George Hurd

From the blog

Echo_4

Echolocation: Launched

It’s finally here. Echolocation is a new project of mine focusing on the two things I love most in this world: travel and music. About a year ago I had the innocent idea to write some pieces of music based on places I had traveled. It evolved into the most incredible experience I’ve ever had – a 90-day adventure that spanned Europe, recording massive amounts of sounds unique to every place I went, and using them to write music about each location.

So I hit the road, recorder in hand, to capture sounds from over Europe – pulling it all in, processing it, and transforming it into music. It’s led to months of incredible travel, produced nearly a hundred hours of recordings, almost destroyed a savings account, and inspired oceans of editing, writing, and composing. And I’m just getting started.

It’s taken me to mind-blowing places I would never have gone and connected me to incredible people I would never have met. I was able to record with truly talented local musicians (a flutist and 96-piece choir in Germany, violinist/ flutist in Rome, guitar quartet in Portugal), and this unpredictably collaborative process opened up countless new doors for me as a composer.

I’m looking for subscribers to support this project. By subscribing, you’ll receive a new piece from a new location every 4-6 weeks. You’ll also receive writing, pictures and videos exploring our travel and the process of composing this music. The first song is Oslo about (you guessed it) Oslo, Norway, the first stop on our trip. It’s filled with sounds collected during our short stay there – stomping, singing, laughter, wind, and echoes –  all energetic and bursting with excitement for the start of this adventure.

Subscribe to download and listen to the full song.
Listen to an excerpt below:

Subscribers will have the choice of different membership tiers, each offering increasingly exclusive items to accompany the music: free downloads of the albums in my back catalog, the original field recordings used to build the music, postcards sent to you from us on our travels (next up: a 3-week road trip though New Zealand – so much music to write!), exclusive behind-the-scenes pics/vids/info, free concert tickets, and more. Go HERE to explore what options you’ve got to choose from!

This project will be BIG. A sprawling web of music defined by the ever-changing landscape. Each piece will be different. It all depends on what sounds we discover and what we need to evoke that place, those experiences. Because of this I decided to make it an ongoing subscription-based project. It needs the room to grow into whatever it has to become, and releasing as a simple one-off record just felt too restrictive. Some pieces will be electronic, others acoustic, many will be both. Some may be short, some very long. Whatever happens I just want to take you along for the ride to find out how it all comes together.

Every inch of this is being created side-by-side with my wife, Anna Hurd (formerly Anna Singer), the wildly talented graphic artist who has spent every second with me on these travels, understands my music better than anybody, and will be contributing much of the visual side of Echolocation – graphic design, illustrations, photography, films, and more. You can see her incredible handiwork appearing already in the Echolocation video above and the album art below.

This is a life-changing project for me and one that’s extremely close to my heart. It’s the single most inspiring project I’ve ever worked on, and I hope you can be part of it by subscribing!

Much love,
George

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