- Best Use of Non-Traditional Percussion - 2012
Take a contact mike and one or more of the following: water bottle, stacked cymbals, detached hood of a car, a sheet of metal, floor tom, chains, bricks, file cabinet — any item that can make a sharp, clattering sound — and process or amplify the sounds these items make together, and you'll get a bit of the confrontational and eruptive sounds that Echo Beds uses in all of its sets. Echo Beds is to noise or the avant-garde now what Suicide was to the New York underground scene in the 1970s. These are not percussive sounds and textures for the sake of a cheap startle; they work in the context of unconventional songs and compositions. With its distinctive approach to rhythm, Echo Beds is effectively creating a new industrial music to reflect the harsh realities of the current era. - Westword
- High Expectations From the Lowest Common Denominator (Album)
Subterranean yet otherworldly sounds — like what you might hear if you were to somehow set up microphones in the endless tunnels of http://www.westword.com/related/to/H.P.+Lovecraft/" title="H.P. Lovecraft">H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness — start off this live recording from the 2011 Denver Noise Fest. At points, the creeping, ambient noise of bio-mechanical entities in the middle distance are interrupted by feral screams or roars echoing nearby. And it's all punctuated by bursts of sound, like steam suddenly shooting unexpectedly and violently from a fissure in the floor. Did Echo Beds model the sound of water dripping in a cave? Are http://www.westword.com/related/to/Tom+Nelson/" title="Tom Nelson">Tom Nelson and http://www.westword.com/related/to/Keith+Curts/" title="Keith Curts">Keith Curts channeling some creature hidden in the secret places of the earth that we only hear about in folklore and horror movies? It sure sounds like it throughout this recording, which is abstract yet infused with terrifying immediacy. - Westword - Tom Murphy
A juggernaut of sound and emotional catharsis, the music of Echo Beds draws an immediate comparison with Einsturzende Neubauten and the more percussion-heavy end of SWANS. Fusing sound and performance ideas from post-punk, industrial and noise, this band's shows aren't going for performance art, though the visual side of the show with Keith Curts and Tom Nelsen seems to exorcise demons through their voices, while unleashing punishing rhythms on percussion, bass and electronic devices. The act's recently released split with fellow Denver-based experimental project Tripp Nasty is a low-fi trip through a nightmarish vision of industrial blight. Arguably the most beautifully terrifying and electrifying band from Denver.
An Agonist Revision of a Future Lament (Album)
- Implications of an A B Conversation" is the sonic essence of the violence the industrial age has inflicted on the collective human psyche. Part avant-garde jazz and partially informed by the forbidding, terrifying side of harsh noise, this is an uncompromising release, as haunting and stark as a Tarkovsky film. - Westword - Tom Murphy
- Arsonist Alibi E.P. (Album)
Denver’s Echo Beds has been terrorizing DIY audiences around town with scrap metal and contact mics for a minute now, forging an industrial aesthetic that catastrophically crashes as much as it crawls across the skin. To boot, though this is certainly noise, it’s important to note the musicality present here as well. Improvised in practice, maybe, shapely and well-composed nonetheless. Still, if you have a comfort zone, get the fuck out of it right now.
- Tiny Mix Tapes
- Show
A saxophone at a metal gig? Is Bruce Lamont in the house? No, it was Echo Beds, a trio of miscreants whose unsettling noise threw a curveball into the night right as it began. Shifting between John Zorn-ian saxophone blasts and cavernous drifts not unlike Locrian, they gave an unconventional show the unconventional opening it deserved. Their highly distorted and improvised take on percussion also provided the right overdose of discomfort. I dug it -- if it's loud and pissed, I'll always give it a chance -- but the claps couldn't conceal a dude yelling "Play some real music!" That should say something about Echo Beds' reception.
- Crustcake
- Arsonist Alibi E.P. (Album)
Echo Beds have utterly outdone themselves this time, just as I knew they would. The Denver dystopian noise trio have created something so raw, so primal, so cerebrally violent that the musical masochist inside you will cry out in orgasmic delight. I watched Echo Beds perform this song in a packed DIY space with 4 drummers playing in sync, crashing and screeching sound-sculpture and member David Mead going out into the audience and screaming into a mega-phone. It absolutely blew me away, Echo Beds grabbed me by the lungs and pummeled me with sound as visceral as anything I’ve ever experienced from any one performance I could name, after their set I told them that I imagined the experience seemed similar to an early Swans show. To listen to their new Arsonist Alibi EP is to be willingly thrown into the cold muddy downward slide into a mass grave of sonic oblivion. Go ahead, let yourself be absorbed by the baphometic war machine that is the rhythm of “Arsonist Alibi pt. 1”. It’s very footsteps instills fear and anxiety into the hearts of all who hear it. It starts out right on top of you, with shrieking war cries and pummeling you with cascading mortars of rhythmic noise only to segway into slow breathing agression. As it broodingly waits for its next victim to come within striking distance.The other track on the record is quite similar except it contains vocal samples which make statements against war, corruption, racism, imperialism and religious fascism. All in all Echo Beds really are a stunning force in avante garde music today..
