PRI: Echoes Interviews

Wall is the recording persona of Lyla Foy. She's created a buzz with her early singles and new EP called Shoestring, bringing her fragile songs to life using antique digital synthesizers.

Hem is a Brooklyn-based band making a gentle dream-folk music that harbors songs of loss, turmoil and redemption.  The group almost broke up making their latest album, Departure and Farewell, but it turned out to be a rebirth.

Rhian Sheehan creates melancholy electronic landscapes that often employ instruments from his children's toy box. We talk to him in his New Zealand studio about his beautiful new CD, Stories from Elsewhere.

Shaman's Dream is a world fusion group tending towards the meditative side. It's headed by Craig Kohland, and on their latest album, Prana Pulse, electronica artist Bluetech joins the band. They talk about meditation and groove.

Kevin Murphy and Thomas Haugh are Irish musicians but their music isn't traditional. Inspired by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, they make their own quirky ambient chamber music, using instruments from the Marxochime Colony.

Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds has released two albums in a row that truly seem to emerge from the heart of that country's winter darkness. If his 2010 album, And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness, was the sound of Iceland's sunless winter days, his latest release, For Now I Am Winter, turns the Nordic freeze into heroic rapture. Both sophisticated and edgy, Olafur Arnalds inhabits his own sonic universe, balancing emotions and mood on a laser's edge. For Now I Am Winter is the Echoes CD of...

After a seven year hiatus, the sultan of Ethno-Techno returns with a new CD of global groove mash-ups and melodic trans-global flights called Apollo. We explore his muses.

Tina Malia is a self-professed hippie chick. She also possesses a remarkable voice honed in her singer-songwriter music, Kirtan chanting and collaborations with electronica artist Bass Nectar. She talks about the darker, electronic dimensions of her new CD, The Lost Frontier.

German electronic musician Ulrich Schnauss talks about his latest CD, A Long Way to Fall, and what it's like to have an oft-imitated sound.

Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi mixes classism with minimalism and ambient moods on a CD of lush and melodically rich music that threads the line between pop and neo-classicism. His recording In a Time Lapse is the Echoes CD of the Month for March.