Hammock: Chasing After Shadows...Living With the Ghosts
Series: Echo Location: Soundings for New Music
From: John Diliberto
Length: 00:03:30
Also in the Echo Location: Soundings for New Music series
Kevin Keller's Ambient Chamber Music
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
Ambient chamber music composer Kevin Keller's In Absentia is a study in finely calibrated emotions dealing with the disappearance and likely death of his father-in-law. ...
International Guitar Night: Four virtuosos from Germany, Israel and America talk about a converge...
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
There are some guitarists for whom one insturment isan't enough. Brian Gore is one of them. For the past decade, he’s been realizing his ambition of a global guitar ...
Mediaeval Baebes
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
The allure is undeniable. Six talented, attractive women breathe renewed life into the rich texts of medieval songs and poetry with their hauntingly beautiful musical ...
Mellodrama: the Signature Sound of Progressive Rock
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
The Mellotron was the sound of progressive rock and space music in the 1970s. Before digital synthesizers, it was an instrument that played back the sounds of orchestras, ...
An exotic forest of sensual grooves, ambient atmospheres and intoxicating melodies
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
Ylang ylang is a flowering tree that grows in South Asia, and on his album, Ylang, Robert Rich has sculpted another exotic forest of sound, full of sensual grooves, ambient ...
Jon Hopkins's Quaint Electronica
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
You may not know Jon Hopkins, but you’ve heard him on albums by Coldplay, Massive Attack, Imogen Heap and Brian Eno. On Coldplay’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, ...
Violinist Anna Schaad's Dream Within a Dream
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
Violinist Anna Schaad’s music is steeped in fantasy and inspired by her Navy pilot husband. Though heavily Celtic influenced, she takes an electronica turn on her album ...
English electronic duo plugs in with vintage synthesizers and heads into space
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
English electronic musicians Mark Shreeve and Ian Boddy perform in a pair of cockpits of keyboards and gear. They specialize in a sound that has roots in German space music ...
Kronos Quartet: Four Decades of Breaking the String Quartet Rules
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
In the world of string quartets there is before and after Kronos, the ensemble that revolutionized the form, playing new music from Steve Reich to Sigur Ros. We talk with ...
Ludovico Einaudi's Nightbook
(00:03:30)
From: John Diliberto
Pianist Ludovico Einaudi is a different kind of classical composer. He's a student of the avant-garde and the rich classical tradition of his native Italy, but he’s also a ...
Related Pieces
Piece Description
Hammock is Nashville-based guitarists Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson. They've made their money writing country and Christian music but their hearts reside in the shoegaze sound of 80s bands like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. They’re also partial to elliptical Zen koan titles. Their new CD is called Chasing After Shadows...Living with the Ghosts.
Hammock's music justifies that poetic imagery. Each song is like a symphonic tone poem, but rendered in electric colors, assertive grooves and shimmering, sustain-laden guitars. They build from modal repetition: a simple guitar arpeggio is repeatedly deployed through reverb, delays and sheets of dappled distortion that moves with inevitability toward a grand crescendo. In this episode of Echo Location, John Diliberto reviews the new album by Hammock.
It's part of Echo Location: Soundings for New Music, the weekly digest from Echoes host and Peabody Award winning producer John Diliberto, exploring the latest in modern music with quick hitting interviews, music and commentary. Each edition of Echo Location features a beautifully edited music blend, that's combined with John's thoughtful insights and artists's comments to make a sound-rich journey for listeners. Each episode can stand on its own or be scheduled as a weekly or occasional series.
Broadcast History
WXPN, Philadelphia and WITF, Harrisburg
Transcript
There are Hammocks you swing in. They lull you into a hazy dream on a hot summer day. Hammock the band might have the same effect on you, that is until that hazy summer dream becomes a mind- altering journey into an interior space.
Hammock is Nashville-based guitarists Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson. They've made their money writing country and Christian music but their hearts reside in the shoegaze sound of bands like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. They had an under-rated Christian alt-rock band called Common Children that emerged from that sound. But Byrd and Thompson decided they liked the instrumental side of this sound and formed Hammock, releasing their first album, Kenotic, in 2005. Their recordings are full of densely reverbed, layered and distorted guitars.
After drifting off into the drone zone on their previous album, Maybe They Will Sing For U...
Read the full transcript
Timing and Cues
incue: "There are Hammocks you swing in..."
outcue: "...I’m John Diliberto and this has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music."
