On The Turntable

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    Terry Stamp

    Terry Stamp :: Blue Redondo

    At some point during the recent hype cycle surrounding the Hard Quartet’s debut LP, Matt Sweeney popped up on our feed singing the praises of Terry Stamp’s Blue Redondo. Stamp, formerly of the English hard rock group Third World War, recorded Blue Redondo after he relocated to El Segundo, CA, in the late 1970s. Each of its 12 tracks are rough gems, hard-bitten but sweetly rendered loner folk bolstered by Stamp’s blues-soaked guitar and vocals, not to mention the occasionally eccentric production touch.

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    Styrofoam Winos

    Styrofoam Winos :: Real Time

    Styrofoam Winos—the Nashville-based trio of Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel—follow up their 2021 self-titled debut with Real Time, an endearing and invigorating collection of shaggy southern rock and dusty, woolen folk. With a lo-fi, ambling ease, they cruise through road-weary choogles; swampy, faded funkers; harmonica swept confessionals; and meditative, noodling jaunts through the passage of time.

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    Smoke Bellow

    Smoke Bellow :: Structurally Sound

    “I come crashing down like sunsets gleam,” Meredith McHugh sings in the opening minutes of Structurally Sound, the fourth and final album from Smoke Bellow. The Baltimore via Australia duo of McHugh and Christian Best do, in fact, break up in spectacular, brilliant fashion here – joining forces one last time on guitars, synths, percussion, bass, and vocals for an ecstatic record of funky angular post-punk, damaged motorik-infused disco, and minimalist art-rock.

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    Jeff Parker ETA IVtet

    Jeff Parker ETA IVtet :: The Way Out of Easy

    “With the ETA band, there were all these other experiences dealing with music that people were composing. So, when we would improvise, all of that other stuff was informed in what we were doing.” Visionary guitarist Jeff Parker joins us to discuss The Way Out of Easy, recorded live at his residency at ETA.

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    Chu Kosaka

    Chu Kosaka :: Arigato

    Chu Kosaka’s Arigato is wide-open pastoral bliss. The natural extension of Happy End with a bit more of a singer-songwriter orientation, Kosaka pieces together what could be the finest example of American country rock through the lens of a Japanese perfectionism. Don’t let that fool you. The tunes are loose.

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    The Cure

    The Cure :: Songs of A Lost World

    Robert Smith never aimed to create the definitive soundtrack for our current dystopian moment, but he may have done it anyway. The argument against? He wrote some of these songs more than a decade ago and has been playing them off and on at shows for nearly as long. But despite the temporal disjunction, if you’re looking for some way through early November 2024, bleak, magisterial Songs of a Lost World makes an ideal companion. It is wise, spiritually charged and not at all bent on insisting that “we’ll get through this” or “things will get better.”

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    Nap Eyes

    Nap Eyes :: The Neon Gate

    Arriving after a four-year gap, the latest album from the acerbic Canadian indie rock band reveals a group in a state of graceful turmoil and artistic ferment. A work of stoned eschatology involving Yeats, Pushkin and a jet-ski-racing game for the N64, The Neon Gate finds Nap Eyes scattered but not disenchanted, committed to finding new ways to sound exactly like themselves.

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    Christopher Owens

    Christopher Owens :: I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair

    It’s been long enough. This is the album we’ve been waiting for Christopher Owens to make for over a decade… as bold and beautiful and great as any one of the immortal Girls records.

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Kristen Roos :: Universal Synthesizer Interface, Volumes I, II, III

In 2019, Vancouver composer and sound designer Kristen Roos acquired a floppy disc of pioneering computer musician Laurie Spiegel’s 1986 algorithmic composition program Music Mouse for a few bucks on eBay. The purchase sent him tumbling down a rabbit hole of vintage music software interfaces. Over the three volumes of Universal Synthesizer Interface, Roos has captured the fruits of his research and experimentation. Composed of pulses and patches, primitive drum machines and bass squelches, Universal Synthesizer Interface emerges as one of the most slyly delightful, engaging and weirdly beautiful musical projects going.

