Welcome back to Transmissions. This week on the show, which brings our 2023 season to a close, we are joined by Matt Werth of RVNG to discuss the life and multi-dimensional sound worlds of Pauline Anna Strom. This month, the label released Echoes, Spaces, Lines, which collects the first three albums from the Bay Area synthesist and composer, as well as Oceans of Time, an unreleased record included in the box set for the first time.
Category: Podcast
Transmissions :: Penelope Spheeris
This week on the show, Transmissions host Jason P. Woodbury joins Penelope Spheeris, director of The Decline of Western Civilization trilogy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Little Rascals, Suburbia, and Wayne’s World. Spheeris is the host of Peter and the Acid King, a true crime podcast set in the Los Angeles punk scene of the early ‘80s concerning the unsolved murder of Peter Ivers, host of New Wave Theater.
Transmissions :: Conner Habib
This week on Transmissions: Conner Habib. He’s the author of the Pen/Faulkner award longlisted horror novel, Hawk Mountain, and the host of the weekly podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib. Informed by his practice of Anthroposophy and Christian mysticism, AEWCH focuses on the esoteric and ventures into strange and unusual places, touching frequently on Habib’s spiritual views while also exploring his views on sex work, his interest in art and literature, punk rock ethos, and his singular conversational style.
Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions :: John Carroll Kirby
Make yourself comfortable, on this all-new episode of Transmissions, we’re focusing on the fantastic tunes crafted by John Caroll Kirby. His music exemplifies the current zone where jazz, fusion, new age, soul, R&B, and electronic composition all mingle. He’s worked with artists like Blood Orange, Solange, Frank Ocean, Eddie Chacon, and many more. But it’s his own records, including this year’s Blowout, that demonstrate his compositional chops. The native Angeleno joined us to discuss going far from home to record and much more.
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.
Transmissions :: Buck Meek (Big Thief)
You know Buck Meek from Big Thief and his solo albums, like this year’s Haunted Mountain. Full of near-death experiences and tender but insistent roots-inspired songwriting, it’s an album that finds inspiration in the mysterious Mount Shasta, long a site of high strangeness. He joins us to discuss Jolie Holland, Judee Sill, Bob Dylan, Big Thief and reciprocity this week on Transmissions.
Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions :: Mitch Horowitz
This week on our weekly podcast, we’re chatting once again with Mitch Horowitz, occult scholar, practitioner, and historian. We’ve had Mitch on a number of times—once a year or so for the last few years. What can we say? We just love listening to the guy riff. His latest is book is Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice. Our talk? Well, it’s all over the place, covering many of the figures who appear in the book, like Jack Parsons, the pioneering father of modern rocketry—who was also a practicing magician, one-time Marxist, and famously died at 37 in a fiery explosion.
Transmissions :: Maria Elena Silva
We were introduced to the music of Maria Elena Silva via 2021’s Eros, which featured collaborations with previous Transmissions guests Jeff Parker of Tortoise and was produced by Chris Schlarb. Silva is back with a new one, the recently released Dulce. Here, she’s joined by Schlarb once again, as well as Transmissions alumni Marc Ribot, who brings a raw, questing intensity to her new songs, which swell with rock & roll gusto and a newfound display of bravado.
Transmissions :: Matt Marble on Arthur Russell (Live at PRS)
Welcome back to Transmissions. We’re still buzzing from this last weekend, which saw a live taping of Transmissions at The Philosophical Research Society, the Los Angeles campus founded in 1934 by esoteric scholar Manly Palmer Hall, featuring Matt Marble, an artist, author, audio producer and director of the American Museum of Paramusicology.
No Way Out: An Oral History of Sunburned Hand of the Man: Time Goes Way Back
This is the last episode of the podcast! We start with comments from Sunburned members reflecting on the impact of press coverage and ensuing exposure on the band. This shifts to general comments about how they’ve navigated – and oftentimes defied – external expectations. This section closes on the role humor has played in the band. Then we shift to comments and stories shared by friends, collaborators, and fans of Sunburned Hand of the Man, including thoughts from Thurston Moore, Ethan Miller, Neal Campbell, and more! We close out the episode and the podcast with a final thought from each of the band members interviewed for this project.
Transmissions Live at PRS September 30 :: The Esoteric Sounds of Arthur Russell with Matt Marble
Los Angeles, we are pleased to share word of Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions live at the storied Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz on Saturday, September 30th with Matt Marble, author of Buddhist Bubblegum: Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell.
Transmissions :: Colleen
This week on Transmissions, we welcome returning guest Cécile Schott, aka Colleen. Her latest, Le Jour Et La Nuit Du Reel, was tracked using a minimalistic setup, a Moog Grandmother and two delays: a Roland RE-201 Space Echo and a Moogerfooger Analog Delay.
But for Schott, this assemblage allows for near infinite synthesis, and a genuine multitude of expression. As the world gets stranger and more difficult to understand, the record wordlessly questions what is real—and the times of day and night when the line between real and imaginary blurs.
No Way Out: An Oral History of Sunburned Hand of the Man: Flex
In this week’s episode, we try to wrap our brains around how Sunburned Hand of the Man actually makes their freeform music. Through the episode, we consider the semantics of improvisation and practice in the context of this free form entity. In that context, we learn how the open nature of the band manifests in unspoken rules of not telling each other what to do. This, in turn, allows the band members to enter and commit to the jam in a way that is more authentically connected and elevated.
Transmissions :: Jarvis Taveniere (Woods)
Welcome to Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions; this week on the show, we’re joined by arvis Taveniere of Woods. You know his long running Woods band with Jeremy Earl of course—and Woodsist, their record label and Woodsist Festival, which returns September 23-24 upstate with Kevin Morby, Avey Tare, Cochemea, Tapers Choice, Ana Saint Louis, Natural Information Society, Kurt Vile, Scientist, DJ Aquarium Drunkard—that’s our own Justin Gage—plus many more. The band also just released a glowing new album, Perennial, which finds the band in a gentle, rambling mode.
No Way Out: An Oral History of Sunburned Hand of the Man: Heavy Rescue
This week, we shift from the band’s chronological narrative to consider the many factors that bind this chaotic mass of people together in this creative yet uncommercial experience. We open with our focus on the role that music has played in the band members’ individual lives and how a shared love of music brought them all together. This morphs into a consideration of the band’s many artistic influences, with a close look at the impact of the Wu-Tang Clan on Sunburned. We hear about the complicated and often difficult backgrounds of many of the Sunburned musicians and how jamming with the band can often serve as a type of group therapy.