The deep, rich sound of Josh Cole’s double bass can be heard on countless recordings from his Toronto jazz peers. If you’re a fan of this instrumental palette, Kind Mind is a uniformly gorgeous collection of compositions speckled with field recordings, electronics, and passages of improvisation.
Year: 2023
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti :: Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean
It takes a village to raise the music of Fortunato Durutti Marinetti. For his fourth album in three years, Toronto-via-Turin songwriter Daniel Colussi surrounds himself with a murderer’s row of collaborators, including members of Elrichman, Motorists, and Energy Slime. Colussi’s languid voice is always placed at the forefront of his meticulous arrangements, providing the narration for a sound he describes as “poetic jazz rock.”
Bill Million (The Feelies) on The Velvet Underground
Cut live at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City in October 2018, The Feelies Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground, is a full-throated homage to one of the indie pioneers’ foundational influences. Founding Feelie Bill Million joins us for an all-things-Velvets chat, with digressions into The Beatles, The Willies, future plans, and more.
Allah-Las :: Zuma 85
You can glimpse a stunning sunset through a ruined window on the cover of the Allah-Las’ fifth full-length, Zuma 85, a fitting metaphor for the music’s cracked pastoral beauty, which imbues 1970s psychedelia with sunny So-Cal breeziness.
The LP gets at a very consistent vibe from divergent directions, trying out all sorts of ideas but fitting them into a single, album-spanning narrative. It’s a nice view, but more than that, a reminder of how art can spring from difficulty and transcend it.
Diamonds From the Deepest Ocean :: Bob Dylan | Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte
Diamonds From the Deepest Ocean is a new series exploring classic Bob Dylan bootlegs from the CD era. Before broadband internet, YouTube, and bottomless hard drives overflowing with FLACs, many Dylan fans relied on the grey market to gain entry into the world of unreleased Dylan. This series celebrates those tangible treasures and wonders: “What’s lost when you can have it all?”
Now playing: Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte
Morton Subotnick :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick has achieved more in his 90 years than could be covered in days of conversation — from the San Francisco Tape Music Center to the Buchla synthesizer to his groundbreaking electronic albums to his works for theater and dance. He shared an hour of his time and the conversation dove in the deep end, straight away. Still far ahead of his time, Subotnick is currently on his final run of performances – the “As I Live and Breathe Tour.”
Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera
Think the first Soft Machine Record. Think the Zombies’s Odyssey and Oracle but with the budget constraints of Black Monk Time. This is an album that deserves to be mentioned alongside those but also stands on its own. It’s psychedelic pop with punk rock energy that’s pushed over the top by Elmer’s ecstatic vocal performances.
Chris Forsyth :: Returns to Solar Motel
Sometimes a record amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Released 10 years ago, Solar Motel found guitarist Chris Forsyth sidestepping the avant-garde improv to embrace rock urgings. The resulting album struck a note—for listeners, but consequently, the artist himself. A decade later, it’s being reissued with extra music as Solar Motel (Expanded). Ahead of its December 8th release, Forsyth joined us to reflect on how the album changed his life—and his artistic point of view.
Omni Gardens :: Golden Pear
Moon Glyph label boss Steve Rosborough returns with the latest album from his soothing solo project, Omni Gardens. Like previous releases, the foundations of these instrumental compositions are the burbling tones of the Moog, played with the gentle grace of Mort Garson.
J.R. Bohannon :: Plays Vince Guaraldi
It might yet be a little early in the year to break out Christmas tunes, but it’s worth letting pedal steel instrumentalist J.R. Bohannon take you “Skating” with this recent single from the folks at Astral Spirits. Slipping and sliding over a ghostly rhythm track, loping bass arcs, and a thick layer of ambient noise, he brings a spooky and psychedelic spirit to Vince Guaraldi’s timeless melodies.
Head Voice :: Ben Chasny, Donovan Quinn & James Jackson Toth
You’ve certainly seen the names Ben Chasny, Donovan Quinn and James Jackson Toth plenty here on Aquarium Drunkard. The latest venture for these brilliant underground musicians is Head Voice. This is not a new band, however. It’s an old-school zine.
The Lagniappe Sessions :: Jeffrey Alexander
You can’t Jeffrey Alexander down. Whether with The Heavy Lidders or Dire Wolves, he’s been traveling the highways and byways the New Weird frontier for decades. Hot off the heels of this latest album Easy Portals, he drops by AD to share a grab bag of covers from various projects, featuring tunes by The Fall, Top Drawer, and Swedish psych legends International Harvester.
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
To the other side of the sky. Via satellite, transmitting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W
Bandcamping :: Fall 2023
There are plenty of bigger things to be depressed about these days, but for a certain stripe of music fan, the recent Bandcamp news was a particular bummer. If you haven’t heard, the platform was sold to Songtradr, a B2B music licensing service, who promptly laid off a healthy chunk of the workforce. While the ultimate fate of Bandcamp remains unclear, the future looks bleak.
What’s next? We’re not sure. But for the moment, we’ll continue sharing music via our Bandcamping column — especially as Bandcamp Fridays stay in place, offering artists a more-than-decent lifeline.
Transmissions :: Moby and Lindsay Hicks (Moby Pod)
Welcome back to Transmissions. This week on the program, we’re joined by electronic musician Moby and Lindsay Hicks. Together, they run Little Walnut, a production company responsible for documentaries like Punk Rock Vegan, music videos, and Moby Pod—a podcast dedicated to offering unique perspectives on music, animal activism, climate change, and beyond. This conversation with host Jason P. Woodbury demonstrates the way Moby and Hicks are brave and open in ways that aren’t common in our culture, rejecting the easy cynicism and guardedness that seems to rule the day. And while this talk does get a little bleak at times, but it’s also a very funny conversation concerning our changing landscape, science fiction, music, and full of a lot of quips and jokes. We hope you enjoy it.