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
Author: Justin Gage
Dirty Three :: Love Changes Everything
Twelve years on from their last album together, Warren Ellis, Mick Turner and Jim White reconvene in a sprawling improvisation of tidal force, six cuts or one, depending on how you look at things. The tracks flow one into another like water running through sluices, inexorable and boundary-less. It’s as if, once started, the Dirty Three couldn’t stop until they had exhausted themselves.
This Place Don’t Make Sense To Me No More: Bob Dylan’s “Street-Legal”
Street-Legal is loud and brash and ugly. There’s a little stink to it, no question. But it reveals the world from which it hails in ways unlike any other Bob Dylan record. It is the primal scream of a man and his nation confronting a future of diminished horizons. It is white diamond gloom and destruction in the ditches. It is a seminal document of bad vibes.
Richard, Cam And Bert :: Somewhere In The Stars
Richard Tucker, Campbell Bruce, and Bert Lee were regulars though not exactly superstars in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. They played as often for change, outdoors in Central Park as at the best known downtown venues, and they made just one album, Limited Edition, in 1970, long out of print until a digital reissue in 2014.
Indeed, Tucker is now best known for his creative partnership with his wife at the time, Karen Dalton. This collection of early, unreleased material includes the original recording of “Are You Leaving for the Country,” which Dalton covered memorably on her 1971 album, In My Own Time, as well as the only song the duo ever wrote together, “Sleeping in the Garden.”
Levek :: Look A Little Closer
… other songs evoke The Zombies, and others yet Talk Talk. Solar and lunar at the same time, the ebbing, scarce light of Levesque’s fingerpicked guitars comb into a dense honey dough. It’s like he produced the ethnological recordings of the music of a group of divine beings from an 1980s fantasy B-movie.
Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: June 2024
Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab, airing every third Sunday of the month. This month features Tyler Wilcox’s Doom & Gloom From The Tomb with a selection of semi-summery sounds new and old, followed by Chad DePasquale’s New Happy Gathering with a mid-year halftime report of favorite 2024 digs. Sunday, 4-6pm PT.
Cornelius :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
From his home in Tokyo, Cornelius joined us to discuss the ethereal qualities that make up his current material, his longtime admiration for The Durutti Column, looking back on breakthrough album Fantasma, the Kraftwerk-inspired visual components that augment his live performances, and much more.
Hölderlin :: Hölderlins Traum
Hölderlin remains a footnote in the greater Kosmische tome. Like many of the Kraut canon’s lesser-knowns, Hölderlin’s legacy and overall impact would be marked by sporadic line-up changes, discrepancies in sound and direction, and even lawsuits. Their reputation is further shrouded in the fact that the group, along with big-timers Klaus Schulze and Manual Gottsching, were key parties to the eventual falling out and demise of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and his Pilz and Cosmic Couriers label. Sensationalism be damned, prior to the drama and tumult that would follow, Hölderlin managed to lock- in on their first LP for the legendary and ill-fated Pilz.
Someone Like Me :: A Compilation
Efficient Space, the label that heroically issued this compilation, defines the songs it gathered as “confessional loner folk, devotional song, civil rights activism.” I would suggest it is much more. Like Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk before it, Someone Like Me offers a glimpse into the transcendental sprouts in the salt of the earth, this time by way of alien americana and abstract, out-of-time lo-fi.
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
Pacific bivouac. 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
Funk Tide :: Tokyo Jazz-Funk from Electric Bird 1978-87
The Parisian label Wewantsounds delivers yet again with Funk Tide – Tokyo Jazz-Funk from Electric Bird 1978-87, a compilation surveying the Japanese jazz label’s ferocious first decade, culled by the Tokyo-based DJ Notoya. The eight tracks within, many of which are seeing their first release outside of Japan, comprise a bonanza of fusion, city pop, smooth soul sounds, and beyond.
Marina Allen :: Eight Pointed Star
Marina Allen’s Eight Pointed Star brings back her light fusion of indie rock and Americana, evoking the folk revival of late ’60s icons like Joni Mitchell and Karen Dalton as much as it does present-day peers Dana Gavanski and Andy Schauf.
Waltel Branco :: Meu Balanço
One of the unrecognized masters of Brazilian music, Waltel Branco seemed to have been everywhere from the 1940s to the 1970s, Zelig-like. As the director of the Som Livre studios of Rede Globo, he produced most major records of Brazilian music history, with more than three thousand official credits and a few thousand more in dispute, for wildly different works, from the afro-folk of J.B. de Carvalho to the samba of Elizeth Cardoso to the bossa nova of João Gilberto to the tropicália of Gal Costa to the soul funk of Tim Maia.
At Ease With Coleman Hawkins (1960)
At Ease With Coleman Hawkins is jazz for way past midnight, when ties are loosened and heels are kicked off; when the twilight glow of last night and tomorrow morning ooze into a hazy, pastel hue of here and now.
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
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