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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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    A Picnic Of Sorts

    A Picnic Of Sorts :: Mobile

    A marvel of sweet synthesizers, field recordings, and beyond, A Picnic Of Sorts’ debut compact disc envelops the listener in a subtly immersive ambient landscape. Mobile sounds fantastic in any listening situation — through headphones, turned up loud to fill the room, or (best of all maybe) as the soundtrack to a long drive with no particular destination in mind.

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    Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel

    Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel :: The Room

    On The Room, 7-string guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento and saxophonist Sam Gendel team up for a bewitching duo record, crafting resplendent and airy golden hour jazz. With slithering, bossa nova grooves; earthy, Arcadian folk melodies; and a slow-burn, romantic mood, the album is a quietly mesmerizing affair…

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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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    Jeff Parker

    Jeff Parker :: Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy

    Released by Eremite Records at the end of 2022, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy offers up four sidelong pieces recorded live in Los Angeles. Here, we get to eavesdrop on Parker, bassist Anna Buttterss, drummer Jay Bellerose and saxophonist Josh Johnson in full freedom flight. It’s an uncommonly intimate live recording — the players seem to be extremely at ease in this small club setting.

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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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    Yuma Abe

    Yuma Abe :: Hotel New Yuma

    An upbeat departure from understated debut Fantasia, the brisk nine tracks of Hotel New Yuma are based around the concept of theme songs of a fictional variety show (the record’s namesake). In an ambitious effort to harken back to the midcentury age of Japanese films and television, tracks like the flashy single “I’m Falling For You” register as instant classics.

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    Hemlock

    Hemlock :: 444

    Alternating between acoustic folk and electric distortion, the dozen tracks that make up 444 feel aesthetically of a piece reminiscent of Jana Hunter and the early work of Lower Dens. High praise. Part of what’s remarkable about 444 is how often it cartwheels wildly, surely on the edge of disaster, and then sticks the landing. In short, Carolina Chauffe trusts their instincts, and it pays off.

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Hemlock :: November

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The 30-track collection November immerses listeners in process, allowing one to follow along as Carolina Chauffe jots down musical notes and sketches, some of them to be developed later, others not. We wrote about Hemlock’s 444 LP not too long ago, a sort of greatest hits constructed out of Chauffe’s daily songwriting devotion, but appreciate the diversions and half-successes and byways of this collection. Some days yield gemlike beauties, others not, but it is all about the journey.

Mt. Misery :: Love In Mind

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If one yearns to take solace in a breezy, hypnotic collection of guitar pop, Love In Mind is the antidote. There’s a chiming whimsy reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub at their most melodic (such as the compositions of departed songwriter Gerard Love). Lyrically, the jovial and wide-eyed buoyancy of tracks like “Sunday Song” and “Waking Up” will specifically remind TFC heads of classic, Big Star-inspired efforts like Songs From Northern Britain. If the comparison seems too evident to ignore (or one to fellow Scottish legends Belle and Sebastian), the young band actually welcomes it like a badge of honor. 

Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: January 2025

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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 continues his annual January tradition of sharing a host of Neil Young rarities — outtakes, live recordings and more, spanning a half-century. Then, Chad delivers a an hour of psychedelic folk, ambient music & orchestral pop. Sunday, 4-6pm PT.

Big Bend :: Last Circle In A Slowdown

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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. At times reminiscent of the fluid, gauzy extrapolations of Talk Talk, Last Circle in a Slowdown might have more in common with Joan of Arc’s controversial ProTools workout The Gap. But Big Bend doesn’t embrace the alienation that comes with such studio manipulation and digital disruption, instead finding a lithe grace in the interstices of the regular and the revolutionary. Untroubled but eerie, Big Bend finds its own kind of ambiguous beauty.

Television :: CBGB, Early 1975

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A hack Hollywood filmmaker would likely use cliched/corny smash cuts to convey the kinetic energy of NYC’s burgeoning mid-seventies punk scene. The tapes tell a different story, with history unspooling at a leisurely pace. These audience recordings of Television at CBGB during a long winter residency at the club — dangerously lo-fi, utterly priceless — are full of awkward tuning breaks, persistent amplifier hum, muttered introductions, cacophonous false starts, muted applause. Something’s happening here, but no one is quite sure what it is.

Nyron Higor :: S/T

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Nyron Higor’s self-titled sophomore LP starts with a slow-motion frevo that drags amidst the reverb as if it was played inside a ghost motel. It is a perfect encapsulation of the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist’s new release: clouds of sonic niceties sculpted from the ruins of library music. Here, bird-like whistles and tremolos emerge into eerie atmospheres, from which they seem detached, like ground and figure.

Johnny Coley :: Mister Sweet Whisper

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Like some strange offspring of William Burroughs and Chet Baker backed by The Lounge Lizards, Birmingham, Alabama’s Johnny Coley delivers southern gothic beat poetry in a leathery, slurring wobble on Mister Sweet Whisper. His words, backed by a group of local young musicians from the Sweat Wreath label on guitar, upright bass, vibraphone, saxophone, and organ, are lysergic and hallucinatory incantations–nocturnal, perverse, slithering, and hilarious.

The Weather Station :: Humanhood

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Tamara Lindeman is the Weather Station, for all intents and purposes, so what’s remarkable about her seventh album is how she slips into the mix. She flutters and flourishes like a wild jazz flute. She eddies and cascades in slithery runs. She matches the syncopated stop-go of a piano run, her voice just off center enough to be interesting. She spits out knotty strings of striking imagery. But she does it all as another instrument in a breezy, jazzy mix, as significant but no more so than complicated patterns of percussion, sharp outbursts of flute and cloudier eruptions of saxophone, or the intricate interplay of keyboards, guitars, bass.

A Picnic Of Sorts :: Mobile

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A marvel of sweet synthesizers, field recordings, and beyond, A Picnic Of Sorts’ debut compact disc envelops the listener in a subtly immersive ambient landscape. Mobile sounds fantastic in any listening situation — through headphones, turned up loud to fill the room, or (best of all maybe) as the soundtrack to a long drive with no particular destination in mind.

Steven R. Smith :: Triecade

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With his new album, Triecade, Los Angeles-based guitarist, artist and composer Steven R. Smith marks three decades of releasing music. Since his early days amidst the Jewelled Antler collective, Smith has put out some fifty records under half a dozen different monikers. Taken in its totality, his catalog comprises an almanac of forgotten countries, ruined cities and faded empires, a sketchbook of improbable flora and fauna. It is one of the most enchanting and labyrinthine discographies in modern American music.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy :: The Purple Bird

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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.