Echo Helstrom is a Portland, Oregon-based rock band led by former Blanket Music guitarist Ross Seligman. The four 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 instead of electric bass guitar) and arrangements, which runs from chamber music to punk 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 meets Leonard Bernstein"). 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 sans Dinu - is also active on the Portland scene, and performed Seligman’s music for a Netscape television ad.
