Folk & World
Real World Records release “Echo”, by Sheila Chandra, today, on vinyl and digitally. Chandra lost her voice fifteen years ago and presents “Echo” as what will probably be her last album: there is nothing newly sung on it, because she can no longer sing. The vinyl gathers ten takes and the digital version sixteen, all from concerts and from radio and television sessions, and all drawn from a trawl through every performance the British singer ever had recorded.
“These performances, whether drawn from concerts or radio sessions, were all recorded as single takes,” she says. “I wasn’t a machine and it’s important that the live recordings reflect that.”
Most of the tracks come from the first two albums of the solo-voice-and-drone trilogy she released in the nineties, reissued on vinyl in 2023 for its thirtieth anniversary. There are also two songs from her fifth solo album, “Roots and Wings”, and a track from The Imagined Village’s 2007 tour. The title points to the Greek nymph condemned never to say anything of her own and to repeat only the last words of others.
Chandra explains why she chose some takes and not others: “It’s a performer’s presence and heart that an audience come to hear, not technical perfection.” And on the selection itself: “I have chosen feeling over precision – even, in some cases, chosen ‘soul’ over the best available recording quality.”
Text by Alba Puiggròs