As the world seemingly draws to a stop, Portner finds himself quarantined at home in Western North Carolina amidst work on Animal Collective’s eleventh studio album, the first album since 2012 to feature all four original band members.
Category: The AD Interview
It Has to Be About Need :: The Mysteries of Lucinda Williams’ Good Souls Better Angels
On the apocalyptic Good Souls Better Angels, Lucinda Williams grapples with pain, mortality, and the devil. She joins us to discuss the album’s apocalyptic themes, breaking with the familiar, and how she stays in touch with the sense of mystery that has always fueled her work.
Caleb Landry Jones :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
The Mother Stone is a collection of fifteen tracks entirely out of step with whatever modern trends are currently gripping independent music. It feels peerless, out of time, from a different dimension. It isn’t a record you can play quietly in the background as you respond to emails. It requires headphones. Focus. Attention. Which isn’t to say it isn’t any fun. Because it is.
Markus Floats :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
On his new lp Third Album, Montreal’s Markus Floats rewards deep listens with emotive electronic melodies, granular textures, and mesmerizing arpeggios. It’s the culmination of Markus’s work so far, but like the hyper-prolific artists he cites as influences—Prince and Fennesz—also just one drop in his deep pool.
Myths of Existence :: Ahmed Abdullah and Monique Ngozi Nri on Sun Ra
Like his mentor Sun Ra, Ahmed Abdullah understands the power and significance of a name. Diaspora, the combo he leads with Monique Ngozi Nri, stands for “Dispersions of the Spirt of Ra,” and they joined AD to discuss the continual recreation of Ra’s music, Afrofuturism, and the possibilities of the future.
M. Ward :: The AD Interview
M. Ward’s sprawling and reflective tenth studio album, Migration Stories, bears its influence with mid-19th century migration folklore and Pax Americana folk, sung to the rustic hum of heavy guitar strings and vintage Americana. We caught up with Ward amidst our own cross-coastal quarantines to talk Migration Stories, bloodlines, the magic of first-takes, recurring earthquake dreams, and the insanity of modern times.
Stimulation Addiction :: An interview with BODEGA’s Ben Hozie about his new film PVT Chat
New York’s Ben Hozie has become best known in recent years as the singer/guitarist of BODEGA, a band fusing darkly hilarious critiques of online culture and late-stage capitalism with an equally sharp post-punk urgency. It may be less common knowledge that he has carried on a parallel practice as a filmmaker with Pretorius Pictures …
Haley Fohr :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Haley Fohr is feeling the collapse. “I have this character I’ve created that has yet to get out of the internet,” she observes glumly from her quarantined apartment in Chicago. “She’s stuck inside of the internet.” She’s referring to Jackie Lynn, her country-glam outlaw alter ego. Keeping a hyper-femme, truck driving drug kingpin like Jackie Lynn locked behind a screen is like storing an exotic animal in a dank basement: its unbounded soul decays with each passing day void of any primeval thrill. “But we’re going forward with the campaign,” she continues. “We’re excited to release this [album].”
Rachel Grimes :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Part family memoir, part investigative fiction, part historical exploration, Rachel Grimes’ The Way Forth is a multi-layered Southern epic that digs below the foundational myths of the country to uncover the true experiences of people often left out of the historical narrative.
Sam Gendel :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
We caught up with Sam Gendel to learn more about the spontaneous production of Satin Doll, his friendship with Louis Cole, touring with Ry Cooder, collaborating with indie rock veterans, and navigating his peculiar relationship with jazz.
Jon Hassell :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Vernal Equinox introduced a new form of music, which Hassell and others who followed him called “fourth world,” a mix of classical Indian music, electronics, jazz, field recordings and ambient music.
More than 40 years later, the record still feels timeless and fresh, floating in a liminal space between the age-old traditions of raga and the innovations just beginning in electronics and tape manipulation. …
Real Estate :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
The Main Thing finds the band charting new ground, at times by looking inwards and at times by looking back. Aquarium Drunkard reached the band’s Martin Courtney by phone, to discuss how memory, touring, and a decade-plus as a group influenced the subjects of their latest LP.
Lee Ranaldo & Raül Refree :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
On Names of North End Women the new collaborative lp by former Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and Spanish producer/composer Raül Refree, the duo condense electronic pulses, shifting rhythms, tape loops, and far out (and frequently lusty) poetry into a beguiling collage. “I think the idea of going forward is to try to venture into more different places,” Ranaldo says, “rather than fall back into familiar sound-worlds from the past.”
Makaya McCraven: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
McCraven is a musician, composer and bandleader, but he is also highly regarded for his “chopping” or remixing and re-imagining production skills. We’re New Again, his reconfiguration of the late-career classic Gil Scott Heron album I’m New Here, will be one of 2020’s top recordings, putting a fresh spin on moving meditations on family, personal history and black identity. We talked to him about that project, the process of remixing and the way he and Heron find links between many different kinds of music.
Catching Up With Yann Tiersen
“It was important to keep everything in context,” Tiersen said in a phone interview with Aquarium Drunkard. “It was really important for me to have [the songs] back and to have them…in the environment they belong.” This sentiment lays at the heart of the sessions for Portrait. How, at 25 years on, can you create a grand unified theory of your body of work? In Tiersen’s case it involved revisiting a wide variety of songs, reinterpreting them alongside new material, in order to create just what the title implies: a portrait.