On The Turntable

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    Yo La Tengo

    Yo La Tengo :: I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

    “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind” begins with Hubley’s drums over which a snippet of studio chatter can be heard, including a laugh as if they are saying, “Wait until they’ll get a load of this song.” Immediately, McNew commences with a perfect six-note bass riff that powers the song through to the end like the scientifically-tuned Formula 1 car engine.

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    Numün

    Numün :: Opening

    New York’s numün never quite fit into the ambient country mold associated with founder Bob Holmes’s other group SUSS. The team-up with Joel Mellin and Christopher Romero of Balinese music ensemble Gamelan Dharma Swara meant numün was always going to be about finding the common ground between big sky drift and eastern drone. Their third album Opening positions them somewhere between Bruce Langhorne and Popul Vuh. But it also shows them capable of whipping up a slow-motion psychedelic boogie whenever the mood hits.

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    Miles Davis

    Miles Davis :: Agharta

    We just did a monster roundup covering the 50th anniversary of the release of the Davis live documents Agharta and Pangea — a pair of double live LPs recorded at the Osaka Festival Hall, February 1, 1975. You can read that, here, but for the uninitiated looking for a taste, go ahead and dig into Agharta en totale.

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    Bonnie “Prince” Billy

    Bonnie “Prince” Billy :: The Purple Bird

    The Purple Bird is more overtly country than the last few Bonnie “Prince” Billy albums, certainly more so than the droning, mesmeric Lungfish homage in Hear the Children Sing the Evidence from 2024 or even the campfire folk communal Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You from 2023. Of course, threads of rural traditions in country, bluegrass and shape not singing have always woven through Oldham’s work, so it’s not a dramatic departure. Still, this is an album made in Nashville with Nashville musicians and a celebrated Nashville producer, and the twang factor is high.

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    Jantar

    Jantar :: Background Moods

    This latest album from the ambient ensemble Jantar evokes Jon Hassell’s fourth world sound, Laraaji’s ecstatic meditations, and, of course, the motherlode, the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno.

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    Big Bend

    Big Bend :: Last Circle In A Slowdown

    The third album from pianist/singer Nathan Phillips’ Big Bend project blends experimental methods with time-tested tradition. Working with avant-jazz master Shahzad Ismaily and a varied ensemble including Jen Powers of Rolin/Powers Duo and violinist Zosha Warpeha, Phillips transforms delicate folk songs into strange collages and elliptical ballads.

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     Total Blue

    Total Blue :: S/T

    The Los Angeles-based trio of Nicky Benedek, Alex Talan, and Anthony Calonico have been making music together in various configurations for well over a decade. Their newest project, the outstanding Total Blue, takes the ingredients of smooth jazz and world fusion–fretless bass, muted horns, piles of synthesizers, global rhythms–and vaporizes them into a shimmering mist. The result is one of the most alluring things to come out of LA’s adventurous post-jazz scene.

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    Sam Amidon

    Sam Amidon :: Salt River

    The big news about Salt River is the collaboration with Sam Gendel, a celebrated jazz saxophonist who has worked with Amidon in various roles since 2017. However, aside from an extended reedy flight of fancy in “Tavern,” Gendel’s role as producer is primarily to get out of the way, and let Amidon be Amidon, his folky experiments haloed by an aura of extraordinary clarity.

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Takuro Okada :: The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line

The stateside debut of a versatile Japanese guitarist focuses on mostly solo work, largely recorded at home over a period of years. Encompassing ambient ECM mellowness, electronic urgency and tangy noir, The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line shows us an eclectic musician stubbornly chasing tranquility and always restlessly on the move.

The Lagniappe Sessions :: Adeline Hotel

Under the moniker Adeline Hotel, New York-based musician Dan Knishkowy has spent nearly the last decade releasing one fantastic album after another. A benchmark identity of the project is that no release ever repeats quite the same sonic foray, a deliberate approach taking creative inspiration from the likes of Jim O’Rourke and Arthur Russell, the musician revealed to AD last year. After hearing that sound mutate from fingerpicking guitar to the jazzy orchestral pop of Hot Fruit to last year’s personal concept album Whodunnit, Adeline Hotel’s inaugural Lagniappe Session reveals everything on full display.

