Since 2018, Joseph Stevens’ project Peel Dream Magazine (aptly named after BBC Radio 1’s John Peel) puts out music of unpredictable variety with predictable recurrence. While the band describes itself as extending the luxurious studio pop tradition of Burt Bacharach or The Beach Boys, and even as a middle point between Steve Reich and Sufjan Stevens (!), any attentive listener will recognize in its sound the influence of luminaire indie acts: the softest parts of Yo la Tengo and The Clientele, the playful lightness of Stereolab and The High Llamas.
Author: Justin Gage
Wally Badarou :: Echoes
Lying somewhere between the demarcations of electro-pop, high life, and the Caribbean diaspora sits the solo excursions of synthesized session heavyweight Wally Badarou. A guru behind the computerized keys and best known as The Talking Heads’ secret weapon on Speaking in Tongues, it was Badarou’s penchant for unfathomably catchy fills and phrasings that elevated “This Must be the Place” and “Burning Down the House” to the legendary earworm status they maintain today. This may be the most immediate reference point on Badarou’s extensive resume, but the sounds explored on his solo records are illuminated more clearly within the context of his eighties studio credits. One simply does not work with Black Uhuru, Grace Jones, or Fela Kuti without being fully immersed in groove.
Soft Machine :: Høvikodden 1971
A few weeks after the release of the incredible Fourth, the classic quartet of the Soft Machine–Mike Ratledge, Elton Dean, Hugh Hopper and Robert Wyatt–played an unlikely two-night stand in an art museum in Høvikodden, Norway, some twenty minutes outside of Oslo. Personal relations within the band were low; tensions were high; and founding drummer Robert Wyatt was already looking for the exit. But what transpired on those nights, now captured in a massive archival release from Cuneiform Records, was arguably the finest incarnation of the Softs at the absolute peak of their powers. Høvikoddden 1971 documents a band torn between shrieking free jazz, throbbing minimalism, psychedelic space rock and fuzzy, proto-punk garage stomp–suspended between their avant-pop beginnings and their fusion future. A three-hour, four LP slab of the Soft Machine may be too much for the casual fan. Or it might just be the ideal point of entry.
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
Amour velours. 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
Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers :: Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens
Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens, the first recorded collaboration between long-time AACM musicians Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers, produces imaginary soundscapes to the concrete landscapes of Manhattan’s largest open area. This delicate psycho-cartography, a miniature model of what is already supposed to be a microcosm of nature itself, is weaved through the slow erosion of the geology of the piano by the crying winds of the trumpet.
Emergency Group :: Mind Screen
Emergency Group don’t have anything to prove at this point, at least not around these parts. Over a pair of albums (and an all-timer Lagniappe Session), they have shown themselves one of the most lethal improvisational rock units around. But while everyone would have welcomed another helping of their headlong neo-kraut assault, their new album goes in a different direction entirely. In Mind Screen, Emergency Group have made a smoldering late-night record, all quiet interplay and expansive spaces.
Pat Keen :: I Saw A Bug
I Saw A Bug isn’t a lonesome highway; it’s an American cabaret. There are backcountry signifiers, to be sure—banjo and pedal steel and fingerstyle guitar—but there are also eerie synths and drum machines and MIDI programming that make the album feel like a slightly extraterrestrial simulacrum of American music. Almost as if aliens were trying to recreate the country and western songbook based on the handful of AM radio signals that had finally made it past Alpha Centauri.
Richard Tripps :: Between The Morning
Like the coziness of nostalgia, the 4-track tape recorder is immediately evident during the guitar jangle that opens “Blue Eyed Open Sky”. Recorded in a tent cabin on a river in the musician’s hometown of Big Sur, California, the lo-fi aesthetic of Richard Tripps sophomore album was a deliberate choice, inspired by the analogue charm of tape, where the musician’s formative demos crossed paths with key influences like the VU and fellow Big Sur psych-folk outfit The Range of Light Wilderness.
Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd :: The Moon and the Melodies
First released in 1986, the collaborative record of dream pop deities Cocteau Twins and minimalist giant Harold Budd is still among the most interesting crossbreeds between so-called pop and so-called art music. By the time of its release, The Moon and the Melodies‘ mix of cerebral drone experimentation and crystalline emotional delivery was at least on par with those at the frontier of pop’s absorption of the avant-garde: John Cale, Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell, and the like.
Master Planners: Interpretations of Pharoah Sanders’s Magnum Opus
Pharoah Sanders and Leon Thomas’s thirty-minute magnum opus, ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’ is arguably the paradigmatic work of spiritual jazz, setting the template of deep groove, free blowing and global rhythms that has long characterized the form. But it has also become, improbably enough, something of a standard, covered dozens upon dozens of times–both within the bounds of jazz and beyond them. We scoured a half century of covers and rounded up a handful of our absolute favorite incarnations.
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
Selects from the AD mid-year review. 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
Videodrome :: Stop Making Sense (1984)
Stop Making Sense is unabashedly effervescent, like a jolt of straight dopamine. For being a concert film about a famous band at the height of their success, there’s nothing about Stop Making Sense that’s trying to be cool or sexy, flashy or pedantic — it’s just trying to have a good time.
Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance :: Jinxed By Being
Opposites attract in this unexpected collaboration between dubstep pioneer Sam Shackleton and out-folk innovator Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance. Yet the oddity itself is very beautiful. Shackleton’s music has never sounded so warm and present. Chasny’s work has never seemed visionary and forward looking. They meet somehow in a middle that no one foresaw, and it is a strange and lovely place.
Rich Ruth :: Water Still Flows
Like his previous album, the COVID-era 2022 masterpiece I Survived, It’s Over, Nashville multi-instrumentalist Rich Ruth’s new album Water Still Flows is absolutely audacious in its musical fusions and amalgamations. This one is a woozy kaleidoscope of spiritual jazz, post-rock, chiming minimalism, Berlin school synth sequencers, metal and drone. It is entirely possible that it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.
Suzanne Ciani :: Buchla Concert At Galeria Bonino New York, April 1974
With this recording of Suzanne Ciani’s 1974 live Buchla concert at Galeria Bonino in New York, Finders Keepers adds a new touchstone to the obscure history of modular synth music (and to the crucial part female artists have played in it). It also throws light into the deep connection between experimental sound design and the new age music that Ciani later represented, a connection that is not at all restricted to Pauline Oliveros or, later, Laraaji and Eno. In this release, the complex drones of electric sequencers form soft, shapeless tapestries with an almost religious ease.