruments of their choosing. During each show, guests will be free to explore the rooms inside the estate and discover the various performances as the evening unfolds.

We’ve invited a truly incredible group of guest composers to join us in this undertaking, and we can't wait to share them with you when tickets go on-sale on Thursday, 9/7, at Sid The Cat Presents. (Mark your calendars!)

We’re so glad we get to consider you part of our extended Los Angeles family.

With all of our love,
Ben, Rob, Joe, Brendan, Nathan, Jud, and Jeremy

---

The fine print.

ESVI: FAMILY will take place at a secret location in Silverlake at the following times. General admission tickets cost $75, and includes complimentary cocktails for the hour preceding each show. We are holding a specially-priced preview performance on Friday, 10/20, at 5 pm.

Friday, October 20th
5pm (special preview pricing, all ages)
9pm

Saturday, October 21st
4pm
8:30pm

Sunday October 22nd
2pm
6:30pm

Tickets will be available for purchase on Thurs. Sept. 7 at 10 a.m. and  can be purchased directly at Eventbrite or Sid the Cat Presents.

A limited amount of specially-priced student tickets will be released one hour before each show at the event check-in site (location TBA) with valid student ID.

*Tickets for the all-ages preview on Friday, October 20th at 5pm are specially priced at $35.

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How we think about family...

ESVI: FAMILY is inspired by the ever-changing notion of "family," especially as it relates to the divisive and fragmented nature of today’s current climate. As an artist collective that builds community through creation and performance, the Echo Society aims to create a universal experience of unity and expression, drawing upon personal experiences to creatively connect with others in an emotional and impactful way. The Echo Society is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

Nathan Johnson - Breath

Holy Motors, Dir. Leos Carax (2012)

We're excited to share some insights into the thought processes of our composers and visual artists with our new blog. We'll be sharing ideas, sounds, and images as we lead up to our show on August 31st at the Theatre at The Ace Hotel. Next up, we have Nathan Johnson.

I love musical interludes … those little moments that give us space to breathe, while somehow tying broader themes together. In theatrical productions, these entr’actes (literally, “between the acts”) were originally short pieces of music or dialogue used to distract audiences from set changes happening behind closed curtains. The interludes would serve as bridges between the main events of a story by expanding on motifs, creating tonal shifts, and sometimes even developing self-contained plots of their own. 

I’m always intrigued by art forms that emerge from technical restrictions, and history is rich with examples. The average length of recorded music was defined and restricted by the medium that held it; likewise, the vision of a film by the aspect ratio of its frame. In the world of comics, many newspaper editors made a practice of removing the top row of panels from nationally syndicated strips as a response to space restrictions. This forced cartoonists to empty their headers of everything except a title since they knew it would be omitted for many of their readers, but Calvin & Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson used the extra space to draw self-contained preludes. These served to introduce the theme of the story, and, in many cases, they were as enjoyable as the entire comic.

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson (1985)

As Brian Eno points out in his book, A Year With Swollen Appendices, “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”  

This is the nature of how forms develop. In the case of the interlude, a technical restriction gave birth to an artistic solution that continued on, even as the original restriction ceased to exist. 

There’s absolutely no technical reason for an interlude in a movie, but we still occasionally see them used to great artistic effect. I’d be hard-pressed to find a scene in a recent film that made me smile as much as the boisterous accordion entr'acte from Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. 

Magnolia, Dir. P.T. Anderson (1999)

Likewise, I was astonished and thrilled by the left turn P.T. Anderson takes in Magnolia where, for a brief moment, the camera finds the main characters spread across Los Angeles and inexplicably singing the same song. The music isn’t diegetic, and Anderson makes sure you’re not confused about this, as the song never feels like it’s coming from a record player or a car stereo in the scene. It’s just there, maybe in the atmosphere. The characters simply sing along with the disembodied voice of Aimee Mann, and the scene is unexpectedly magical and heartbreaking.

