The Echo Garden | review in Textura
“Jimmy Behan presents ten micro-detailed sound paintings on The Echo Garden. Eschewing sampling and excluding from his sound palette guitars, drums, vocals, and synth pads, the Irish sound sculptor uses piano, sine tones, found sounds, and field recordings to generate intimate evocations of pastoral tranquility. Fragments of early morning light shine through the trees in Behan’s sonic environment, warming the isolated pond that’s at the setting’s center. Tiny speckles of processed sounds glimmer throughout the peaceful settings, sometimes accompanied by a more “natural” sound (such as an electric piano in Leaving Here) or a field recording (outdoor sounds in Across the Rooftops). While the bell tones in Rust invite a gamelan characterization and a central melancholy melody lends Clock for No Time a song-like structure, the album’s material generally resists genre or stylistic labeling but rather inhabits an abstract space midway between electronic and acoustic sounds, and sound design and compositional form. There’s a focus on the detail of a given sound as well as on how the individual elements cohere into a larger whole. Behan’s clearly more focused on treating the material as explorations of texture and sound that invite associations without dictating them; interestingly, though, the programmatic dimension established via track titling—a trajectory that finds the hypothetical hiker visiting the site in early morning, communing with it, and eventually departing from it as evening approaches—indicates that the composer isn’t interested in wholly severing the ties to referentiality.”
July 2009.