Echo Mine constitutes a new partnership, a farewell and a reunion. It’s the name for a dance choreographed and performed by Robyn Mineko Williams in remembrance of Claire Bataille, who was a founder of Chicago’s Hubbard Street dance troupe. Originally, it was going to be a collaboration between Bataille and Williams (her former student), but Bataille was diagnosed with cancer early in the piece’s development. After she died, Williams completed a work intended to honor the artist who had mentored a generation of modern dancers.
Williams tapped Tim Rutili—the sole constant member of long-lived, occasionally Chicago-based combo Califone—to score the dance. Rutili formed Califone in 1997 from the detritus of Red Red Meat, and he has always understood it to be flexibly composed, allowing him to collaborate with different musicians. But some of those folks stuck around for years at a stretch, and the partings weren’t always smooth. He made the music to accompany Echo Mine with percussionist Ben Massarella and engineer/producer/multi-instrumentalist Brian Deck. Both men were in RRM, and together they fashioned the first Califone LP, Roomsound. But each has also spent years away from the project.
While the returnees’ presence likely gives old fans a warm feeling inside, the sound of Echo Mine is not so much a wander down memory lane as it is an attempt to use shared tools to pave new road. As usual, Rutili’s rasping voice, slithering slide guitar and opaque-yet-resonant lyrics are constants. And Massarella’s instincts for finding just the right vivid textures and constructing creative, functional rhythms can always be relied upon to enrich the music, making the familiar seem novel in reassuringly familiar ways.
But Deck is professional recordist who’s in a milieu that conspires to make his skills and craft redundant. So while you can hear a Crazy Horse-like gesture here and a Basement Tapes-meets-Remain In Light moment there, you’ll also hear vocal treatments and a malleable sense of space that reflects a handiness with contemporary tools. This is especially evident during the instrumental passages, which are way too propulsive to be characterized as ambient music, but are just as focused on the treatment of sound itself as material. Echo Mine may be assembled from guitars, hand drums and drum machines, but it feels like the synthesis of groove and light. And it’ll get you in the gut when both elements fade near the album’s end.
—Bill Meyer
