Echo City

Echo City
Echo City at the 100 Years Gallery in London November 2013
Background information
Origin	London, England
Genres	sound art, improvised music, experimental music, community art
Years active	1983–present
Labels	Gramophone, Line Records, Some Bizzare
Associated acts	Van der Graaf Generator, The Mekons, Unmen
Members	Giles Perring Paul Shearsmith Guy Evans Rob Mills Julia Farrington
Past members	Susie Honeyman Giles Leaman

Echo City is a British sound sculpture and music project founded in London in 1983 by Van der Graaf Generator member Guy Evans, Giles Leaman, and Giles Perring. Its current active members are Guy Evans, Julia Farrington, Rob Mills, Giles Perring and Paul Shearsmith.Susie Honeyman of The Mekons is a former member of the group. The project builds giant musical instruments and sound sculptures called "sonic playgrounds", but Echo City has since 1985 also performed as a band.

The project creates and builds collections of giant musical instruments and sound sculptures of its own design called "sonic playgrounds". The original concept of these structures was to involve audiences and viewers in music making themselves. The group has run music and arts projects over many years based on encouraging participation in music and sound making. The original team formed in 1983 included Guy Evans, Giles Perring, Giles Leaman and David Sawyer. The latter joined as musical instrument maker/sound sculptor for Weaver’s Adventure Playground and Hayward Adventure Playground, contributing the Fibrephone design and future name of the group. Echo City has also performed as a band since 1985 and has made a number of recordings which it has released via its own Gramophone Records label, Line Music and Some Bizzare.

Echo City's first recording was the album Gramophone, named because like all the other things the group produced with the "phone" suffix [their instruments in particular], the record was something that could be played. Gramophone was a collection of recordings, some of which were originally made for a documentary film for British TV station Channel 4 called "Welcome to the Spiv Economy". Other tracks were live recordings made at the London Musician's Collective building in Chalk Farm London. The recordings featured a number of conventional instruments as well as Echo City's own devices and combined a range of musical styles including jazz inspired melodic music, field recordings and a sequence of pieces reflecting an improvised approach that was to figure heavily in the group's subsequent work. The follow up, The Sound of Music, released on Stevo Pearce's industrial label Some Bizzare in 1992, was entirely performed usings Echo City's own self made instruments and, reflecting the group's increasing involvement in participatory music making and community arts, was a more abstract and experimental recording, derived from studio based improvisations, live and field recordings and pieces recorded in music workshops. It also featured the project's first use of sampling technology.