"It's Time for Winter": Echo Us prepare the Solstice with a new animated music video
In keeping with the recent tradition, Echo Us is releasing its 4th animated music video called "It's Time for Winter", on the winter solstice. The single is the first Echo Us work to see release after the three-album Trilogy Memoriam concluded in 2014. As the project's founder, Ethan Matthews is also celebrating his 15th year of creating and releasing music as Echo Us.
It’s Time For Winter embraces the season with its light to dark metaphorical stanzas wrapped in quick-paced percussive bravado and guitar atmospheres. Echo Us as a musical project was conceived of during a two week commitment of its founder in a mental hospital 2001, and although the music has grown much brighter since that time there is also a tinge of unquiet in the new single.
"Echo Us music has grown more and more 'content' lyrically over the years, but certainly not less musically daring. That said, there are always two or three meanings wrapped into any piece of song material, and that is only coming from my perspective- the listener can make their own story", says Matthews.
Echo Us will soon announce release plans for its 5th full-length album in 2017. The album is an effective ‘epilogue’ to the Trilogy Memoriam in that it features tracks that didn’t fit within that larger work mixed with some written after the trilogy's close. "Although the album can be called an epilogue, it is absolutely its own work", says Matthews. "It's Time For Winter and the other tracks fit together seamlessly like the trilogy releases, but I did not know where they fit into the bigger picture at the time of their composition; it was like plucking out things from the whole that didn’t quite fit before, but they fit together perfectly as this new album".
"It’s Time for Winter" comes from the Tomorrow Will Tell the Story sessions. Echo Us will announce entire details on the new album and further video material in 2017.
Echo Us is a musical concept project active since the turn of the century. Begun by American composer and multi-instrumentalist Ethan Matthews, "Echo Us" literally means "to answer", or "to connect". The current format of the project began in a psychiatric ward 2001. There Matthews experienced the first of a series of consciousness-shifts that drove the project forward in the following years.
The beginnings of Echo Us itself go all the way back to August of 2000 when Ethan’s first group, Greyhaven split. Greyhaven had released one full-length album in Germany that had put his music on the map internationally. Greyhaven was known for their inventive combination of progressive rock and metal with Berlin-school electronic music. The band was revered and featured across Europe and gained a strong following in Germany particularly.
Matthews calls his unique approach to composition "musical channeling". Echo Us music is often written in trance states with automatic writing as the primary technique for recording the lyrical material. 'Spiritualist' phenomena has at times completely surrounded the recording process, with 2012's Tomorrow Will Tell the Story being the most poignant example. Tomorrow Will Tell the Story won an Independent Music Award and featured the vocals of GRAMMY-nominated singer-songwriter Henta, as well as a canticle sung by hermeticist Rawn Clark. Echo Us music is both about pattern recognition and intuition, and there are few stylistic boundaries.