Rain Echoes

Rain Echoes is the collaboration between Sarah and Andrew Jeweleye.

The desert can be both calm and cacophonous. Silent and a snarl of sand. It can romance you with its echoes; bouncing between basin and range. It is sublime. It is serene. It is desperate, dour and dazzling.

Merging the subtly inspired and the obliquely experienced into snapshots of improvised knob-twirling, thing-tapping, string-wiggling and other forms of machine abuse has become Rain Echoes’ mission. Their vision, of the shifting sands and ageless stone criss-crossing the landscapes of the southwest.

Sarah & Andrew incorporate a varied mix of instruments both modern and ancient. From singing bowls and analog synth machines stuffed through loop upon loop of stomp-box effects to guitars, drums and other jingly things; their sole purpose in the context of Rain Echoes is to created seamless rivers of swelling and receding noise that paint a broader picture of an Ecosystem of Sound.

They have, in the years since the project emerged, purposefully withheld hours upon hours of recorded improv sessions in favor of performing once or twice annually in durational “sessions” that often last in excess of four hours.

To say it will become a “life’s work” to capture the desert’s essence in momentary and ephemeral sound falls, somehow, infinitely short of the act itself. However, this is the endeavor Sarah & Andrew Jeweleye have embarked upon.

During the summer of 2014, Flagstaff-based self-described future-punk duo, Black Lanterns, began incorporating Sarah Jeweleye’s deeply felt percussion and sound bowl performances into their frenetic frenzy of software sound and sampled guitar wailing; further illustrating the narrative both Andrew Jeweleye and William Cross were exploring through Black Lanterns.

As the Hollow Earth stories faded from memory, the receding hubris of its protagonist left, in its wake, a notion of the permanent impermanence; the defined nothing; the fleeting forever.

From this assessment of the scales of subconscious space emerged Rain Echoes; a meditation on the momentary.

Thank you, you.