ECHO MINE

Description

"'Echo Mine' is Califone's score for Robyn Mineko Williams' dance. The movement and music began together and grew together, like two clear entities. Sometimes totally intertwined and sometimes bouncing off each other, much like reflections. But, in a way, always connected and listening. Ben Massarella, Brian Deck, and I worked in a way that felt like coming home; Brian handled the engineering, electronics, drums, and room sound, with Ben adding essential percussive parts, feel, textures, and colors. I felt like my job was to hover over it all like a moth. Find the melody in everything. Direct only when necessary and leave opportunities for everyone to work at the top of their creative game. We created our album 'Roomsound' in much the same way (almost 20 years ago). Three of us in the studio - Be human. Play together as much as possible. A good feel trumps perfection every time. Bring in other musicians to add other voices and other colors, to do what we can't do. As musicians, we are not precise. Califone can kick up dust and ride a wave of self-created chaos. Many of our songs are built on foundations created from spontaneous moments. It is almost impossible for us to do the exact same thing twice. When it works, we can find magic in it. The song remains a living thing, always expandable and evolving. Robyn is an abstract painter. I don't know how to explain what she does, but we all felt it deeply when creating this music. Watching Robyn and the dancers rehearse, I had the same feeling as being in front of a Rothko painting. There is a deliberate precision in the dance and movement that pulls details of a story into abstract forms that illuminate dream logic, the invisible contours and colors that deepen emotions around what it is to be a human in a physical body - beyond words. Perhaps everyone involved in this project is an abstract painter."