Echo Helstrom is a Portland, Oregon-based rock band led by former Blanket Music

Blanket Music

Blanket Music is a jazz-influenced indie-rock band from Portland, Oregon. Led by Chad Crouch, the owner/operator of Hush Records.-History:The band formed in 1999, to perform at a wedding reception. Mixing jazz, rock, bossa nova and pop music, the band released debut album Nice in 2000...

 guitarist Ross Seligman.

The members are all trained in classical and jazz music, and Echo Helstrom has been called an "orchestral rock band" due to their instrumentation (violin, and bowed standup bass

Double bass

The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...

 instead of electric bass guitar) and arrangements, which runs from chamber music

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

 to punk rock

Punk rock

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...

 and many genres in between. The result has been described as "...a combination of raw emotional power with sophisticated melodic beauty" (and more prosaically as "Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...

 meets Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...

").

The band is named after an early girlfriend of Bob Dylan, and Seligman’s lyrics and vocals have been described as Dylanesque.

The song "Floor 104" on their eponymous first album, with its haunting ending of "please don’t go / please don’t go / to work today / to work today", is dedicated to Seligman’s stepbrother Laurence Polatsch, who perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The Echo Jazz Trio - an incarnation of the band - is also active on the Portland scene, and performed Seligman’s music for a Netscape

Netscape

Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...

television ad.

The song "Where I Sleep" from the album "The Veil" was featured in the Feb. 12th, 2008 episode entitled 'In Da Club' of "One Tree Hill" on the station WB.

Discography

• Echo Helstrom (released 2003)
• The Veil (released November 2007)
• Paper Airplane (EP) (released January 2010)