Transmissions :: Phosphorescent

We’ve reached the end of the road for this season—season 9 concludes with this episode, a conversation with Matthew Houck, the leader of the avant-country band Phosphorescent. In April, Phosphorescent released Revelator, the band’s ninth album. It’s their debut for Verve Records, after a string of well-received albums on Dead Oceans. Joined by collaborators like Jim White of the Dirty Three—who you heard earlier this season—Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs, and his wife and songwriting partner Jo Schornikow, it finds Houck examining—what else?—the end of the world. 

Bridget St. John :: Paris, 1970

Via French television, check out this terrific 13 minutes of Bridget St. John performing three songs solo in Paris, the songwriter’s crystalline guitar and singular vocals captured perfectly. Do we talk about St. John enough? Sure, she’s had plenty of boosters over the years (John Peel was a huge fan), but in our mind she deserves to be mentioned alongside Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, John Martyn and others as one of the great English songwriters of the late 60s/early 70s. I’m also going to put her up there among the very best heads of hair of the 1970s — a competitive area, to be sure.

Bert Jansch & Finn Kalvik :: Norwegian Television (May 7, 1973)

It’s officially Bert Jansch season. Recorded live in the spring of 1973 for Norwegian television, the following twenty-eight minute session finds the Scottish troubadour in the company of Norwegian folkie Finn Kalvik. The set kicks off with the pair collaborating on Jansch’s own “Running From Home” (via his 1965 s/t LP) before sliding into an alternating guitar pull between the two musicians. Koselig!

Terry Stamp :: Blue Redondo

At some point during the recent hype cycle surrounding the Hard Quartet’s debut LP, Matt Sweeney popped up on our feed singing the praises of Terry Stamp’s Blue Redondo. Stamp, formerly of the English hard rock group Third World War, recorded Blue Redondo after he relocated to El Segundo, CA, in the late 1970s. Each of its 12 tracks are rough gems, hard-bitten but sweetly rendered loner folk bolstered by Stamp’s blues-soaked guitar and vocals, not to mention the occasionally eccentric production touch.

David Pajo :: Scream With Me

In 2004, in a break between a string of Aerial M albums and the first Slint reunion tour, David Pajo found himself at loose ends, sleeping on friends’ couches and wondering what to do next. In Brooklyn during this period and, for once, luxuriating in the rare pleasures of an empty apartment, he struck on the idea of Misfits covers. He’d been a fan since early adolescence…

Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: November 2024

Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab. Airing every third Sunday of the month, RFAD on dublab features the pairing of Tyler Wilcox’s Doom and Gloom from the Tomb and Chad DePasquale’s New Happy Gathering. This month, Wilcox leads things off with a selection of dusted late November vibes; DePasquale follows it up with an hour of psychedelic blues, gospel, and soul. Sunday, 4-6pm PT.

Smoke Bellow :: Structurally Sound

“I come crashing down like sunsets gleam,” Meredith McHugh sings in the opening minutes of Structurally Sound, the fourth and final album from Smoke Bellow. The Baltimore via Australia duo of McHugh and Christian Best do, in fact, break up in spectacular, brilliant fashion here – joining forces one last time on guitars, synths, percussion, bass, and vocals for an ecstatic record of funky angular post-punk, damaged motorik-infused disco, and minimalist art-rock.

Smokey Robinson :: Just My Soul Responding

Barely a year removed from his final performance with The Miracles, Smokey Robinson delivered Smokey, his first album stepping out on his own. Driving solo, Robinson pushed his sound sonically and topically. The politically and morally charged, “Just My Soul Responding” is the pinnacle of that push.

Bridget St John :: Curl Your Toes

How many songs can you think of where the songwriter has a philosophical interaction with a
burrowing mole? If the answer is none, then now it is one. This is one of the many charms to be relished in Bridget St John’s rousing “Curl Your Toes.” After studying in France for a time in the late ’60s, St John found herself floating around in the English folk atmosphere with many scene-makers of the time. She soon met musical champion and promotional extraordinaire John Peel and went on to release her fully acoustic debut album, Ask Me No Questions–on which this song is found–through his Dandelion label in 1969.