On The Turntable

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    Pharoah Sanders

    Pharoah Sanders :: Pharoah (Box Set)

    Reissued in 2023, everything about Pharoah Sanders’ eponymous 1977 album is a gift. It’s a masterpiece of quiet mystique and joy that almost never was. Available for the first time since its original release, Pharaoh has been rejuvenated with the splendor of a monumental box set from Luaka Bop. It’s a tremendous archival achievement that casts new light on a crucial point of transition for Sanders…

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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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Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: February 2025

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, Chad kicks it off with an hour of broken valentines, with Tyler following it up with some melancholy psych-folk situations. Sunday, 4-6pm PT.

Ted Lucas :: Nobody Loves Me Like My Baby Does

On February 21, psychedelic folkie Ted Lucas’ self-titled 1975 cult classic rides again, this time thanks to the folks at Third Man Records. This go-round, an expanded vision of Lucas’ visions is offered, with the digital release including four previously-unreleased songs, including the swooning, flute-heavy “Nobody Loves Me Like My Baby Does.”

Roedelius :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Featuring 50 tracks from his vast recorded archives, 90 presents kosmische pioneer Roedelius at his most intimate. The result is a collection that feels as meditative as it does personal. “Everything came to me as a gift of the moment,” he explains, opening up about the genesis of his creative practice and how his songs function like prayers.

Ron Geesin :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

In the creative act, is the interaction with others or solitude in a private space more important? While in the past, genius was often described as a solitary artist, distant from society, today more importance is placed on the “creative ecosystem” from which they emerge. The story of Ron Geesin might help to rebalance the issue, highlighting both the collaborative phase and the more secluded one. But could his choice to follow his own path, away from the well-trodden routes, have worked against him in terms of critical reception?

Horsegirl :: Phoenetics On And On

Horsegirl’s three members were hardly out of high school when they emerged from Chicago’s raucous post-punk scene, a boisterous but cerebral gaggle of youth and precocity unafraid to play with amp feedback and dual guitar tone. Now college age, the trio of Nora Cheng (guitar/voice), Penelope Lowenstein (guitar/voice) and Gigi Reece (drums) whip a bit of air and lightness into their sophomore LP, tapping indie phenom producer Cate LeBon’s way with tipsy agitated sweetness.

Unearthed, Vol. 19 :: Valentine’s Day

It’s been a few years, but we’re rebooting the Unearthed mix series in 2025 — further trips into the murky bootleg world! To get things going, a mix made up entirely of live recordings from various Valentines Days from over the decades. It’d certainly be a stretch to call everything included here a love song, but hey, we’re all mature enough to recognize that the emotions of February 14 run the gamut, right? The moony, swoony vibes of the holiday can just as easily slip into feelings of loneliness, regret and heartbreak. Or just plain weirdness! All aboard the mystery train of love …

Aquarium Drunkard Book Club :: Chapter 32

Welcome back to the stacks. It’s Aquarium Drunkard’s Book Club, our monthly gathering of recent (or not so recent) recommended reading. In this month’s stack: a brief but powerful chronicle of the spiritual awakening, initiation, and transformation Alice Coltrane underwent between 1968 and 1970, the 1923 book that forever changed the course of David Lynch’s artistic life, Rosecrans Baldwin’s meditation on Los Angeles, from self-help cults and psychics to migrant workers and Octavia Butler, and Mark Swartz’s “what if” exploration of artists who died before their time

Barbara Keith :: S/T

Barbara Keith’s 1970 self-titled record began making its rounds of the archival labels (both legitimate and not) at the turn of the century. It was hailed – like so many of the now-resurfaced formerly-shelved records of the seventies – as a lost masterpiece du jour. Perhaps it was the studio lineup which included the likes of Lowell George and Spooner Oldham, or maybe Keith’s retreat from the limelight following its release, or the fact that the material ended up being covered by Patty Loveless, Delaney & Bonnie, Barbara Streisand, and Melanie. Whatever the reason, it was this record that brought her name into the collective discussion of forgotten songwriters.

Greg Foat :: The Rituals of Infinity

Prolific UK keyboard impresario and composer Greg Foat is back to nicking his album titles from classic English sci-fi paperbacks. This time, he’s borrowing from Michael Moorcock’s 1971 novel, The Rituals of Infinity. Foat likes to mine sci-fi not so much for its brooding cosmology as for its air of zippy, intergalactic pulpiness. And here, once again teaming up with British jazz legend Art Themen on saxophones, Foat and company lay down another funky, lush album of library grooves and jazz futurism.

Jairus Sharif :: Mawu

The Calgary-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Jairus Sharif returns with Basis of Unity, his third album under his own name, later this month via Telephone Explosion Records. With the one exception of some freestyle spoken word courtesy of original CAN vocalist Malcolm Mooney on the track “We Be,” Sharif handles all the instrumentation and production himself on this droning symphony of ambient noise and free jazz – armed with a cadre that includes alto saxophone, electronics, percussion, drums, bass, keyboard, samplers, and “small instruments.”

Freckle :: S/T

Blink and you’ll miss another one of Ty Segall’s bands. The LA-psych-rock linchpin fronts an eponymous guitar army, the even louder Fuzz, an ongoing collaboration with Tim Presley, the unhinged Wasted Shirt with the Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale, C.I.A. with his wife Denée and likely another dozen that escape me just now. This one, Freckle, pairs the fuzz king of Topanga Canyon with Corey Madden of Color Green, a cosmic-country slanted psychedelic outfit that might remind you of the Sadies at their most lysergic.