Echo City is a combination of several disciplines. It is a band. It designs musical instruments out of industrial and waste materials. It manufactures sonic playgrounds. It runs music and instrument building workshops for people of all abilities and ages. It trains playleaders in the art of Sonic Play. It breaks down the barriers between performer and audience.
Echo City's roots go back to 1983 when four musicians, Guy Evans (Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill), David Sawyer, Giles Perring and Giles Leaman, were commissioned by the arts charity Interlink to build the UK's first sonic playground on an adventure playground in Bethnal Green. Built to withstand the onslaught of disaffected youth from one of London's most deprived inner city boroughs, the finished structure sported giant tubular bells fashioned from scrap streetlamps, drums made from polyethylene storage barrels and the first [and since much imitated] Batphone - a bass percussion instrument resembling a giant pan-pipe made from yellow polyethylene gas main. The project was huge hit with play and recreation professionals as well as the children who used it. Within three months, the same team had been commissioned to build a second playground for disabled children at The Hayward Playground in Islington and, with funding from The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the musicians were able to experiment with new materials - principally aluminium and fibreglass.
This project in particular generated a wholly unanticipated level of interest from the media and from promoters. The sonic playground team suddenly found itself in demand to perform and run projects. There was one problem - the only instruments it had built were bolted into two playgrounds and belonged to other people. For the following year, Echo City as it had now dubbed itself, and now supplemented by Paul Shearsmith staged events at such prestigious locations as the South Bank using instruments discreetly borrowed from their permanent sites.
In June 1985, the solution came in the form of a grant and technical
assistance from The London 
Innovation Network. Using a fully equipped
workshop and assisted by skilled professionals, Echo City was able to refine its original
designs and build them into the mobile unit which made its debut at the 1985 Pendley Jazz
Festival followed a week later by WOMAD. This highly adaptable structure has now
been at the heart of Echo City's project and performance work for over a decade. By now
Sawyer had returned to his own work in Exeter, Devon, and Giles Leaman had taken up full
time work as a playleader. Rob Mills, an improvising saxophonist and then treasurer of the
London Musician's Collective joined the group as did Susie Honeyman [violinist and
researcher for the original sonic playground projects] as a performer and project worker.
Left-field curiosity and an in built distaste for out-and-out commercial exploitation have since brought Echo City a unique and indefinable career path which has embraced commissioned art, equipment manufacture, community project work, music composition and performance.
Echo City have performed worldwide at festivals and in concerts on their 'Mobile', an assembly of their unique instruments. The performances combine improvisation with more orchestrated pieces bringing together the diverse musical experiences of the members. Conventional instruments rub shoulders with outlandish constructions of fibreglass, aluminium, steel and gas main to produce dramatic and uplifting music. Echo City perform in conventional venues - festivals and concert halls - but enjoy most the environments where exciting spontaneous music is seldom heard - hospitals, zoos, coach stations, and shopping malls.
Any inquiries regarding performances, playground designs, workshops or consultations will be forwarded directly to Echo City.
One King Poets/Major Wood ....import CD $15.99
Much has been written recently about Miles' electric period, Agharia, Get Up With It, ect., but none of the gathering enthusiasm has so far produced any muisc which approaches the power and sheer joy of those records. Most attempts have concentrated on the dissonance and volume while neglecting the other vital element - a massive, hip-rolling groove! A small experimental music club in London was therefore a most surprising place to discover a re-affirmation of the music. To some extent it was probably as much a shock for the performers. One King Poets have been together as a trio of Mike Walter (saxophones and organs), Robin Musgrove (drums) and Jerry Bird (electric bass) for several years. They mainly played the free improvising circuit - despite the fact that they don't improvise, instead inviting special guests to improvise over their pre-arranged pieces. These guests have come from areas as diverse as Afro-Pop and experimental electronic music, with results that were, to say the least, variable. However, when they invited Echo City members Giles Perring (electric guitar) and Paul Shearsmith (trumpet/trombone), they were cooking from the outset!
Echo City/Echo City ....import EP CD $13.99
'Echo City' is a new EP CD that features one 19 minute track in eight movements - an excellent new work! Be advised that this is a limited numbered edition! The initial run is only 100 copies! With a little luck, there may be additional runs!
Order Now!
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