Explore the Big Ears Festival 2025 with founder Ashley Capps in Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast we preview the Big Ears Festival 2025 taking place in Knoxville at the end of March. This is an enormous event with over a hundred artists all on the leading edge of whatever music genre they are in and at Big Ears, there are a lot of music genres, all in abundance. This year features more artists from the Echoesphere than ever including Steve Roach, Michael Rother, Marissa Nadler and more. Every year I talk to Big Ears founder Ashley Capps to preview the event.  Although Big Ears is thought of as a bleeding edge festival sometimes, this year it embraces artists from the new Age including Laraaji, who has been there before, and Steve Roach who is the first true representative here of the ambient new age explosion that began around 1980.

Ashley Capps: And really, new age music isn’t an outlier. We’ve had elements of what many people would consider to be new age for many, many years, I think. So, you know, I feel like it’s an important part of these exploratory music traditions.

Ashley Capps. With artists like Roach, Explosions in the Sky, Rich Ruth, SUSS, Immersion and Anoushka Shankar, it’s almost an Echoes Festival.

We will hear the complete interview with Ashley Capps.  The Big Ears Festival takes place March 27-30 in Knoxville, TN bigearsfestival.org

Days of Genius Past: Sasha's Da Vinci Genius - The Echoes Interview

In the Echoes Podcast, the spirit of Leonardo Da Vinci transformed into electronic sound by DJ and producer Sasha. Da Vinci Genius is an immersive exhibit on the life of the Renaissance polymath. Sasha created a score that ranges from orchestrally cinematic to electronically grooving.  You won’t find the Renaissance music of Da Vinci’s era here.

Sasha: We did try taking kind of our modern instruments, our modern melodies and putting them onto kind of medieval instruments, but it ended up sounding like a bit of a pastiche, you know? The show itself is very technological and future-facing.

So is the music.

Sasha is a renowned DJ and record producer. He began his career in the late 1980s, playing acid house music, and rose to prominence in the 1990s through his partnership with fellow DJ John Digweed. Together, they produced influential mix albums like Renaissance: The Mix Collection and the Northern Exposure series, significantly shaping the progressive house and trance genres.  As a solo artist, Sasha has released notable albums, including Airdrawndagger and Scene Delete. He has also remixed tracks for artists such as Madonna, Moby, and The Chemical Brothers. He was voted World No. 1 DJ in 2000 by DJ Magazine and receiving a Grammy nomination for his remix of Felix da Housecat’s “Watching Cars Go By.”  He released a beautiful ambient compilation, The EmFire Collection, that included his score to the surfing movie, New Emissions of Light and Sound.

Sasha talks about sculpting a soundtrack that finds Da Vinci in the future he helped create in the Echoes Podcast.

Remembering Tangerine Dream's Edgar Froese on the 10th Anniversary of his Departure with the Complete 1982 Interview in the Echoes Podcast.

On this 10th anniversary of his passing, we remember Edgar Froese with this 1982 interview for the Totally Wired: Artists in Electronic Sound series. Tangerine Dream changed music. Period. There was nothing like them before their 1974 album, Phaedra and a vast landscape of music from Donna Summer’s I Feel Love” to EDM to ambient to dreampop are based on their sonic designs. Edgar Froese was the guiding light of Tangerine Dream. He founded the group as an experimental band in the 1960s and guided them through a music that was wed to technology, even if Froese once told me that if you can’t make music on a comb, then you are not a musician. I interviewed Edgar several times before his passing in 2015.

I talked to Froese as part of the radio series Totally Wired-Artists in Electronic Sound in 1982. I met him at his studio in West Berlin. This was before the Berlin Wall came down and there was still a claustrophobic and disconnected sense to the city. Escaping that is part of what Tangerine Dream’s music was about. At the time, White Eagle was their latest recording and Stuntman was Froese’s latest solo release.

Froese had already created an entirely new kind of music with Tangerine Dream on albums like Stratosfear, Rubycon and Ricochet. They epitomized the electronic age of music, recording over 150 albums of synthesized compositions. Their film soundtracks include “Sorcerer” “Thief,” “Risky Business,” and “Legend.” But Tangerine Dream are the original source.

Hear Edgar Froese talk about the history of the group, his ideas about electronic music and his sense of cosmic consciousness in the Echoes Podcast II with his complete 1982 interview

Listen to our Tangerine Dream at 50 Documentary.
Hear our interview with the current edition of Tangerine Dream
See our list of 10 Tangerine Dream Albums to Blow Your Mind,

The Roots of Electro-Pop-John Foxx's Metamatic Turns 45: The Echoes Interview

In the 1980s, you couldn’t be sure now long New Wave music would last. But now in 2025, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark and Gary Numan are still recording and touring, and newer bands like Ladytron, Washed Out, Emma Anderson, Maps and World Brain are ascending. It’s a sound that isn’t going away. This year, one of the most influential albums of electro-pop turns 45, Metamatic by John Foxx.

