With Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia, guitarist Michael Rother was instrumental in developing Kosmische Musik, or Krautrock. A new boxset charts his often pastoral and filmic solo trajectory.
Category: The AD Interview
Starflyer 59: Hey, Are You Listening?
While Starflyer’s early, reverb-drenched albums, named Silver and Gold for their monochromatic album covers, fit neatly into the shoegaze movement, it didn’t take long for Martin and assorted company to outgrow that mold, blooming into one of the truly essential—if largely unknown—forces in American indie rock. Young In My Head is a vital edition to that catalog.
Cochemea: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
On All My Relations, Cochemea Gastelum’s second solo album and first for Daptone Records, the saxophonist offers up a globetrotting swath of sounds, soul music of varying genres. Funk, R&B, Latin jazz, Indigenous chants and stomps, Morrocan Gnawa, cosmic jazz—leading his combo of Daptone stalwarts, Gastelum melds together elements of each to form a multi-faceted, spiritually cohesive tapestry.
Charles Ditto :: In Human Terms
An experimental minimalist from the Texas hill country, Charles Ditto self-released In Human Terms on his own label in 1987. He calls it “nootropic deconstructed pop minimalism,” and it slots nicely with the spacey ambient worlds of Michele Mercure, Pauline Anna Strom, and Savant. Picture round shapes floating through a light fog and you’re in the right astral territory.
Dave Harrington :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Dave Harrington is a modern-day guitar hero in an era that increasingly does not seem to care about such figures. His credits should be legendary, but as it stands, he […]
Jessica Pratt :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Jessica Pratt doesn’t have many contemporaries. Her nylon-string reveries exist in a precarious space between the then and now, and she seems destined to float as a cult figure for […]
Catching Up With Alejandro Escovedo
“I’m sitting here in Carrboro, North Carolina.” This is the voice of Alejandro Escovedo. On the day we’re speaking, I’m hoping to catch his performance that night at the Cat’s […]
Maston: Tulips, 45 RPM & Psilocybin
This is the story of taking mushrooms, unintentionally playing a record mastered for 45 RPM at 33, and discovering its shadow self . . . and then discussing the experience with its architect. Sonic examples, for the curious, included.
Chris Cohen: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Like his work with Deerhoof, Cass McCombs, Ariel Pink, and Weyes Blood, Cohen’s gentle psych-pop has always rewarded paying close attention. But Chris Cohen finds the songwriter addressing his world with more candor than ever before.
Pedro the Lion: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Like Joan Didion’s writing about Los Angeles, or Flannery O’Connor’s examinations of the American South, Pedro the Lion’s “Phoenix” is as much about an inner place as it is about a location on the map.
Sharon Van Etten :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
In the four years since her last record, Sharon Van Etten has been busy. In that time she’s gone back to school, scored a film, and become a mother. It’s that last element that seems to hang over much of her excellent new album, Remind Me Tomorrow. Produced by John Congleton, it’s solid leap forward for an artist who has made substantive changes with every album she’s released. Aquarium Drunkard caught up with Van Etten, via phone from her home in Brooklyn, to discuss her new record, the paranoia of parenthood, the connective power of shared stories, and how Suicide, Nick Cave, and Portishead informed the work.
Harlem :: The AD Interview
Harlem always felt less like “garage rock” and more like a yard sale: strewn out in the driveway, “as is” stickers, handwritten signs down the street announcing “yard sale, this […]
Glenn Kotche :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
As anyone who’s ever seen him live can attest, Glenn Kotche is an inventive player, not beholden to typical rock & roll tropes and unafraid to interject left of center […]
Lola Kirke :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
A couple times a week, someone will come up to Lola Kirke and call her “Hai-lai,” parroting the loving mispronunciation of her Mozart in the Jungle co-star Gael García Bernal’s conductor character Rodrigo. As far as crosses to bear go, she admits it’s a fairly light one.
Speaking with Aquarium Drunkard, the actor/songwriter connected the threads between her dual disciplines.
Jeff Tweedy :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
For more than three decades, Jeff Tweedy has written about his fear of being misunderstood. First as one-half of the songwriting team in the pioneering alternative country band Uncle Tupelo, […]