The Lagniappe Sessions :: Yves Jarvis

Reviewing Yves Jarvis’ All Cylinders, we wrote, “Where once was a loose attempt at art gospel or chopped-up soul, now there is a conscious, sincere engagement with the classics Jarvis clearly adores—Paul McCartney, Love, Stevie Wonder, and Prince.” Those are clearly classic touchstones, but Jarvis does more than tap into them: he taps into their spirits and synthesizes them into something brand new. Jarvis is a melodic polymath, which is made clear by his first ever Lagniappe Session, which finds him covering material from Porter Robinson, John Mayer, and a standard from Frank Sinatra.

Dub Syndicate :: Out Here On The Perimeter 1989-1996

Continuing the drive to get the On-U Sound catalogue back out there and following on from the ’80s Dub Syndicate box set Ambience In Dub, the label presents the Out Here On The Perimeter box set – with a title that makes no effort to hide the label’s otherness from usual dub fare – collating four Dub Syndicate records spanning 1989-1996. As a special bonus, a fifth recording is included entitled Obscured By Vision, on which Sherwood reworks rhythms from the period.

Midnite Jazz :: The Tommy Flanagan Trio (1960)

The Midnite Jazz column returns with The Tommy Flanagan Trio (1960): a purely laid-back rendezvous into classic jazz ballads and standards. With a sprightly runtime of just over a half-hour, it’s the perfect soundtrack for late-night strolls after last calls, when the streets are as hushed as the trio’s dynamics.

Transmissions :: Steve Lillywhite

Welcome back to Transmissions with Jason Woodbury. This week, Steve Lillywhite, a producer who’s had as pivotal a role in shaping your host’s musical taste as anyone. In this conversation, Lillywhite opens up about working with artists like Dave Matthews Band, U2, Phish, XTC, The La’s, Marshall Crenshaw, The Killers, and more. From The Joshua Tree to Billy Breathes, from Before These Crowded Streets to Field Day, Lillywhite speaks about it all, the influence of dub, his production approach, and more.

The Pretty Things :: Rock St. Trop

Sometimes a record’s peculiar milieu is so anomalously ingrained with the finished product that attempting to separate the two is a futile exercise. The “lost” 1969 album Rock St. Trop (sometimes simply titled Philippe DeBarge) is a glaring case study.

Will Stratton :: Points of Origin

Will Stratton ditches his usual delicacy and heads deep into fire country on his eighth album, delivering a quietly ambitious and wholly convincing set of songs about conflagrations, California and the steady erosions of time. Featuring an array of characters connected by circumstance, saloons and prisons of society’s making as well as their own, Points of Origin expands on (and pares back) Stratton’s careful fingerstyle guitar arrangements and folk melodies to incorporate the bizarro American visions of Steely Dan and Jimmy Buffett. It’s a vivid and exquisite update of rock’s bummer era to fit today’s more sinuous dystopias.

Pass The Hatchet :: On Yo La Tengo’s Guitar Sculptures

When Yo La Tengo shifts into “guitar sculpture” mode, you’d be forgiven for thinking the idea is simply to make as much noise as possible. But closer inspection reveals Alexander Calder-like complexity, a commitment to movement and grace. The band’s sculptures aren’t static objects made of hard materials like traditional sculpture, but instead are always shifting and moving. The following is a sampling—though not all—of Yo La Tengo in this zone. They are presented chronologically and unranked. After all, this isn’t Guitar Player magazine.

Geologist :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

We caught up with Brian Weitz (Geologist) late in February about his new collaborative record with Doug Shaw, A Shaw Deal, which transforms guitar sounds into an eclectic, sometimes unrecognizable shapes and patterns, as well as about his fascination with the renaissance instrument, the hurdy-gurdy, which he first heard at a Keiji Haino concert at Tonic in the aughts, and now employs to create hallucinatory improvised sets, about as far from the Ren Faire as a stringed instrument can wander. He’ll be releasing an album of hurdy-gurdy music later this year.

David Grubbs :: Whistle From Above

This is Grubbs’ first solo LP since 2017, though he has, in between, made records with a Ryley Walker, Taku Unami, Jan St. Werner and the Wingdale Community Singers. This one, too, is a collaborative effort, though Grubbs remains at its intellectual center, pushing the boundaries with precision, rigor and surgical cleanliness, but pushing them all the same.