ECHOLOCATIONS, Formerly InRadio, produces and distributes bi-monthly CD comilations of independent music. Our mission is to connect listeners with, and encourage the production of, new music and ideas.

InRadio 4.5 Here Come the Mannequins, January/February 2007

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Sera Cahoone
Self-released
Sera Cahoone is a twenty-nine year-old singer songwriter based in Seattle, by way of Colorado. Armed with her favorite Martin guitar, Sera's music reflects her love of both old country-western and modern lo-fi. Her unique sound bridges the gap between the two genres, like a musical love child of Buck Owens and Cat Power. Sera began writing songs on the guitar in high school, but actually got her musical start at the age of eleven, when her mother finally gave in to her daughter's prodding and bought Sera her first drum set. To the tune of her family's exasperation, she taught herself the drums by playing along to the radio in her bedroom. By thirteen, Sera's mother was driving her to Rocky Mountain bars to play open blues jams with musicians thirty years her senior. In recent years, Sera was the drummer for indie favorites Carissa's Weird, also touring with Iron and Wine and The Long Winters. Her self-released, self-titled debut album caught the ear of the folks at Sub Pop, who recently signed her to their roster.

The Blow
K Records
The Blow is Portland-based artists Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt. Khaela Maricich is a pop musician, visual artist, and performer. She works in the cracks between pop music and performance art, bouncing between the genres to suck out the juicier parts of either world. She has toured the United States extensively performing her monologue-based solo opera, "Blue Sky versus Night Sky." Jona Bechtolt is a technological multi talent. With his project, YACHT, he makes textural dance-based compositions and performances. He has toured the United States and Canada with his own projects, as well as with a number of other bands. Most recently, he played drums on Devendra Banhart's European festival tour. The Blow has released five albums of music, crossing styles from folk to electronic, radio-style hits; their most recent is the effervescent Paper Television, out on K Records.

Dosh
Anticon Records
Martin Dosh has been drawn to music from around the time he mastered walking. He was begging for piano lessons at the age of three, and, not surprisingly, had developed significant musical taste before reaching puberty. Raised mainly in Minneapolis, at 16 he moved east to study jazz and drums at Simon's Rock College of Bard in Massachusetts. The Lost Take, Dosh's third album, re-imagines Dosh as the full band he's always wanted to be. He takes his expertly arranged keyboard and drum loops, smashes them, and spreads them wide over his tracks. Instead of puzzle-piecing his pre-recorded session bits into surprisingly organic soundscapes, Dosh builds his miniature opuses out of live improv (his own drumming and Rhodes playing) inspired by raw, written instrumentation: first Dosh's emotive keyboard/piano progressions; later guitar, saxophone, bass, violin, clarinet and pedal steel from a hand-picked cast of Minneapolis musicians.

Page France
Suicide Squeeze Records
Page France is the slightly off-kilter brainchild of Michael Nau. It began in the spring of 2004 when Nau and good friend Clinton Jones put together a collection of songs which were, as they say, "perhaps, intended to be placed on an old, dusty shelf for years to come." But Baltimore- based Fall Records offered to release the songs as the band's debut album. Shortly thereafter, Page France began performing live and recording numerous demos. They created a substantial following that continues to grow daily, generating enough belated attention that their first album, Hello, Dear Wind, was recently re-released on Suicide Squeeze.

Dona Dumitru Siminica
Asphalt Tango Records
Despite the plaintive scenes depicted in Romanian Gypsy Dona Dumitru Siminica's songs, women went wild for his high-pitched falsetto singing style, in much the same way that Italian opera audiences went crazy for the weirdly androgynous vocal timbres of castrato singers. Combine the soulful, sad tales that are the bedrock of blues with the faux-female sonic qualities of Tiny Tim, and you have some idea of what your ears can expect on Sounds From a Bygone Age, Vol. 3, the latest installment of archival recordings re-released on Asphalt Tango Records documenting the great Romanian Gypsy musicians. Like many other Gypsy musicians in 1960's Romania, Siminica's musicianship and talent came from family members (in this case, his father) and also from the influence of the tightly-knit lautari, or gypsy musician community, that were called on to play at various social occasions in Bucharest and elsewhere.

