Snow Angel

Echo Mine is Califone's score to Robyn Mineko Williams' dance. The movement and the music started together and grew together, like two clear entities. At times totally intertwined and at other times bouncing off one another, sort of like reflections. But, somehow, always connected and listening. Ben Massarella, Brian Deck and I worked in a way that felt like a return to home; Brian handling the engineering, electronics, drums and overall sound of the piece, Ben adding percussion, feel, essential textures and colors. I felt like my job was to hover over all of it like a moth. Find melody in everything. Leave openings for everyone to work at the top of their creativity. We made our album, Roomsound, in much the same way (almost 20 years ago). Three of us in the studio ' Be humans. Play together as much as possible. A good feel beats perfection every time. Add other musicians to add other voices and other colors, to do the things we can't do.

Georgy Sviridov was a celebrated figure whose vocal works, along with those of his teacher Shostakovich, are considered to be among the most important in twentieth-century Russian music. His ‘small cantata’ Snow is Falling includes passages of hypnotic stillness as well as folk-like warmth, while the major song cycle Russia Adrift evokes landscape, mysticism and religious faith, ending in a solemn hymn to the Motherland. Sviridov’s prolific output included symphonic suites as well as theatre and film scores. The angular and impassioned Music for Chamber Orchestra reveals his mastery of non-vocal music.

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)