With the Echo Society shows, we’ve never had a technical reason to consider interludes since we’re not changing scenes, but as I began thinking about our upcoming show, I started getting excited about writing a handful of smaller “linking pieces” that could weave through the entire night.

Our shows are, by nature, fairly modular. In the past, we’ve begun our preparation by choosing a common theme (“Bloom” or “Veils,” for instance), but we’ve been pretty isolated in our writing, sometimes not hearing the other compositions until the first rehearsal.  

Dynamic arc and interlude plotting

This show will be different for a number of reasons, but one key shift is that we’re focusing more on the night as a whole. Usually, our musical director, Joe, waits to sequence the show until all the pieces are complete, but this time we wanted to take a different approach. So, three months ago, we gathered around Rob’s dining room table and started sketching out the arc of the whole evening before a single note was written.

ECHO V Structure Meeting, May 2016

We plotted out dynamic levels, transitions, and instrumentation changes, and then met up repeatedly over the following months to share our progress. We’re now thinking further outside of our own compositions and digging for ways to create a more unified experience that represents the title of our fifth show: V.

In our first blog post, Ben noted that “V” is a representation of Spirit (I) into Matter (IV). For my interludes, I’ve been exploring this theme specifically as it relates to “Breath.” We see it expressed in the creation story of the world’s major religions: a divine being shapes matter (the dust of the earth) and then breathes into it “the breath of life.” 

Breath is, of course, the thing that sustains us, but it also empowers a unique voice, both literally and metaphorically. This is one of the things that has been so inspiring about working with the composers in the Echo Society. Each show reminds me of the variety of voices being expressed, from Jud’s cinematic melodicism to Jeremy’s electronically-generated pattern work. 

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Writing Session for Interlude I

Preparing for this show has been especially fun for me, because I’ve had the opportunity to peek into what makes each of the other compositions tick, and then think about ways to bridge the gaps between them. In some cases, this involves playing around with keys and timing, often calling the other composers to float ideas about how I might interpret pieces from their work. If you look at my writing session, it’s actually laid out sequentially like a film, with the other compositions abutting and overlapping my files for context. In the photo above, you can see individual pink snippets from Brendan's piece that that he sent over for me to incorporate into one of my compositions. In this way, I’m quoting, referencing, and repurposing other elements in order to tie these voices together.  

And this brings me back to our overarching theme for the night. In writing interludes, I’m operating in the spaces between the acts, looking for a common thread to connect the dots. I decided early in my process to feature an actual voice, so I’ve been working with my frequent collaborator (and one of my personal favorite voices), Katie Chastain. Each interlude has developed into a sort of meditation on breath, and I’m reminded that although air is, essentially, unlimited, our breaths are not. I almost imagine the voice in these interludes as a spirit of the theater; a spectral observer from a forgotten time, reminding us that we have the opportunity to use our breaths – our lives – to create something unique.

- Nathan

Eskmo - Transforming Spaces

AFTER - Warehouse space behind MAMA Gallery

We're excited to share some insights into the thought processes of our composers and visual artists with our new blog. We'll be sharing ideas, sounds, and images as we lead up to our show on August 31st at the Theatre at The Ace Hotel. Next up, we have Eskmo.  

Photo by Spencer Hansen

One of our goals since the beginning of starting The Echo Society was to host these events in locations that were unexpected, distinct in their own right, and flexible enough to allow us to make new creative choices at each step along the way. 

Our process of transforming each location has multiple stages, and way too many contributions from a large team, to describe in full detail, but I'd love to give a birds eye view the motivations for us as a collective. 

We set out to find locations in LA that inspire us from the moment we see them, and these spaces have so far included a sound stage built in 1916, a downtown church, and an unused warehouse in the Arts District. For our fifth show, "V," we are thrilled to have it take place in a beautiful space built in the 1920s, The Theatre at Ace Hotel. 

