Echo Mine

• Echo Mine is Califone’s score to Robyn Mineko Williams’ dance. 

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. Direct only when necessary and 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.

As musicians, we are not precise. Califone can kick up some dust and ride a wave of self-created chaos. Many of our songs are built on foundations created out of spontaneous moments. It is nearly impossible for us to do the exact same thing twice. When it works, we can find magic in there. The song remains a living thing, always stretching and evolving.

Robyn is an abstract painter. I’m not sure how to explain what she does, but we all felt it deeply while creating this music.

Watching Robyn and the dancers rehearse, I had a similar feeling to being in front of a Rothko painting. There is a deliberate precision to the dance and movement that pulls the specifics of a story into abstract forms that illuminate the dream logic, the unseen edges and colors that deepen emotions all around what it is to be a human in a physical body – beyond words.

Maybe everyone involved in this project is an abstract painter.

– Tim Rutili