Lower Dens’ 2010 debut. A hazy and hypnotic collection of minimalist shadow pop. Jana Hunter’s autumnal finest.
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.
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.
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.
Deep-cut Jamaican dub from 1975. Produced by Clive Chin at Randy’s Studio 17 in Kingston, Jamaica.
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.
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.
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.
Broadcasting from Le Guess Who? festival, Utrecht, Netherlands — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
West Coast wanderings and backcountry reveries. Cosmic country, fingerpicked blues, folkers, garage hallucinations, loose ends and autumnal open roads.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The Houston-based trio known as Chrome Chasm features three veteran improvisers doing what they do best — improvising. Together, guitarist Tom Carter (Charalambides), saxophonist/flautist Mlee Marie (Hearts of Animals) and pedal steel-er Will Adams (Lower Dens, Ka-Nives) create bewitching, twilit music that’s somehow both minimalist and wide-open — a vast landscape that somehow contains countless sonic details.
Aquarium Drunkard chatted with Tom, Mlee and Will to find out more.
Across the Miles Davis electric era there’s no greater divide than that between 1972’s On the Corner and what came before it. But the signposts are there if you know where to look, with recordings from a European tour in the fall of ‘71 revealing Miles subtly, deftly moving the pieces into place for his next iteration.
Copenhagen-based composers Jason Dungan (Blue Lake) and Johan Carøe join forces on Routine, a quietly transportive collection of ambient folk and new age soundscapes shaped through an exchange of musical fragments. Blending acoustic instrumentation, electronics, and Dungan’s self-designed 36-string zither, the duo arrive at something intimate and unhurried—a luminous meditation on domestic ritual, the rhythms of everyday life, and the quiet wonder of being alive.
Panamint began as a studio experiment between longtime collaborators Anna St. Louis and producer Jarvis Taveniere, who reunited to put Taveniere’s new Los Angeles studio through its paces. What started with left-field covers of Post Malone and Helene Smith soon evolved into a set of original recordings, joined by Danny Garcia, aka Reverend Baron. Out this week, their self-titled debut EP draws on the timeless pull of vintage soul and classic pop.
In his classic book Mythologies, French thinker Roland Barthes criticizes plastic because it can be molded into anything—cheap, colorful surfaces open to infinite transformation. Contemporary pop is made of the same stuff, and Sam Gendel’s Advanced White Trash makes the case for what’s beautiful, even freeing, about it. The record sounds like something that was uploaded to SoundCloud at 3 a.m., a Roland Sound Canvas emulator buffering on a dying phone someone found in a Walmart parking lot, and still it comes out strangely appealing, almost hypnotic.
Cork trio Ana Palindrome make a hypnotic blend of art-pop, droning vocals, sawing fiddle, and glitchy folktronica on “A MAN A CURE,” their first release for London’s World of Echo. Beneath its pulsing rhythms and woozy electronics, the track questions the idea of self-made identity, as Niamh Dalton’s voice shifts between the organic and the artificial.