BEFORE - The Theater at The Ace Hotel

For every show, each composer is required to compose a brand new piece of music written specifically for the orchestration put together for that particular night. And for each show, the ensemble changes. This in itself is a huge undertaking but also a super rewarding process. The same goes for working with the spaces.

Changing venues each time, which is in itself is a large undertaking, also influences the theme for the night, the lighting design, the type of orchestra we put together and drastically effects the pieces written for the particular ensemble for that particular show. This pushes the whole team, whether composers, lighting and design, sound or production, to reach further, potentially improving and trying something new and a bit risky and vulnerable. 

Just as a Springtime show in a church calls for pastel rooftops and floral sonic patterns, or as a winter performance in an abandoned warehouse calls for stark dynamic ice, for this next show we plan on telling a story of Spirit being injected into Matter. For this next show, just like previous ones, we are going to do some things we have never done before. 

We hope to continue to engage the LA community in new and creative ways step by step. With big hearts, thank you for joining us. 

- Brendan

BEFORE & AFTER, previous shows

VEILS
Warehouse space behind MAMA Galler, Arts District LA

VEILS - BEFORE - Warehouse space behind MAMA Gallery

VEILS - AFTER - Warehouse space behind MAMA Gallery

VEILS - AFTER - Warehouse space behind MAMA Gallery

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BLOOM
The Vibiana Church, Downtown LA

BLOOM - BEFORE- Vibiana Church

BLOOM - AFTER - Vibiana Church

BLOOM - Projection Mapping Vibiana Church

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WINTER / Solstice
MACK SENNETT, SIlverlake LA

Winter and Solstice - BEFORE - Mack Sennett Studios

Winter and Solstice - AFTER - Mack Sennett Studios

Winter and Solstice - AFTER - Mack Sennett Studios

Deru - Hello World // Process Post

We're excited to share some insights into the thought processes of our composers and visual artists with our new blog. We'll be sharing ideas, sounds, and images as we lead up to our show on August 31st at the Theatre at The Ace Hotel. This week we start with Deru. 

The name for this show is "V", or five, and while doing some research we came across the idea that in numerology, 5 represents the "symbol of the incarnated conscience: 4, Matter, + 1, Spirit", and as a way to unify the show we've begun thinking about our creative theme as being: "Spirit Into Matter".

The hopes with my piece, therefore, is that I can extract the 'life' out of the acoustic instruments on stage by analyzing them and playing with their pitch data in interesting ways. 

I'm also continuing my exploration into partials and microtonality that started while writing my piece for our last show, "Veils". Complex sounds, like acoustic instruments, have a series of sine waves at various frequencies and amplitudes that combine to form the original sound. So a partial is any of these individual simple sine waves that compose a complex sound. Because acoustic instruments aren't electronically generated you end up with partials at frequencies that don't fit into western scales, so you end up with microtonality. This form of microtonality has opened up a huge world of colors for me, and they are colors that I love. The sounds evoke feelings that don't seem to exist in our normal 12-tone scales. They are 'other' and 'dark' but they also make sense and have a system to them. 

Brakedrums made from spare car parts.

My piece will be based on percussion, so I've been analyzing the partials of the various instruments that will be on played stage, with the aim of being able to blur the lines between the instruments played acoustically and the electronics coming out of the speakers.

I've also been playing with the beat frequencies that occur when pitch shifting two partials against each other, as a source of rhythm onto itself. 

I hesitate to give too much away in terms of sound, but below are two quick examples. The first one is a brake drum (see photo above) being struck and some sine waves, playing back the exact frequencies of the partials in the recording, taking over. The second is a bowed cymbal with sine waves extending and playing with the partials over time.

I'd like to leave this post about technique over content for the time being, as I have quite a few surprises that I'd like to leave as surprises, but this space will update regularly as our composers and collaborators share their processes and thoughts. 

- Benjamin Wynn / Deru

Partial analysis.

Partial amplitudes in a sequencer.

Amplitude and pitch data.