Alela Diane
Holocene Music
Portland, Oregon-based singer and songwriter Alela Diane grew up amongst the deep woods and winding rivers of the Northern California Gold Rush town, Nevada City. Alela grew up singing songs with her parents (both musicians), and performing in the school choir. During a stay in San Francisco in 2003, she began teaching herself guitar and writing her first songs, blending tense, trance-like arpeggios with warm, thick vocals and meditative lyrics about family and nature. Written in response to a loss of home and familiarity, her new The Pirate's Gospel is a document of personal reevaluation and renewal set against the backdrop of generations past and future, mothers and fathers, life, death, and birth.

Bishop Allen
Self-released
If you thought you had a lot going on in 2006, Bishop Allen probably had one up on you. At the end of December they finally completed their intensely ambitious e.p.-a-month project, whereby they cooked up an (at least) 5-song batch of pop ditties every single month. The Brooklyn band was formed when guitarists Justin Rice and Christian Rudder met while attending Harvard University; drummer Jack Delamitraux was a later addition to the group.

Mike Gunther and His Restless Souls
Heart of a Champion
Mike Gunther's primitive and patently American music melds fiery lyricism and unusual instrumentation with traditional elements of country, blues and soul. On Burn It Down for the Nails, the second full-length release from Mike Gunther and His Restless Souls, Gunther leads a parade of eclectic players as they romp amid the shadows and flames of his storytelling. Gunther, a Montana native who grew up in Minnesota, put his musical background this way. "I grew up listening to distant AM and shortwave radio stations and a sparse collection of records my folks had. The only instrument my mother owned was a pitch pipe from teachers college. I heard the music of Robert Johnson on the radio when I was 14, bought a Harmony guitar with a warped neck at a garage sale for ten dollars and learned to play."

The Lovely Sparrows
Abandoned Love Records
Formed in 2005 by singer/songwriter Shawn Jones and longtime friend and collaborator Jason Cooper, the Lovely Sparrows is the culmination of over a decade of slugging it out in the southwestern indie rock circuit. In 2005, the band recorded and released a well-received 7", Take off Your Hats You Godless Bastards, which garnered play on select public and college radio stations, and the group began playing out around select clubs and house parties in Austin. Friends as well as former, current and occasional members of the band contributed their talents to flesh out their recent Pulling up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint, out on Abandoned Love Records.

Swan Island
Holocene Music
Swan Island is an all-female dance-metal crew founded in Portland, OR in March of 2004. Clearly situated within the grand tradition of Pacific Northwest feminist rock (Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip), Swan Island encompasses Heart's heart, Sabbath's chug, and The Au Pairs' political disco. The Centre Will Hold, their debut release on Holocene Music, captures this unique fusion with the kind of crackling, raw energy that's reflected in their live shows. Named after an Industrial Park with nary a swan in sight, Swan Island simultaneously mock and embrace the metal tradition by setting its bread and butter riffs against the backdrop quick disco rhythms.

Snowden
Jade Tree Records
Atlanta's Snowden drowns their brand of melodies in a sea of reverb heavy distortion and hypnotic layers. Anti-Anti, the band's debut album for Jade Tree, integrates the ethereal guitar resonance and dynamic percussion reminiscent of bands like Ride, New Order and early Cure, with the volatility of contemporaries such as The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It combines a mix of tracks recorded by Erik Wofford (The Black Angels, Explosions in the Sky, My Morning Jacket) at Cacophony Recorders in Austin with tracks recorded and mixed by principal songwriter Jordan Jeffares. Snowden recently completed their first mini-European tour, and have traveled extensively in America in recent months in support of Anti-Anti.

David Krakauer's Klezmer Madness!
Label Bleu
Clarinetist David Krakauer's muse is Klezmer, a tradition of non-secular Jewish music that enjoyed somewhat of a revival in the late 1980's. On Bubbemeises: Lies my Gramma Told Me, Krakauer teams with Jewish hip hop beat architect Socalled to make a sound unlike anything you've heard before: remixed Hasidic chant, klezmer tributes to James Brown, and an in-your-face raving battle for reinvented Jewish identity.

