New - Atlantic Road Trip - Watch As The Echo Falls - LP

Watch As The Echo Falls marks a conscious shift in Atlantic Road Trip’s artistic trajectory. Their debut album, ONE, served as their initial statement—a full quintet exploring folk music through their perspective as jazz musicians from around the globe. During the tour that followed, they composed Over Mountain, Under Sky, an ambitious large-scale work for big band, orchestra, and trio that pushed their sound to its grandest scale.
With this release, they’ve intentionally pared everything back to discover what emerges when three instruments meet at their most essential. It’s an exploration of minimalism and intimacy that honors the folk and jazz foundations at the heart of their musical practice.

“This album navigates two fundamental questions,” says Chad McCullough. “The first is: how little can we use to say something meaningful? The second, paradoxically, asks how much color and texture we can incorporate while remaining true to our artistic core.”

The album weaves brief cinematic soundscapes between minimalist compositions that serve as frameworks for improvisation. Propelled by the trio’s diverse instrumental palette—particularly Paul Towndrow’s array of whistles, flute, and alto saxophone—the music reveals itself as protean and unpredictable. This is three musicians working at the height of their powers, resisting easy categorization at every turn.

At the trio’s foundation, vibraphonist Miro Herak provides the architectural framework upon which much of the music is built, offering both harmonic grounding and structural clarity for the horn players. Recorded in Herak’s hometown of The Hague, his thematic composition “Past Memories” and the album’s bookending “Prologue” and “Epilogue” create a subtle narrative thread throughout the recording. “When I composed ‘Past Memories,’” Herak explains, “I aimed to evoke a sense of nostalgia and reflection, allowing listeners to journey through their own memories while experiencing the music. I hope to create a space where audiences can connect with their own stories, evoking a sense of peace and introspection.”

Multi-instrumentalist Paul Towndrow, one of Scotland’s most versatile and inventive voices, contributed two contrasting pieces. “Parting of the Adriatic” is a serpentine, near-jig with pronounced Balkan inflections—playful and rhythmically intricate. “It explores the natural friction between Balkan time signatures and the Celtic and jazz traditions we grew up with,” says Towndrow. “It’s more than just a rhythmic experiment; it’s an attempt to find the exact intersection where our individual histories meet.” His second offering, “Cadmus,” strikes a more contemplative tone. “I wrote it as a reflection on memory and the stories that anchor our history,” Towndrow explains. “It’s named after a WWII minesweeper that sailed with my grandfather’s ship, the HMS Sheffield. This song is about keeping those fleeting moments from being lost to time.”

McCullough composed the album’s remaining pieces, most written in the week leading up to the session. “I was convinced nothing would work,” he recalls. “I kept writing, hoping something would land, but felt like I was missing the mark entirely. I even called one of my sketches #72 because it felt like I’d written that many bad things. I arrived fairly anxious, but the moment we began rehearsing, those fears evaporated.” Some tracks lean into maximal texture—”Spell Breaking,” with its five vibraphone layers, multiple whistle parts, and doubled trumpet lines, began, as McCullough describes it, “as a longer-form composition drawing equally from Tears for Fears and the Irish-Anglo traditional band Flook. With no guitars to be found, we leaned into creative studio production to realize the textures I was hearing.” With others, so much color and depth emerged by leaving significant interpretive space for the musicians to inhabit. “Silere” evolved from an abandoned motet into what McCullough considers “one of the more beautiful pieces on the album.” “Fading Photograph” finds him “drawn to the challenge of playing trumpet beneath the flute—from our first session together, I’ve felt an intuitive connection with Paul’s phrasing; sometimes it’s scary enough that we both laugh.” “And Again” layers shifting melodies that modulate and change meter contrapuntally over one another. “Echo Falls” presents a straightforward folk melody in 5/4 that, while growing in complexity, is always anchored by Herak’s recurring ostinato. And “Singularity,” inspired by the West African balafon, takes its name from the trio’s unified sense of purpose and focus.

The album unfolds with intentional contrast—synthesizer interludes and electronically processed passages set against spare, acoustic trio pieces. Through it all runs a unifying principle: these musicians refuse to settle into comfortable folk-jazz convention. As McCullough puts it, “This album is like jumping into the ocean. You never quite know what’s coming, but you’re guaranteed to get fully submerged.”