They make a bigger, more monstrously fierce sound than almost anyone and despite what some might think.. YES, the world still needs that, now more than ever. - Strangefire
- Arsonist Alibi E.P. (Album)
If you listen to the two parts of this EP, you’ll find that there is an element of controlled chaos that permeates the release and also parallels the band’s humble beginnings. After the sudden folding of a previous band, the guys had to perform a final tour gig with less than an hour to prepare. And thus Echo Beds was born. They took rubble and pressurized it into something new. Since that night they’ve decided to pour more of themselves into the project and it has yielded some wonderful results. Arsonist Alibi is a desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland, but there is also a sort of beauty to it. Bones crunch and snap, jagged shards of metallic noise cut their way through the atmosphere, and primal voices scream until vocal chords are left bruised and bloodied. And yet the band takes all of these harsh elements and grinds them down into parts with which they can build something new. Something worth sitting up and taking notice of. - Cactus Mouth
- An Agonist Revision of a Futilist Lament (Album)
Mocny muzyczny front w Denver zaczyna zarysowywać się w mojej wyobraźni. To w sumie ciekawe, bo nigdy nie miałem większych przemyśleń odnośnie tego miasta, nie kojarzyło mi się specjalnie z niczym, takie ładne, niewielkie, gdzieś na pustkowiu, a jednak... Po Sense From Nonsens przyszła kolej na Echo Beds, które poniekąd związane jest ze wspomnianym projektem. Album ten jest...cholernie niepokojący. Od pierwszych do ostatnich dźwięków jest w nim coś złego albo dokładniej - złowrogiego. Słuchając go, czułem się jakbym oglądał jakiś horror. Trochę poddenerwowany, spięty, bo napięcie można kroić już nożem i za chwilę coś może wyskoczyć zza rogu. Niby człowiek się nie boi, ale wolałby uniknąć czegoś takiego... I okazuje się, że nie jest potrzebny do tego obraz. Suspens można doświadczyć też w ten sposób. Końcówka całości wydaje się zresztą potwierdzać te moje filmowe podejrzenia.
Eksperymenty. Nie-do-końca-ambientowe-przestrzenie. Miejsca, które przywołują chociażby Einstürzende Neubauten z debiutującego okresu. I przede wszystkim hałas, rozumiany w sposób nienachalny. Zostawiam więc was z tym materiałem. I zalecam słuchanie nocą. Najlepiej głośno. - Soinoise
- High Expectations From The Lowest Common Denominator (Album)
I will warn you, this track is about 17 minutes long.Listening to this song is what I imagine David Lynch’s dreams to be like after a bottle of cough medicine… But I’m not sure “dreams” is the appropriate term.Echo Beds(Kieth Curtis, Tom Nelson) is a noise duo from Denver, I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting them as I believe they are presently on a west coast tour. This track is a live excerpt taken from Denver Noise Fest a few months ago. The aspects that drew me so much towards this song is shrowded in a reason that I have described before with other noise acts…Sculpting noise-scapes and abstract sound with climactic structure in mind will ALWAYS sell me faster than anything. This track will make you jump at times, with harsh noise lashing out like rabid teeth on the back of your neck. At other times it holds you in a very subtle form of tension with small sounds and the ever present delay effects. Which earn them their cavernous title and in my opinion they have one of my favorite names I’ve heard from a musical project yet.
- Strangefire
- Write Up
Echo Beds describes their music as “overdriventapehissnoisewalllandscape”, which is a pretty accurate description of the bands sound. But what this phrase fails to capture, is the “all in, whole body” commitment that members Tom Nelson and Keith Curts bring to the performance. When combined together, the sound and performance create a visceral, and often times polarizing, reaction for those caught in its wake. But whether you love it or hate it is of complete secondary importance – this release of energy and emotion is for themselves. This is their coping mechanism; their therapy.
However, if their brand of “music therapy” creates a positive emotional outlet for others, well the guys are cool with that too. - Literati Records
- High Expectations From the Lowest Common Denominator
Subterranean yet otherworldly sounds — like what you might hear if you were to somehow set up microphones in the endless tunnels of http://www.westword.com/related/to/H.P.+Lovecraft/" title="H.P. Lovecraft">H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness — start off this live recording from the 2011 Denver Noise Fest. At points, the creeping, ambient noise of bio-mechanical entities in the middle distance are interrupted by feral screams or roars echoing nearby. And it's all punctuated by bursts of sound, like steam suddenly shooting unexpectedly and violently from a fissure in the floor. Did Echo Beds model the sound of water dripping in a cave? Are http://www.westword.com/related/to/Tom+Nelson/" title="Tom Nelson">Tom Nelson and http://www.westword.com/related/to/Keith+Curts/" title="Keith Curts">Keith Curts channeling some creature hidden in the secret places of the earth that we only hear about in folklore and horror movies? It sure sounds like it throughout this recording, which is abstract yet infused with terrifying immediacy. - Westword