By Carl Begai

If you’re a metal fan the name Oliver Hartmann may not ring any bells at first, but chances are pretty good you’ve heard him on any number of albums over the past 15+ years. The German vocalist / guitarist / producer launched At Vance in 1998 and has released nine albums with them since then, but Hartmann’s talents have also been used for recordings by Avantasia, Rhapsody and Edguy (to name a few) and as a guitarist on the annual Rock Meets Classic tour. Even if you are familiar with his catalogue, however, you may not be aware of his long-standing tenure as a member of the Pink Floyd tribute band Echoes, which has been around since 1995. Hartmann came on board in 2003 and has devoted a considerable amount of time to the project in spite of his busy schedule. He kicked off what promises to be a busy 2016 with a fully acoustic Echoes tour in support of their recent live CD / DVD release Barefoot To The Moon, which landed in a Nuremberg church on the day of this interview.

Seriously. A church. Complete with a bar. Only in Germany…

Professional musicians have their work cut out for them when covering Pink Floyd to begin with, but doing so acoustically is an entirely new animal. Particularly when Hartmann and his bandmates get down to business.

“Two years ago we did a benefit show in Aschaffenburg, Germany,” Hartmann says of the push towards the acoustic set. “We were asked to play, we thought about it, and decided to do an acoustic show. We picked out the songs we thought would work best and played for an hour, and that’s where we got the idea to do an entire acoustic evening. When we were putting the show together we decided that we would supplement any instrumental parts that were missing or too difficult to play acoustically – keyboards, sustain, delays, that sort of thing – with a string quartet. And the idea wasn’t a big stretch because of my involvement with Rock Meets Classic over the last years. We decided to take a minimalistic approach to the songs, sort of like an MTV Unplugged version of Pink Floyd (laughs).”

Choosing which songs to perform acoustically wasn’t the headache one might expect when weeding through Pink Floyd’s catalogue.

“In principle we tried out everything from our full band set. It was clear from the beginning there would be certain songs that work really well with a string quartet, there were others where we changed the arrangements to make the strings fit, and there were some songs where we decided to leave them out completely even though we probably could have figured out a way to make it work.”

The Barefoot To The Moon acoustic shows are an impressive take on some of Pink Floyd’s greatest moments, including some that never saw the light of day. Take, for instance, the very start of the show which features an intro played on water-filled wineglasses inspired by an avant-garde post-Dark Side Of The Moon side-project that never made it to the stage,

“I don’t remember who suggested that, but it was inspired by a project Pink Floyd did in the ’70s called Hoursehold Objects,” Hartmann reveals. “They experimented with household appliances in making music and the wine glasses were part of that, and we knew that they never performed that bit live. We tried it out for ourselves and it worked out great, so we decided to use it for the show.”

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Go to the official Echoes facebook page here for information on the Barefoot To The Moon CD/DVD.