JOHN FOXX: That was the thing that fascinated me most about synthesizers. Whenever you get a new instrument it changes the shape of the music completely. You write your music, and you write to accommodate the qualities of the machines.

Musically adventurous and lyrically trenchant, Metamatic remains a timeless artifact of electronic music and pop. We’ll hear John Foxx, Gary Numan and Gareth Jones talking about this release and its creation 45 Years ago.

Echoes Podcast: Maps Counter Electronic Melodies and The Art of Noise 40th Anniversary.

The Echoes Podcast features two electronic artists, one from the future past and one from the present future, with James Chapman of Maps and The Art of Noise, celebrating the 40th anniversary of their debut album, Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise! released in June, 1984.

The artist known as MAPS has been making exquisitely crafted dreampop music for most of this century. MAPS is James Chapman and we heard from him recently regarding his production of Emma Anderson’s Pearlies album. While many artists went introspective during pandemic lockdown, James Chapman decided to synthesize joy on the all-instrumental electronic album, Counter Melodies.

James Chapman:  I actually started working on those tracks during the first lockdown, so kind of 2020 and obviously it was a really depressing time. And I think I wanted to do something really uplifting and upbeat, just as a kind of antidote, really.

We talk to James Chapman about Counter Melodies and more in the Echoes Podcast.

Hear James Chapman in our Emma Anderson feature.

In June of 1984 an album came out that seemed to turn music on its head. It was by a fairly anonymous trio called The Art of Noise. That name came from the 1918 Futurist Manifesto by Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises.”  They were among the first to employ the Fairlight CMI synthesizer which also included one of the first samplers and that last invention is what created their sound. Programmer J. J. Jeczalik, engineer Gary Langan and keyboard player and arranger Anne Dudley were part of Trevor Horn’s production team.  They were responsible for the sound design on albums by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, Malcom McLaren and most presciently, the song “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. Joined by Horn and Paul Morley, in June of 1984 they released their debut album, Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise.

They created an audio riot of sound. Licks stolen from records, noises in the environment, technology and car engines were all part of their sound, using these noises as music.  It was an update of musique concrete of the 1940s and 50s and composers like Pierre Henry and Piere Schaefer. They just married them to funky dance beats.  Ironically, a band that codified the initial concepts of sampling, were themselves sampled many times. Their prettiest song, “Moments in Love” turns up in movies and TV and is still being sampled by the likes of Charlie XCX, J Dilla and Drake.  Other tracks like “Beat Box” and “Close (to the Edit)” were sampled by Fatboy Slim, The Prodigy and many more.

I didn’t want to leave 2024 without celebrating this release so we played a suite of their music on Echoes, but for the podcast, I’m digging back to a segment of the radio series Totally Wired and a 1988 segment on the group where I talked with Anne Dudley and JJ. Jeczalik, who, as you’ll hear in this feature, gave me an odd pronunciation of his name.

Emma Anderson - From Lush to Independence: The Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast, Emma Anderson. 4AD was one of the defining record labels of the 1980s and 90s with artists like Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Clan of Xymox and Wolfgang Press. Among those groups was Lush, the band fronted by the duo of Emma Anderson and Mikki Berenyi. They recorded 3 full studio albums between 1987 and 1996 with the inevitable and short-lived reunion in 2015. Since then Berenyi has written a memoir and released two albums with her band Piroshka in 2019 and 2021. But Anderson, other than her band Sing-Sing in the early 2000’s, has been silent, until now. In 2023 she released her solo debut, Pearlies and in 2024, a remix disc called Spiralée- Pearlies Rearranged. John Diliberto talks to Emma Anderson and her producer, James Chapman of Maps, about a reluctant singer, 60s influences and remixes in the Echoes Podcast from PRX.

The Continuing Story 0f David Borden-An Electronic Pioneer: The Echoes Podcast

Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Co. circa 1975

In the Echoes Podcast, a pioneer of electronic music: David Borden, the founding member of Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company. In 1969, he created the group Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company. They were one of the first performing synthesizer bands, managing multiple modular Moogs and Mini-Moog synthesizers. Borden was actually a test pilot for Moog.

David Borden:
Well, in my first few days there I couldn’t get a sound and his head engineer came down and turned on the amplifier. That’s how bad I was. So without the amplifier, of course, none of this stuff, you can’t hear it. So the next week I was patching patch cords and I ruined one of his modules. . . . . And so Bob came down. He was there for about five seconds, looked at it and . . . .And then I thought to myself, well, that’s it for me. I’m out of here. And he came over and put his arm around me and said, can I come at night? . . . So he took me upstairs, had a key made to the whole place and said, just come here at night and after you’re done working, just leave it set up. It’s okay. Everything’s fine and don’t worry about a thing. And so I said, okay. . . So after six months, I was very sophisticated. I knew all the parts of the synthesizer. I was hooking up very tricky things and strange things and having a great time. And he said, I just wanted to tell you, we redesigned all the modules so that no matter how you set it up, you can’t screw it up. So I was surprised. That was a big turning point because I realized I had taken part in the research and development of what became the standard Moog synthesizer.

