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On The Turntable

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    Lower Dens

    Lower Dens :: Twin-Hand Movement

    Lower Dens’ 2010 debut. A hazy and hypnotic collection of minimalist shadow pop. Jana Hunter’s autumnal finest.

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    Klaus Schønning

    Klaus Schønning :: Lydglimt

    Rustling wind. Check. Ambient bird calls. Check. Serpentine Hohner Clavinet funk. Check. Originally released in Copenhagen in the winter of 1979, Klaus Schønning’s Lydglimt was reissued in 2020 via the ever-sleuthing Frederiksberg Records. A baker’s dozen, the record is a taut embrace of ice cold synths and a Teac 4-track recorder.

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    Yuzo Iwata

    Yuzo Iwata :: Daylight Moon

    Thumping Velvety boogies, Bardo Pond-worthy zoners, achingly strange ballads, feedback laced freeforms … and more! The (mostly) instrumental record grips hold of you as a reminder of the essence of a true psychedelia in sound, rather than the buzzy ambiguity that the term seems to be placated in of late.

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    Pharoah Sanders

    Pharoah Sanders :: Pharoah (Box Set)

    Everything about Pharoah Sanders’ eponymous 1977 album is a gift. It’s a masterpiece of quiet mystique and joy that almost never was. Despite the fact that the maestro himself was never satisfied with the album and rarely spoke about it, Pharaoh took on a life of its own over the next four decades to become one of Sanders’ most hallowed and revered recordings.

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    Atlas Sound

    Atlas Sound :: Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel

    A beautiful, dislocated trip through bedroom psychedelia, haunted melodies and hazy, otherworldly textures. Like tuning into Someone’s dreams on an old, discarded shortwave radio.

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    Clive Chin Presents

    Clive Chin Presents :: Randy's Dub

    Deep-cut Jamaican dub from 1975. Produced by Clive Chin at Randy’s Studio 17 in Kingston, Jamaica.

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    White Fence

    White Fence :: Orange

    The first White Fence record in over seven years, the chiming guitars and Ty Segall back behind the drum kit and console convey a warbly and mysteriously optimistic guiding light.

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    Van Morrison

    Van Morrison :: Common One

    Common One was the album Van Morrison had been trying to make for ten years. It would mark the furthest he had moved away from the sounds of Astral Weeks, while still maintaining the sonic and literary craftsmanship of the legendary session.

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Radio AD — Longform Listening. Worldwide. Twenty Four-Seven. Red sun setting over a violet horizon.

Call Mr. Lloyd :: A Brief Richard Lloyd Appreciation

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A restless farewell to Richard Lloyd! The musical “alchemist”—a self-selected term—passed away on November 7. In tandem with Tom Verlaine in Television, Lloyd helped rewrite the rules when it came to the electric guitar in a rock setting. Lloyd was a player of boundless technical skill and unbridled imagination—a potent combination, to be sure. When Lloyd launched into a solo, every note was life or death, every moment a high-wire act of wildly impassioned delight. Here, a small sampling of the man’s six-string genius.

Josh Johnson :: Animative

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Josh Johnson plays the saxophone like an orchestra in this third solo album, Animative. That will surprise no one who’s seen his live shows, frenetic, ebullient displays of the power of live looping, as one sax riff echoes another and another. Nimble, pointillistic “Idiophone” which starts off the album, juggles reed and electronic sounds like a circus plate spinner, a cerebral abstraction one moment, a funk-syncopated fusion dream the next.

Jon Hassell :: Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three)

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Music Is Invisible marks the third and final entry in Jon Hassell’s Pentimento trilogy. Arriving five years after the experimental trumpeter’s death, it’s not exactly a studio album, but it’s more than a live tape. As a record of a singular artist’s psychic terroir, strong, mutable style and idiosyncratic sonic palette, it’s a fittingly puzzling send-off. But rare elements of “straight Hassell” lurk in the mix, for those with the ears to see.

Dexter + Franz :: Panoramic Highway

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While Panoramic Highway draws on a wide array of influences spanning geography and time, it’s anchored by the sounds of Marin County’s coastline, where Dexter+Franz recorded at the Panoramic House. Throughout the album, field recordings and samples of the ocean and beaches seamlessly weave in and out of the songs. Waves crash, seagulls chirp, and synth textures float through the mix like gusts of salty sea breeze. In these moments, Panoramic Highway becomes an elemental experience, rooted in the soundscapes of nature.

