Recorded January 2007 in Huntington Beach, California.

Chronologically speaking, this track is probably the last composition to my credit that could comfortably reside under the umbrella term, "psychedelic rock." Within a couple months of this song's completion, I had dropped out of UCLA's Ethnomusicology program (the influence of which can clearly be heard here in the Middle Eastern-inspired percussion parts) and re-located to Portland, OR where no-wave and free improv rapidly moved into focus, the heady combination of which all but eclipsed my previous leaning towards 1960s rock and marked the advent of what, in retrospect, I might consider my "new psychedelia."

Composed at the outset of what was to become a "long-distance relationship," the lyrics make oblique reference to that situation, especially the line offering to "dissociate [sic] from space and time," wherein I'm pretty sure I meant to write/sing "disassociate," but far more egregious errors have slipped by far better writers so I suppose I won't beat myself up over it too badly.

One of my favorite aspects of this piece is the through-composed structure, which consists of several related, interlocking parts that never really repeat (with the exception of the ending coda referring back to the intro section, though strictly speaking, it, too is a new part. Had I stayed in California and dodged the massively re-inventing influences waiting for me in Portland, it's likely that this song would've been a prototype for a whole series of compositions based loosely on it's definitive traits. I recall speaking with another student at UCLA, in typically pretentious terms, about inventing a "new genre of music," of which "Echoes Ring Out" was apparently the initial exposition. This supposed new genre was to be identified by non-standard, through-composed compositional structures, pan-ethnic flourishes such as the percussion section and jazz-ish guitar noodling, and hallucinogenic textures rooted in Western psychedelic rock. I guess that seemed a bit more revolutionary to me at the time, for whatever reason.

Despite the awful cliche that is perpetrated by the "backwards guitar solo" in far too many incidences to bother counting, something about the way it sits in this arrangement, especially in a call-and-response pattern against the vocals, as well as the clean rhythm guitar, is actually compelling enough today to actually give me pause to consider using that effect again somewhere. I can't imagine where in my current and upcoming work that would possibly be appropriate, but every time I hear it in this track, I have that same thought. Though obviously flawed in many ways, and I don't just mean the hideously out-of-tune snare drum, this song actually has many things that keep me going back to it. Maybe the backwards guitar should be left on the table, but what about the weird song structure here? It's definitely something to keep in mind as I continue struggling to squeeze out that "truly original idea" that seems to evade me at every attempt. There's definitely something to this one.

One last observation: I think this is the only recording where I play the bass with fingers all the way through. Hadn't ever happened before, and not likely to happen again. Not that interesting, I know, but there you go.