Mother Mallard released their eponymous debut in 1973, a work that stands alongside the best of both Tangerine Dream and Steve Reich. A new album, Make Way for Mother Mallard, 50 Years of Music has just come out, that contains never-before released archival works of live and studio performances, from the very beginning to his last concert. Hear this epic story on Echoes.

The Ambience Between-Rena Jones & Kilowatts: The Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast, Rena Jones and KiloWatts come on to talk about their new album Caesura. It’s a more complex take on electronica, combining synthesizers with Rena’s violin, viola and cello orchestrations.

Rena Jones is a polymath musician who has been a defining voice in ambient chamber music. KiloWatts has been around just as long releasing electronic psybient dreams. They’ve gotten together, remotely for a new release, Caesura, that seems to capture our time.

Rena Jones:  The name speaks for itself in a way, doesn’t it? It’s about the space in between the pause between two different forces, right? Or different aspects. And for me, what drew me to that name, was just that we’re, living in such a divided times, right? And I feel as polarity keeps happening in our world, it’s nice to remind people that you don’t have to be extreme one or the other. You can take the time to pause and have a moment to reflect and be in that space in between either or.

John Diliberto brings us Rena Jones and KiloWatts in the Echoes Podcast from PRX.

Hear Rena Jones in her 2021 Echoes Interview

We Celebrate Wendy Carlos' 85th Year in Echoes Podcast

We look back at Wendy Carlos on her 85th Birthday.

This is actually a feature we did for Wendy’s 70th birthday that we redid for her 80th birthday.

You know that a lot of time has passed when your references become dated. With its array of cords and cables crisscrossed in a patchbay, we used to compare it to a telephone switchboard gone crazy. Well, synthesizers don’t look like that anymore, the modular renaissance excepted, and most people under thirty wouldn’t know what a telephone switchboard was unless they watch the TCM channel a lot.

It was 1968 when Wendy Carlos took her Moog synthesizer and applied it to the contrapuntal 18th century music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The album was called Switched-On Bach and it changed the shape of modern music forever. It took synthesizers out of the world of sound effects and the avant-garde and into the mass market. It’s 50 years later and Wendy Carlos first masterwork is now an iconic moment in the history of electronic music. She’s done other great works since. She presaged Brian Eno and Ambient Music with her 1972 album, Sonic Seasonings (from whence we stole the title of our annual Christmas show). Her Beauty in the Beast was a manifesto for the synthesizer in the global village as Carlos digitally hand-crafted her own global orchestra coupling hybrid instruments and timbres that are remarkably true to form, from the roaring Tibetan trumpets that open the album to the Balinese xylophones and suling flutes.

She only did a few film scores, but they are legendary. A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron were signal works in film scoring.

15 Years ago we did a feature on her 70th birthday. In the Echoes Podcast, we updated it for her 80th Birthday drawing from 30 years of interviews with Wendy Carlos. And now, here we are on her 85th. I’d give you links to her recordings, but none of the are available in any form.

Listen to our earlier Podcast on the 50th Anniversary of Switch-On Bach
Read our Post on Four Switched -On Masterworks by Wendy Carlos.

Kraftwerk's Autobahn at 50: The Echoes Kraftwerk Documentary

It’s the 50th Anniversary of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.  The iconic German electronic band switched on their debut album in November, 1970, but their breakthrough artistically and commercially came in 1974 with an album that broke all the barriers of music, especially in the Top Forty.

Ralf Hutter: We could never understand why there were–everybody wanted to stick to the guitars, or the drums because they’re so boring.  And now it’s happening.

To celebrate, we’re repodcasting our documentary. Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine Music . We’ll hear from Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter as well as Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark, Jean-Michel Jarre, Orbital, Michael Rother, Depeche Mode, James Merle Thomas (Quindar), Karl Hyde (Underworld), Manuel Gottsching (Ashra)  and Conny Plank, looking back on a band that altered the face of music for decades.  Kraftwerk is on our list of 35 Icons of Echoes. We go down the Autobahn with Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine Music: The Echoes Documentary in the Echoes Podcast.

On the Echoes Podcast, two masters of strings, from guitar to ngoni, when we talk to Joss Jaffe and Jim “Kimo” West. Jaffe is a musical explorer. West is a guitarist with a reputation for Hawaiian slack key music but he also plays with Weird Al Yankovic. Go figure. Jaffe studied tabla drum in India and has picked up instruments from around the world. Together they’ve made a serene recordings called Santhi and it includes instruments like the West African ngoni, Indian tablas and bansuri flute, and e-bow guitar.

Jim “Kimo” West: We didn’t want to go heavily Indian or heavily African or heavily Hawaiian. We just wanted to have a blend of these different influences, stuff that we like from around the world and just do it naturally, just play what we like.

John Diliberto will when he talks to Jim “Kimo” West and Joss Jaffe on Echoes from PRX.