On The Turntable

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    Jeff Parker ETA IVtet

    Jeff Parker ETA IVtet :: Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy

    Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy offers up four sidelong pieces recorded live in Los Angeles over the past few years. Here, we get to eavesdrop on Parker, bassist Anna Buttterss, drummer Jay Bellerose and saxophonist Josh Johnson in full freedom flight. It’s an uncommonly intimate live recording — the players seem to be extremely at ease in this small club setting.

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    Mark Hollis

    Mark Hollis :: Mark Hollis

    The quietly revolutionary Talk Talk singer made one final album before calling it quits: his self-titled solo album debut, from 1998. While often overshadowed by the majestic experimentation of his former project’s late work, Mark Hollis harbors its own secrets and surprises, while building upon the work those albums began. As a final testament, it’s a fitting paradox, full of roaring silences and whispering explosions, a collection of whisper-thin abstractions that have been annealed into something durable and concrete.

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    Haruomi Hosono

    Haruomi Hosono :: Tropical Dandy

    Haruomi Hosono’s second solo effort, Tropical Dandy, now released as a standalone album for the first time in the U.S., shows the bassist and bandleader moving on from his folk-rock beginnings. A complex, eccentric and deeply committed commentary on exotica, sonic simulacra and tropical vibes, it’s full of contradictory constructions and proud artificialities that tap into something deeper than the merely real.

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    Jorge Ben

    Jorge Ben :: A Tábua de Esmeralda

    In the middle of the heaviest years of a military dictatorship, Ben Jorge wanted, in his own words, to “bring peace of mind and tranquility” to Brazilians. He wanted happiness and imagination, visions of utopia, the quickening of the heart. A Tábua de Esmeralda espoused this ideal of absolute joy through its sweet and comic gestures, making reference at the same time to saints and soccer clubs, Medieval magicians and cartoon characters, as if they all belonged to the same semantic realm …

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    Secular Music Group

    Secular Music Group :: Volume 2

    Making good (and then some) on the promise of their debut, Secular Music Group’s Volume 2 is a gorgeous jazz fantasia that beautifully brings together Sun Ra, Jewel in the Lotus and the European Library Music tradition under one expansive umbrella. The Chicago-based ensemble records everything analog, live and direct to a four-track machine — an approach that might seem unnecessarily fussy at first. But the results are impossible to argue with.

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    Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin

    Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin :: Ghosted III

    On their third album, the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin continue to condense and refine their approach, with the rhythms as mesmeric, the riffs as repetitive and the tones as mysterious as ever. But Ghosted III also breaks up the pattern, with more songs, shorter tracks and delicate shifts in approach. Minimal jazz, avant-rock, experimental groove, modal funk — whatever you want to call it, it’s mutating before our very ears, and growing stranger and more powerful with every installment.

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    Augustus Pablo

    Augustus Pablo :: East of the River Nile

    East of the River Nile is a masterpiece of haunting and hazy ambience from Augustus Pablo (aka Horace Swaby), whose plaintive melodica leads waft through these dubbed-out instrumentals like fragrant and heady strains of ganja mist.

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    Guru Guru

    Guru Guru :: Känguru

    Känguru feels less a product of its circumstances and more like a beam from some kosmische asteroid: four songs of heady, rapturous, meandering rock. They’re jammy but structured, punctuated by climaxes and build-ups, vibe shifts and open space. But it’s about the journey, not the destination: get on the ice floe and float along, man…

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Yesternow: Editor’s Note Volume Five

Otoño. Autumn. Fall. In this installment: Mojave seeker Ken Layne’s Desert Oracle. The return of PTA. Auteurs and the genesis, evolution and eventuality of a character. Karl Childers. The definitive history of Talking Heads. Richard Lloyd’s near photographic memory, and more. 

Raul Seixas :: Gita

A direct product of the Paul Coelho-sponsored introduction to alternative religion and mind-altering drugs, Raul Seixas’ Gita finds the Brazilian musician further embracing mysticism through a bigger infatuation with Aleister Crowley (the pre-chorus of “Sociedade Alternativa” is a direct translation of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”) and Eastern philosophy (Hindu book Bhavagad Gita) in what eventually became his best-selling album and first gold record.

Transmissions :: Dan Wriggins (Friendship)

Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. This week on the show, Dan Wriggins of the Philly band Friendship. Earlier this year, the band released its fifth album, ⁠Caveman Wakes Up⁠. Fans of the roots-informed indie rock of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman—frequent collaborators with Friendship—will find plenty of busted and bruised glory in these songs, which fall on the shaggy end of the alt-country spectrum. But for us, it’s Wriggins’ wry and sly lyrics that really seal the deal. Take “All Over the World,” in which a landscaper experiences “the beating heart of God/ laying down a roll of sod.” That down in the dirt realness is what makes Caveman Wakes Up so captivating. He joins us to discuss.

Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin :: Ghosted III

On their third album, the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin continue to condense and refine their approach, with the rhythms as mesmeric, the riffs as repetitive and the tones as mysterious as ever. But Ghosted III also breaks up the pattern, with more songs, shorter tracks and delicate shifts in approach. Minimal jazz, avant-rock, experimental groove, modal funk — whatever you want to call it, it’s mutating before our very ears, and growing stranger and more powerful with every installment.

Guinga :: Delírio Carioca

Guinga’s Delírio Carioca offers an alternative history of MPB, like an anti-bossa nova: what if samba had not dissolved into cool jazz but rather formed a deep new assemblage with the orchestral soundtracks of Mancini and Morricone. What if instead of having slowed and reduced the drum ensembles of samba and translated them into a particular style of plucking and intonation, MPB had retained much of the quality of samba’s parent-genre, choro—the frenetic percussive fills, the elaborate counterpoint, the counterintuitive progressions.

WITCH :: Sogolo

Where 2023’s Zango emphasized the Zamrock band WITCH’s fuzzy, blues-based roots, the reunited group’s newest record takes a more experimental turn. The jittery, psychedelic sound of Sogolo defies the expectations of those who might have hoped for a more faithful reconstruction of the band’s early days, opting instead to traverse the realms of reggae, freak-folk, desert blues and more. Frenzied percussion flourishes accentuate the unhinged guitar riffs of “Kamusale” and “Nadi,” while African folk rhythms guide later tunes like “Set Free” and “Nibani.”

Ratboys :: Light Night Mountains All That

By now, Ratboys is as reliable an institution in indie rock as Culver’s is for hamburgers, or as humid days at the lake are for bug bites. “Light Night Mountains All That,” the new single from the Chicago-based band, is the first music released since 2023’s phenomenal LP The Window, and represents a decade of creative duo Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan releasing music under the moniker. 

1981 :: A Post-Punk Compilation

Long live the old, weird internet. Out of all the genres, post-punk has always felt like the hardest to pin down. What the hell was / is it? I’m not sure I could tell you. But I can tell you that the Musicophilia blog’s massive 1981 box set of mixes is perhaps the best representation of the wild burst of creativity that was happening in the underground at the time. While the original mp3 downloads of the box set have since been replaced at Musicophilia with streaming options, we have uploaded the original files for posterity …

Denis O’Donnell :: The Snow in Brooklyn

Denis O’Donnell has been at the forefront of the Austin, Texas country movement since 2006. On his latest release, The Snow in Brooklyn, O’Donnell has recruited top notch jazz players and taken his songs to Bob Hoffnar and Andy Taub in NYC. Having roots in both Queens (O’Donnell’s grandfather owned an Irish pub under the elevated train) and Texas, O’Donnell is throwing his hat in the ring for both Austin and New York legend.

Sir Richard Bishop :: Hillbilly Ragas

From the first shimmering sallies of “They Shall Take Up Serpents,” it’s clear that Sir Richard Bishop has returned from the locales of North Africa and the Middle East to once again explore the shadowy, verdant valleys of blues-folk Americana, the intricate, scale-slanted reveries of India. In abrupt, percussive volleys of strumming and picking, Bishop stakes out a claim on the mystic yearnings of Takoma-style picking, inspired, as the title implies, equally by Appalachia and the sub-continent.

Cochemea :: Vol. 3: Ancestros Futuros

Multi-instrumentalist Cochemea Gastelum wraps up his trilogy of albums exploring his tribal roots by looking ahead. Though he doesn’t jettison the non-Western traditions that informed his earlier two records entirely, his relies more on the present as a way to see into the realm of future days. Full of tribal rhythms pulled from pre-Colonial North and South American civilizations as well as urbane midcentury jazz and ‘70s soul, Ancestros Futuros creates a bold new world in which some things never change.

Primal Scream :: Echo Dek (Adrian Sherwood)

In the fall of 1997 Primal Scream dropped the Adrian Sherwood produced dub companion disc, Echo Dek. Far from the superfluous cash grabs that comprised the majority of ‘remix’ collections of the era, Sherwood’s take feels both essential and independent of the source material. Inky and subterranean, the nine track set doubles down on Vanishing Point’s idée fixe stretching out deep into the void as Sherwood explores the hinterlands, adding and subtracting, while occasionally dubbing in disembodied vox from Gillespie and the voice of thunder, Prince Far I.