Under The Golden Gate

Full show by Robert Hauspurg @ NDR Kultur | 24.10.2017 17:43

NDR Kultur x Himmelsrandt

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© Richard Labrooy

Flicker

Unreleased, from forthcoming album A Place that Exists, 2019 by Frances Shelley

Evening Star

Stream / Download: https://smarturl.it/elskavon-nerves

Nerves / Familiarity is the first official start to Elskavon’s next album era, and it’s a representation not only of composer Chris Bartels’ sound over the years, but also a metaphorical look inside his mind. That is, one of contrast.

With Elskavon’s sound, there’s always been a contrast, and marriage, of grandeur and intimacy. Nerves / Familiarity is no exception.

While it starts out quiet, the listener can immediately feel the enormity of Nerves. The sustained sound is that of Bartels slowly drawing a string of yarn across his old spinet piano’s strings. Only a minute and half in, the sound is thick and full, layered with falsetto vocals fed through modular synthesizers. It hasn’t taken long to be engulfed in the grandeur. 

However, as quickly as it arrives, there’s a departure. An intimate and rhythmic cassette texture, signaled by a slow tonic modulation, foreshadows a look at the second track - the contrast.

Familiarity begins with a bed of introspective notes and textures - mostly that of high piano notes and chopped up Rhodes improvisations. There’s a certain closeness with this sound, and a contrast to the large reverb-soaked fabric that leads Nerves. Then halfway through the song, there is a short build - an encore, if you will, to the grandeur of the first track.

Much like these songs and past Elskavon albums, there is a journey of contrasts with every creative turn for Bartels, finding himself deep in a whirlwind of excitement and fear, anticipation and anxiety, inspiration and frustration. And while being fully aware of the negative sides of that whirlwind, there’s an indescribable beauty and hope in the choice to keep writing, to keep moving. And to not simply run from the negatives, but to allow them to inspire, to motivate.

A creative journey should never be easy or comfortable. If it is, the other side will most certainly be lacking in the beauty and depth it so desires.

With this next album era, Bartels is choosing to embrace the contrast.

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Stream/Buy

Nerves

From the HBO documentary "What Happened on September 11th" www.hbo.com/documentaries/what-…ned-on-september-11

Missing Survivor

Written on an uneventful day during lockdown here in the UK... this piece evokes the feelings of every day being the same with little differences... and the light at the end of the tunnel is a long way away!!!

Image by Maira Kouvara - https://www.freeimages.com/photo/typography-2-1196901

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Every Day The Same [Solo Piano]

Finally getting round to making music, rather than fretting about the state of the world. Well, actually making music about fretting about the state of the world, but you know what I mean. (This clip = CS80, Una Corda, vocals, MonoPoly ...)

"Fretting": Una Corda + CS80 sketch: 4th Aug 2020

Helping Hands

The End from the Eternal Beauty Soundtrack, recorded at Abbey Road Studios,  performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra, conducted by Michael Price.

"A beautifully performed romantic orchestral theme, full of longing and nostalgia, capturing the innate optimism of Sally Hawkins' character, Jane."

From Friday 2nd Oct, a limited edition LP of the Eternal Beauty soundtrack will be available to preorder as a Dinked Edition. You will also be able to download it in full as part of BandCamp Friday.

Eternal Beauty Soundtrack - The End

AUG 2010……
The Echelon Effect came to life amid the long winter nights of February 2009, born from a burning desire to fall in love with music again. It started with a laptop and an idea: write a track, and make it huge. But one track became four, an EP that needed an audience. The tracks were posted on MySpace. And people began to listen.

‘Leaving It Behind’ was followed by two more EPs and remixes for The Appleseed Cast and City Breathing. Word spread, and the tracks began to attract positive reviews and gather airplay. What had begun as a way to stave off the dark and the cold had turned into something more.

The Echelon Effect’s debut full-length, ‘Reunion’, was the final part of a quartet of recordings that form ‘Wires and Tapes,’ an 141-minute sequential loop of tracks, each bleeding into the next and the last into the first. As a thank-you to the people who had been instrumental in the evolution of the Echelon Effect, fans were invited to record spoken statements about what home meant to them, which were incorporated into the album’s title track.

More remixes followed, for God Is An Astronaut, Codes In The Clouds, Our Ceasing Voice, Good Weather For An Airstrike and EVOLV among others. In March 2010 The Echelon Effect began work on ‘Mosaic’, their second full-length, featuring the addition of Steve T on drums, it was released on August 9th 2010.

Pushing forward a new project in which the entire year of 2011 is depicted in film. The audio to this being released throughout the year in four EP's. Part 1 was released on 18th April. 