Sheila Chandra announces release of Echo – a collection of live performances

A shy and infrequent live performer in her time, and very much aware that so many of her fans were disappointed never to have seen her in concert, Chandra has put together this collection of recordings to give them a taste of what her breathtaking virtuoso solo voice performances were like.

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‘Echo’ is a set drawn from an extensive search for every concert, TV or radio session recording that Chandra ever made. From these she has picked the finest performances of her songs, drawn largely from the first two albums of her 90s solo-voice-and-drone trilogy, which was reissued on vinyl on its 30^th anniversary, in 2023. Other additions here include two songs from her fifth solo album ‘Roots and Wings’ where she was refining the techniques she would later come to use on ‘Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices’, and ‘The Zen Kiss’ – and a final track drawn from her appearances during the first ‘Imagined Village’ tour in 2007.

Sheila Chandra’s original Real World trilogy set a new standard in the treatment of voice in the studio in the 90s. Band Aid sound engineer (and now long-time producer) Stuart Bruce, with whom Chandra first worked while putting down the vocals for the Monsoon album at Sarm East in 1982, and who mix-engineered her Real World trilogy at Real World studios in the 90s, has masterfully cleaned up and enhanced these recordings for release under Chandra’s direction, with fitting technical and poetic continuity. Though a studio perfectionist, Chandra was keen to preserve the integrity of the live recordings.

“My performances were co-created, by my audience and myself,” says Chandra. “It’s a performer’s presence and heart that an audience come to hear, not technical perfection. Concerts are one of the few places where another person gives us their undivided, undistracted and ‘in the moment’ presence, and we, as audience, ‘borrow’ their stilled mind. It’s one of the vanishingly few spaces in our society where that still happens.

The performances embodied on this album, reflect that truth. They are not perfect. And sustaining 100% focused concentration when you’re carrying an entire show alone is impossible. In some cases, I had access to performances of the same song with greater technical perfection, but less ‘soul’. In every case, I have chosen feeling over precision – even, in some cases, chosen ‘soul’ over the best available recording quality.

That said, listening to an album is not the same as being at a live performance but I’ve tried to ignore the impulse to ‘change history’.”

“These performances, whether drawn from concerts or radio sessions, were all recorded as single takes” adds Chandra. “I wasn’t a machine and it’s important that the live recordings reflect that.”