Echotal share long-awaited collaboration with Jo Quail, 'Melting Ice'

Echotal and Jo Quail have teamed up for a new collaborative single called 'Melting Ice'. Echotal is the moniker of musician and artist David Rooney, born out of the need to interweave and reconcile his two creative forms.

Jo Quail is a celebrated composer and cellist, who "freely crosses the boundaries between genres, awakening listener emotions, and taking audiences into uncharted territory with each concert. Her exuberant, celebratory performance style has won her a fanbase in the contemporary classical world as well as among enthusiasts of progressive music, post-rock, metal and electronica."

"'Melting Ice’ has been percolating around in my head for a long time," David Rooney explains. "The opening section has always conjured up ice melting and spring appearing, but the second part has the sense of foreboding that melting ice also brings.

"I had the good fortune to visit New Zealand just before the virus hit last year and see for myself the reality of retreating glaciers on the South Island. A few weeks earlier I was in Sydney surrounded by burning forests with an acrid otherworldly yellow haze hanging over the city."

Rooney has always been drawn to the northern landscapes and tried to recreate them in the sonic palette of 'Melting Ice'.

"The second part of the track is directly inspired by the soundtrack to ‘In the Mood for Love’ by Shigeru Umebayashi (Yumeji’s theme) and the ‘Echotal’ EP in general was coloured by the soundtrack to ‘The Revenant’ by another Japanese composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who I’ve loved since first hearing his work while in art college in the 1980s," Rooney says.

"The video started out with an idea to animate two old samurai warriors trudging through snow to meet one another to fight, but never managing to in the end."

The recording is Rooney's first collaboration with Jo Quail.

"When I heard Jo Quail’s cello contribution and saw her stunning live performances on YouTube, I really wanted to have her featured," Rooney adds. "The Polish video maker 'Chariot of Black Moth’ had footage of Jo, so we shot some additional footage of me playing the guitar one night by the fire here in the garden and as a result Jo and I finally met up in the resultant film."

The track is produced by Torsten Kinsella of God Is An Astronaut.

Watch the video below.