Interview Podcast – Echoes

When you name yourself deepspace you better live up to it. Mirko Ruckels, who is deepspace, has been doing that since 2007. His album, Neon Blue Utopia was a CD of the Month this past January and he has a new one called Water Planets. You might tell from those titles that Ruckels is influenced by science fiction.

Mirko Ruckels: “I’ve always loved science fiction and I’ve always loved, I’ve always been searching for that perfect kind of ambient science fiction scenario, you know, you know, exploring, exploring a planet by yourself, it speaks to that inner world.”

We talk to deepspace’s Mirko Ruckels about autism, Water Planets and of course, deepspace, on Echoes.

Read our review of Neon Blue Utopia, deepspace’s January 2025 Echoes CD of the Month
Sign up for the CD of the Month Club

The album is a tribute to Polish composer Josima Feldshuh, who died at 13 during the holocaust.  It’s also evoking the current political and global climate. Hania Rani sets herself free when we talk to her about Non-Fiction, Piano Concerto in Four Movements on Echoes.

In the Echoes Podcast,Tubular Bells’ composer Mike Oldfield talks about Ommadawn, his two-sided epic from 1975. Mike Oldfield changed the world of progressive rock and instrumental music with his 1973 opus, Tubular Bells. But two years later he released this third album that many consider to be his masterpiece. It was released 50 years ago on September 25 or November 7. There’s a little dispute there. Today we revisit this epic work and our interview with Mike talking about an album that was inspired by his mother, who died during the recording, but left him her Irish heritage.

Mike Oldfield: I listened to music, Irish music, and there’s something in your blood.  It really is, if I hear something Celtic, something, my ears perk up and just, I identify with it. So it’s always been part of me.

We talked to Oldfield in 2017 about his album, Return to Ommadawn and of course, we talked a lot about the original Ommadawn recording. We’ll return to that interview and we’ll also hear both parts of Ommadawn on its 50th Anniversary in the Echoes Podcast.

Singer Azam Ali from Vas, and Niyaz graces the Echoes Podcast. The voice of Azam has been part of the Echoes soundscape for 3 decades. Her Persian fusion groups, Vas and Niyaz, were seminal acts and her solo albums have included chants of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, and hymns of Sephardic Jews sung in Ladino, to the electronic-driven sounds of her 2019 album, Phantoms. But after that release and the pandemic, she fell into depression and was thinking of leaving music.

Azam Ali: The music industry has just become a place that I didn’t relate to anymore and couldn’t find my place in this new world of becoming what I describe as an Instagram artist. I’m not an Instagram artist.

Definitely not. She has a brilliant new album, working out these themes called Synesthesia and we talk to her in an extended version of our broadcast feature in the Echoes Podcast.

Bluetech’s album, Spacehop Chronicles 2 is the Echoes CD of the Month for October and in the Echoes Podcast, we have Bluetech himself, Evan Bartholomew, talking about this electronic journey into orbit that sits between space music and trip-hop, all meditating on the journey of Laika, the canine cosmonaut that died in space.

Bluetech: For me, creating hope and the possibility of beauty and talking about fantastic sci-fi worlds and giving people a moment to escape and to feel larger than their lives is my approach and the only thing that I know how to do in response to chaos and what’s kind of going on around us.

In our review, we called Spacehop Chronicles 2 “definitive head-trip music for the 21st century.”  Bluetech takes us on a trip when we talk to him tonight on Echoes from PRX.

Read our review of Spacehop Chronicles 2