Category: Mixtapes

Step inside Zandoli, a humid TDK embrace spanning 1971-2025. Analog Estonian groove opens the set before sliding into vintage Italian film funk, Grecian honey skronk, imitation Bengalese hypnagogia, and a rousing 1977 exaltation from Fort-de-France, Martinique. And that’s just the first twenty minutes. Press play, let it soak.

We’ve had post-rock on the brain lately. New music from genre pioneers Tortoise and the prospect of a North American tour by Stereolab this fall, not to mention recent archival releases by the likes of Aerial M, Gastr del Sol and Seefeel have many of us revisiting the sound’s 1990s salad days. For those wanting more, we’ve compiled a mixtape of some three hours of the genre’s knottiest groove logistics. For the uninitiated, here’s a crash course in what the end of the twentieth century sounded like.

Sixteen tracks spread over two continents, it’s springtime at the Pink Cloud Motel. Hyacinth and citrus with the windows rolled down half mast — shades of palm fronds, fresh cut grass, 501 cutoffs, Modelo and watery domestics. Late check-outs encouraged …

For the darkest time of year, a wintry mix of stark sonic landscapes — jazz, ambient, acoustic and unclassifiable. Instrumental treks through the snow, hopefully with a mug of hot chocolate (or something stronger) awaiting you at your final destination.

Following in the footsteps of the “End Is At Hand” mixtapes, “Country In The Clouds” digs into music from the 60’s & 70’s Jesus People movement, but this time with a focus on the cosmic country side of the niche subculture. Like holy hippies baptized in the Bakersfield sound, earnest vocals, far out lyrics, and waves of pedal steel beckon listeners to tune in and take the Jesus trip…

As Aquarium Drunkard recently reported, ambient appears to be the shape of jazz to come. The newest new thing is cross-pollinating with electronics and minimalism, new age and drone. But even these currents have a history. We dove deep into our favorite space jazz of yesteryear, and put together a mixtape for your astral travelling pleasure.

Pulp Jazz draws on long-traduced, sometimes crassly commercial, musical forms—jazz-funk, exotica, new age, sci-fi schlock, lounge music and library—and channels it all into deeply funky, low-key psychedelic groove music. More than that, like the best pulp, it somehow comes out sexy as hell, slinky and dangerous. Aquarium Drunkard has been here for it. The world could stand to be a shade groovier. And when we were asked for a mixtape of the primo stuff, we were more than happy to oblige. It’s what we do.

Let’s hope this fresh wave of fusion doesn’t reignite the jazz wars of old. But we’re down to fight if it comes to that.

New age was, in many ways, a confluence of developments across genres: prog and krautrock, electronic and space music, ambient and fourth world, modern classical, spacious ECM-style Euro-jazz. All of them were cultivating their own approaches to paradise music. What tips any of these experiments into new age may have been, more than anything else, a vibe—an earnestness about the spiritual potential of the music being made.

Fourth world music belongs to an occult geography. This is by design. When the late trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell coined the term, he conceived of it as “an attempt to create a kind of musical scenery which is not entirely ‘primitive,’ not entirely ‘future’ but someplace impossible to locate either chronologically or geographically.” 

There is no atlas to the fourth world. The best that we can offer is something like a star chart. You may have to draw the constellations yourselves, out of lines connecting ECM jazz to phase music, woolly hippie cult rock to a thousand forgotten new age cassettes. Navigate by those for now. You’ll get somewhere eventually. Here’s a compass.