Mosquitos
Bar/None Records
With its mix of seductive bossa nova grooves and winsome indie pop, Mosquitos' III is infused with what Portuguese speakers call saudade. Saudade defies literal translation, but signifies a bittersweet sense of longing. It gives even the breeziest bossa nova melodies a tinge of melancholy and makes them all the more entrancing. Rio de Janeiro native Juju Stulbach lends the vocal performances to Mosquitos' musical hybrid, singing material co-written by American guitarist-singer Chris Root. On III, she even reinvents Neil Young's "A Man Needs a Maid," from his classic Harvest, as a melancholy ballad sung in Portuguese-American saudade at its best.

One Ring Zero
Barbes Records
One Ring Zero is Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp. The Brooklyn-based, multi-instrumentalist duo specializes in pop music for the literati. They've released six CDs, including their critically acclaimed album, As Smart as We Are, a book-cum-CD, featuring songs with lyrics contributed by such authors as Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Dave Eggers and Rick Moody. The New Yorker has said of One Ring Zero, "Accordions, organs, theremins, and the occasional brass horn and homemade instrument combine to make soundscapes that are both haunting and entertaining." Wake Them Up is One Ring Zero's latest, out on Barb's Records.

Pajo
Drag City Records
Though the name Pajo is familiar to few, you'd be hard-pressed to find of music fan of the last 20 years who's unfamiliar with his body of work. He first played out in the mid-80s with the legendary Louisville band, Slint. During the 1990s, he contributed to King Kong, The Palace Brothers, Stereolab, Royal Trux, Matmos, Tortoise and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. David Christian Pajo by birth, he has since recorded solo as Aerial M, Papa M, and now, just Pajo. For the majority of his career, Pajo has limited himself to the instrumental realm, but on his new 1968 his voice rings loud and clear.

Panda & Angel
Jade Tree
Like Belle and Sebastian, there's no Panda and there's no Angel in this band that takes its namesake from two "famed" addicts from one of the musicians' hometown. Constructing haunting pop music with room for mood, the group has garnered comparisons to cornerstones like My Bloody Valentine and Postal Service. In recent years, the group has opened for Wolf Parade, Band of Horses, Crystal Skulls, the Elected and Azure Ray's Maria Taylor. Their Jade Tree debut is Panda & Angel.


Tunng
Full Time Hobby
Comments of the Inner Chorus is the second full-length album from the British digital-folk collective Tunng, released on Full Time Hobby. In England, they have been credited with re-inventing British folk, a sort of reply to the new, distinctly American "freakfolk" movement led by Devendra Banhart, among others. Writes Pitchfork: "As with all proper folktales it immediately plunges its audience deep into the phantasmal wilderness. Led by the duo of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders, Tunng operate in a world where women can be transformed into hares, mysterious wind-up birds make front-page news, and true love inevitably leads to total doom."

Maestro Echoplex
Catbird Records
In 2001, Maestro Echoplex produced one album, Last Night I Saw God on the Dance Floor-it then came out of nowhere to be chosen as the number 2 record of 2001 by the BBC New Music Room and to garner acclaim from distinguished press around the world. Maestro songwriter Andrew Goldman was hailed an artist with a great gift, able to communicate directly and passionately with the listener in the manner of Elliott Smith and Neil Young. However, back in 2001, even accolades from the BBC, The Village Voice and The Washington Post weren't enough to get this self-released indie album into proper distribution. This story nevertheless ends happily: to the joy of musicphiles everywhere, Catbird Records recently re-released Last Night to a national audience.

Holy Shit
UUAR
Holy Shit is from Los Angeles, California where a few years ago Matt Fishbeck met Ariel Pink for the first time. Fishbeck had just disbanded the Push Kings, while Ariel Pink had been recording solo for several years. The two pop musicians found an immediate balance in their direct approach to making tracks: Fishbeck reigned in some of the wildness of Pink's music, while Ariel added an unmistakable sound quality to otherwise straightforward pop songs. Listen closely, and you'll hear that the bass notes and beats sound a bit off what you normally hear. That's because they aren't bass notes or drum beats at all, but spectacularly distinctive beat-boxing from the mouth of Ariel Pink. Holy Shit's new release is Stranded at Two Harbors.