Felt :: Be Still (The Beach Boys)

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Toward the tail end of their ten-album run in the eighties, English jangle pop outfit Felt had sights on 1968’s understated Beach Boys classic Friends for the band’s only known cover. This transformative take on Dennis Wilson’s soulful, momentary piano ballad “Be Still” sits comfortably next to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica-era cover of another Dennis gem in “Carry Me Home” (keyboardist Martin Duffy would play in both bands). A shimmering beauty reminiscent of every frosty, ethereal component of the brilliance of Felt.

The Lagniappe Sessions :: Leah Senior

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Australian singer-songwriter Leah Senior turns to two selections from the British folk guitar tradition for this installment of the Lagniappe Sessions. Recorded at home with Jesse Williams, her take on John Renbourn’s “Rainy Day” slows the tune’s insistent central riff, drawing out its sinuous, unhurried quality and the delicate, cascading descent that follows. On Jansch’s “Tell Me What Is True Love,” a lilting picking pattern opens onto a similarly pastoral expanse.

Kings of Convenience :: Quiet Is the New Loud

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The muted hues, the subdued texture of the light, the encroaching dusk. There’s a sort of unspoken beautiful melancholy to autumn that has nothing to do with gloom or sadness. It hangs in the air, soft at the edges. Released 25 years ago this year, Kings of Convenience’s Quiet Is the New Loud gave that aching melancholy a voice.

Billy Boyo :: Zim Zim 

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Soundsystem check. A lost star of early ’80s dancehall, Billy Boyo was just fourteen when he recorded Zim Zim in London in 1983. One of the era’s great young singjays, Boyo moves between vocal and dub across twelve tracks, his delivery drifting over heavyweight riddims before disappearing into the mix. Full of swagger yet mellow and unhurried, he rides the bass-heavy arrangements through a thick haze of echo and reverb.

Transmissions :: Derrick Bang on Vince Guaraldi

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Welcome back to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions with your host Jason P. Woodbury. We’ve entered the holidays, aka the official “Vince Guaraldi Season.” This week on the show, we’re digging into the work of Guaraldi with Peanuts historian and author of Vince Guaraldi at the Piano, Derrick Bang. We discuss it all: Guaraldi’s fascination with the bossa nova sound in the late ’50s, his status as a composer who didn’t write or read music—writing from a purely melodic standpoint, his work with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete; his groundbreaking Grace Cathedral Jazz Mass; and of course, his work on the animated Peanuts specials. Plus, we explore that lingering mystery: did Vince Guaraldi ever play with the Grateful Dead? Did they jam?

La Ola Nocturna: Experimental Songs & Deviant Pop from the Spanish 80’s

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La Ola Nocturna is the third installment of Bongo Joe’s highly successful series on experimental pop in post-Franco Spain, and the first to chart the wave after dark. If La Contra Ola crowned the industrial liturgies of Esplendor Geométrico and the electronic punk of Aviador Dro, and La Ola Interior drifted through the ambient, exotica, and proto-Balearic landscapes of Miguel A. Ruiz and post-minimalists like Javier Segura and Finis Africae, who carried the Fourth World Music of Jon Hassell and Brian Eno into Iberia, this new volume walks the borderlands between those territories, where left-field pop grew in parallel to unorthodox experiments, and in Madrid, but also in the smaller indie harbors of Vigo and the Canary Islands, and as far north as the Basque Country, where rock had turned politically radical.

The Clientele :: Suburban Light

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It can be difficult to verbalize exactly what autumnal records are capable of eliciting. One thing is undeniable: October and November are the months for The Clientele’s 2000 debut album Suburban Light. Perhaps most impressive, the uninitiated would never detect that such an accomplished record was comprised mostly of a smattering of the band’s earlier 7″ singles from the years prior. Though ideal for any season, the record is an impeccable collection of reveries that paint a viscerally evocative picture of sundown strolls with scattered leaves underfoot.

Steve Gunn :: Sundowner

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A long neglected album dates to the beginning of Steve Gunn’s career, when it seemed that the guitarist might become a Takoma-style picker rather than the songwriter/improvisational experimenter he has since turned out to be. The playing is agile and folk-blues focused; the singing, when it comes, is similarly traditional and not as polished as Gunn has become. The music earned the approval of no less than Jack Rose, and its reels and rambles and psychedelic drones feel very much of a piece with the master’s work.