First of all, I'd like to apologise to Mike Zellers for the long wait. This release had been stuck in review limbo for 112 days but now has been set free. But perhaps that long wait is fitting, as I sit here listening to echoes, an flute-centric ambient record that has me thinking about the passage of time.
It's interesting, with music like this, how it can be interpreted and felt. I don't know if Mike Zellers intended for me to think about the passage of time as I listened to this, and it would seem that the title is more inspired by how the tracks were made (i.e. using loops) than anything else.
But as I listened to this album, I felt like each track was representing the same space, except with eons between them.
Take echo 2, for instance, which is as beautiful as it is lonely. It's bright, but it's also melancholy, and there's a sense of regrowth after a long period of desolation. Skip ahead to echo 3, and it feels like I can see the same environment except far more verdant. There are deer in the woods, light shining between the trees, it's beautiful of couse, but the loneliness and melancholic feeling are absent.
And then where echo 4 feels cold, like it's been frozen over, echo 5 feels truly alive. It feels like an ancient civilization, long gone and long forgotten. The "echoes" to me feel like echoes of time. They feel like Monet's haystacks, illuminated in different ways at different times but structurally identical and consistent.
This all culminates with echo 6, by far the longest piece here, and also the biggest. The sound is almost overwhelming, it's more synthetic. Could this be millenia into the future, or could this be before time even began?
I don't know, but I'm glad that this piece was left in limbo for so long, else I may not have had the opportunity to review it.