Echolocation from Echolocation by Mendoza Hoff Revels

Echolocation - This was written mainly during spring 2020, the first outbreak of COVID. I had spent the previous few years gigging hard and playing mostly pretty dense, “complex” music, a lot of it atonal or atonal-ish, a lot of it involving difficult charts. All of a sudden that seemed too busy, too obsessed with technique, and emotionally un-relatable in this time of slowed-down apocalypse. I spent a few months that spring in LA, and went for long walks and drives out of town since there wasn’t much else possible. Due to both the conditions of the pandemic, and the spaciousness of the western landscape, I started to hear things differently. Long gestures and ideas, repetition, and deeper attention to tonal harmony/big resonant chords with intense blues/country type bends, all became more important to me.

I think of this as an Americana tune… not in the corny/idealizing sense, but in the sense that it’s rooted in American music, people, and landscapes— the good, the brutal, all of it. 
References: Ask the Ages-type Pharoah Sanders + Sonny Sharrock, David Torn, Earth/Dylan Carlson esp. The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, Alice Coltrane's Kirtan:Turiya Sings

–Ava Mendoza

• Experimental
• New York