Echo Helstrom (band)

Infobox musical artist
Name = Echo Helstron


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Origin = United States
Genre = Progressive rock
Fusion
Years_active = ????-present
Label = Unsigned
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Current_members = Ross Seligman, Guitar and Vocals
Will Amend, Bass and Vocals
Alessandra Dinu, Violin
Randy Rollofson, Drums
Chris Mosley, Guitar
Past_members = David Caldwell, Mike McDaniel, Annemarie Hoffman, Doug Johnson
Notable_instruments = Upright Bass, Violin

Echo Helstrom is a Portland, Oregon-based rock band led by former Blanket Music guitarist Ross Seligman.

The five members are all trained in classical and jazz music, and Echo Helstrom has been called an "orchestral rock band" due to their instrumentation (violin, and bowed standup bass instead of electric bass guitar) and arrangements, which runs from chamber music to punk rock and many genres in between. The result has been described as "...a combination of raw emotional power with sophisticated melodic beauty" (and more prosaically as "Kurt Cobain meets Leonard Bernstein").

The band is named after an early girlfriend of Bob Dylan, and Seligman’s lyrics and vocals have been described as Dylanesque.

The song "Floor 104" on their eponymous first album, with its haunting ending of "please don’t go / please don’t go / to work today / to work today", is dedicated to Seligman’s stepbrother Laurence Polatsch, who perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The Echo Jazz Trio - an incarnation of the band sans Dinu - is also active on the Portland scene, and performed Seligman’s music for a Netscape television ad.

The song "Where I Sleep" from the album "The Veil" was featured in the Feb. 12th, 2008 episode entitled 'In Da Club' of "One Tree Hill" on the station WB.

Discography

*"The Veil" (released November 2007)

External links

* [http://www.myspace.com/echohelstrom Echo Helstrom Myspace]
* [http://www.echohelstrom.com Echo Helstrom]
* [http://www.echojazztrio.com Echo Jazz Trio]