the echo and echoplex

Peter Walker || Listen

Walker once directed music for Timothy Leary’s infamous “Celebrations”, in which Leary would rant to an acid-drenched audience of thousands. He also played with Sandy Bull, the legendary Indian-folk fusionist, and hung around with people like Joan Baez who, by the end of the decade, would be far more famous than him. As a fixture of both the Cambridge and NYC Village scenes, Walker was, like Bull, an early devotee of Eastern musical traditions; during and especially after Rainy Day Raga, Walker studied and experimented with the sitar and other then-exotic instruments. After fading from the limelight and settling in Woodstock, he apparently studied flamenco in Spain and kept up with his craft. Here on Raga, it sounds as if he’d never left.

His…playing is a marvel, halting and propulsive at once. “Day at the Fair” moves awkwardly but inexorably forward with a slow but insistent push, looping usually linear progressions around on themselves. On “Hot Fusion”, his cross-eyed phrasings sound like reluctant play, strands gradually being woven together into an intricate whole. Walker has the ability to distort time with his compositions, to move forward or back as if there was no real difference. - Pitchfork

with:
Big Search

@ Echoplex
enter at
1154 Glendale Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026

7:00 pm / $12 / all ages