Little Deaths = Tim Cornelius & Glen Ross / Echocellos

Lent - recorded live at St Paul's Cathedral, Dunedin, 4/4/14
"And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; And was with the wild beasts; And the angels ministered unto him."
– Mark 1:13

Hill 60 - recorded live at Fernhill Hysterical Society [Session #5], Dunedin, 30/11/14
"For connoisseurs of military futility, valour, incompetence and determination, the attacks on Hill 60 are in a class of their own."
– Robert Rhodes James


Recorded by Glen Ross. Mastered by Forbes Williams. Illustrations: Lent - TC; Hill 60 - GR. Insert photos by Kim Pieters.

Thanks to Forbes, Sally & Campbell, Kim, Quintus and Simon.

Released in 2023 as a 10" lather-cut 33rpm record in an edition of 30 by What Lies Beneath - whatliesbeneathnz@gmail.com


"A single wire, a spring, some pvc tube, wooden keys and a sound box… humble D.I.Y ingredients which, when cobbled together by madcap Australian instrument-inventor, John Madin, produce a heavenly drone or even a passible imitation of a true string instrument… Usually these things are wrestled into some kind of orchestrated musicality by wily groups of school children lead by adventurous music teachers, but in the right (or wrong?) hands, the echo-cello can unleash an unholy, doom-laden howl of truly biblical proportions. When Mr Forbes Williams curated an experimental music event for Lent in Dunedin’s vaulted, stone, neo-gothic St Pauls cathedral it seemed the perfect opportunity to unfurl an amplified, double echo-cello improvisation over the heads of an unsuspecting (and fairly sizeable) audience. The theme of the evening being one of dark, gloomy, abstinence and spiritual loss, the two echo-cellos really brought the ‘mournful’ in spades – the wire drones fair bouncing around the cavernous space, summoning the sprits of dead saints and headless martyrs well-beyond our hopes or expectations.

Soon after, Sally McIntyre and Campbell Walker invited us to perform another e-c duet where we opted for the acoustic approach to fit neatly inside a tiny room at their Fernhill Hysterical Society. This improvisation we dedicated to the members of the Otago Regiment decimated almost exactly a century earlier at Ypres, Flanders. Damned if those canny echo-cellos didn’t rise up and conjure the wind, smoke and bloody carnage of trench warfare and the melancholy ghosts of the unreturned… Where the hell this shit came from Glen and I really don’t know… it’s that fuckin’ wire…"

– Tim Cornelius