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Blogger Of The Week: Echoes and Dust
This week's blogger of the week is Dan, from Echoes And Dust. ABoF have enjoyed a lot of support from the blog over the years, and it's genuinely great to see that there are still bloggers and promoters out there with an eye for catching emerging new talent on the UK scene. We caught up with him over the weekend for a quick interview.
Tell us how Echoes and Dust got started.
Echoes And Dust came to life on a wet Wednesday evening back in 2007 when a group of like-minded Indie geeks sat in Islington’s Mucky Pup (best jukebox in London!) harping on that there weren’t enough websites covering the particular dark corner of Indiedom that we liked to frequent.
At that point the thought occurred to us that rather than moaning about it why didn’t we get off our collective backsides and do something about it? And Thus, the website was born.
Since then we have reviewed some several hundred albums, gigs and associated bits and bobs and hopefully become a go-to place for a hardy handful of music enthusiasts.
Where does the name "Echoes And Dust" come from?
That's a good question and one we're not totally sure of ourselves! We bandied a lot of names around that night in the pub, whilst consuming a number of sherbets, but my best guess is that we derived it from The God Is An Astronaut tune Dust & Echoes but felt it tripped off the tongue better the other way around.
What's your best resource for finding new music?
We're fortunate now that we've been going long enough and enough people know us that new music finds us, we get more submission requests than we can ever really cover but we do always make a point to at least listening to everything that gets sent in. That said, Twitter is a very powerful tool for bringing blogs & bands together & we've discovered quite a lot of our favourite bands just through chatting on there.
You're a promoter as well - any stories from the front line you'd care to share?
Haha, god, almost too many! I've been a promoter far longer than I've been a blogger, in fact without wanting to date myself too much I've been a promoter far longer than there have been blogs period! As much as I love writing & the site, live music is where it's at and although being a promoter can be insanely stressful (like having your headliner turn up 5 minutes after you've just announced to the crowd that he's not coming, as happened to us just this week) it can also be hugely rewarding (like when the same headliner then goes on a plays an utterly magical, spine tingling set) and the feeling you get seeing the look on people's faces during a really special night and thinking 'I did this' is like no other.
Beyond that, I'm sure every promoter has the same tales of woe, bands getting lost / breaking down / forgetting you've booked them or having to deal with venue owners who want you to fill their venues and sell their booze but also want you to turn everything down to barely audible etc & so on! Frankly, in my experience, organising musicians makes herding cats look like a relaxing pastime, but when it all comes together it is so worth it.
2011 is drawing to a close. What've been your musical highlights this year?
I think 2011 has been a pretty strong year on the music front, certainly in the areas that I pay most attention to. Great albums from And So I Watch You From Afar, Maybeshewill, Alright The Captain, Trojan Horse and Firesuite have all been on heavy rotation in our office. Special mention has to go to 2 albums though: La Ligne Apre by Tormenta, they are a French band and not that well known over here but this album is insanely good, heavy math metal. I have honestly never heard anything like it before & I'm very excited that they're coming to play for us at the end of this month. And lastly a record that I've only just got by a band from Belfast called LaFaro called Easy Meat. I can not stop playing it, it's just pure adrenaline fuelled power punk. They're not doing anything particularly new but they do it with such enthusiasm & gusto it's impossible not to like it.
Is there anyone on the ABoF roster that you've been listening to?
I have to say, without wanting to sound horribly sycophantic, that the ABoF roster has become increasingly impressive over the last year or so.
I'm a big fan of Esperi, IndianRedLopez, Architects Of Grace, Ex Libras, Talons, Knifeworld & the list goes on & on!
Finally, top tips for running your own music blog.
My main tip is persevere! For a long time it felt as if we were just shouting in to the void, a common feeling in all forms of blogging I think, but gradually after 3 1/2 years we have built ourselves up to a position where we have a small but pretty dedicated audience. I guess the other thing I'd say is find your niche, don't try & cover everything, but find a little corner of the music world that you're particularly passionate about. It makes it a lot easier to keep it going when you're writing about stuff you love. With Echoes & Dust we've gone out of our way to cover stuff we love but gets very little space elsewhere. As a result of that we've built a solid rapport with a lot of the bands we write about and subsequently that helps the live side of our operation, as they know we genuinely believe in them. Building these kinds of relationships is essential to surviving in an arena that is pretty saturated.