“He strove to make KALX more inclusive. He strove to give us a more global sound, and he wrote the most amazing reviews on those records.” — Heidi De Vries, fellow KALXer and longtime friend of Michael Henning via The Daily Californian
Echoes on the Shore is the fourth and final album by Skyminds, a duo made up of Michael Henning (aka DJ Megasoup, a KALX DJ since 2003) and Sean Conrad (aka Channelers, founder of Seattle label Inner Islands). It’s a solemn end to a project that lasted a decade, as Henning died at the age of 49 this past October.
On this, their final full-length work together, the duo continues working in the spirit of improvisation, blending a mesh of strings, synths, and other supple soundmakers into a glowing tapestry of presence. Threading the conversation between Eno’s definition of ambient music—”as ignorable as it is interesting”—and the Tibetan Buddhist concept of our true mind’s sky-like nature, Conrad and Henning weave a living breathing peace. “Springtime,” notably, is the duo’s first release of an un-edited improvisation, the recording captured at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum before its relocation to LA.
