Welcome back to Transmissions, a weekly interview podcast created and curated by Los Angeles online music magazine Aquarium Drunkard. This week on the show, host Jason P. Woodbury speaks with a living legend, and one of our all-time favorite vocalists and songsmiths: Emmylou Harris . . .
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Nicola Alesini & Pier Luigi Andreoni's 1996 'ambient-word record' Marco Polo. Vine-like, lush and minimal, layered and discreet, with assists from Japan's David Sylvian (vocals), Pierrot Lunaire's Arturo Stalteri (bouzouki, harmonium), Roger Eno (keyboards, percussion, vocals), David Torn (guitar), and Harold Budd (percussion). Fourth world, indeed . . .
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On his first proper offering since 2022's career highlight In These Times, jazz drummer and composer Makaya McCraven compiles a set of four new EPs into one for Off the Record. Hence the package's namesake, each set of songs takes the organic improvisation from various previous live recordings. There's an aural alchemy in McCraven's post-production wizardry, the fervent compositions feeling like fresh studio iterations as much as previous live experiences culled from the archives; each set uniquely featuring a different live lineup with plenty of the musician's collaborators and International Anthem labelmates . . .
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An underappreciated British horror gem with a Hitchcockian flair, And Soon The Darkness (1970) ushers in the “tourist-paranoia” and “daylight-horror” subgenres in a lean 94 minutes of suspense and mystery. It’s a film ripe for rediscovery this Halloween season — or any season you may find it . . .
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It’s been nine years since the last full album of new music by Tortoise. 2016’s The Catastrophist feels like it came out a lifetime ago. But any doubt that time or distance has diminished the long-running outfit should be dismissed by a new album Touch, which demonstrates that, despite a nine year interval, Tortoise can be counted on for music which is unpredictable and exhilarating . . .
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Nala Sinephro might not be the first name you’d think of when it comes to wrestling-movie soundtracks, but the emerging ambient jazz star’s work for Benny Safdie’s biopic has plenty of force. Her brief but evocative score uses her familiar tools – harp, synths, sax, occasional percussion – to create an atmosphere of tumultuous reflection and serenely ominous potential. In its tenderness and ambiguity, it traffics in a different sort of destruction . . .
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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 . . .
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Cochemea Gastelum returns with his second Lagniappe entry following up his session from 2021 covering Big Star and the legendary Cuban band, Irakere. This latest installment finds the NYC based multi-instrumentalist and arranger on the heels of his third LP, Ancestros Futuros, released last month via Daptone Records. For his encore session, Gastelum pays tribute to his southern California roots covering War's "All Day Music," and Flip Your Wig era Hüsker D . . .
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Welcome back to Transmissions, a weekly podcast series from Aquarium Drunkard. This week on the show: Pam Grossman, host of The Witch Wave podcast and author of a new book, Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity. This show, at its core, is about the relationship between magic and art. What do we mean by magic? Let’s turn to Grossman's book for a helpful take. She writes that magic is quote, “a way of shifting one’s entire mode of being in the direction of Creative Force and interacting with it…When magic is working properly, there is . . .
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An electric keyboard shimmers as guitars carve indolent arcs of jazz-adjacent sound in “Dreaming,” the vocals barely over a whisper. A string orchestra starts up in the chorus, as Dan Knishkowy murmurs the question, “Am I dreaming?” Fair point. The sound envelopes like a technicolor reverie, cool, removed and satin-y smooth. It’s more akin to quiet storm soul or the fusion-touched jazz rock than the Americana you may have come to expect from Adeline Hotel . . .
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The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick’s underappreciated final novel, is framed by death. It begins with a singularly famous death—the assassination of John Lennon in 1980—and follows the reverberations of that event backward in time to the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 60s and 70s, where Episcopal Bishop Timothy Archer is in the midst of a crisis of faith. The book is a characteristically Dick-ian smoothie of thematic contradictions: sacred/popular, surreal/mundane, historical/fictional, faith/gnosis . . .
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Estudando o Samba is the pinnacle of Tom Zé's tendency to use music as an intellectual statement and practical pedagogy. The title of the tracks, with a few exceptions, are monosyllabic onomatopoeias that refer to a Brazilian prosody, a gestural way of talking. The cover, produced by Zé himself, shows a barbed wire shaped like an ocean wave—-perhaps in reference to a twisting of the image of Brazil promoted by samba . . .
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Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab. Airing every third Sunday of the month, RFAD on dublab features the pairing of Tyler Wilcox’s Doom and Gloom from the Tomb and Chad DePasquale’s New Happy Gathering. This month, Chad kicks things off with a crunchy leaf mix of folk, gospel & soul, and Tyler follows it up with some sad & beautiful tunes from this year and yesteryear. Sunday, 4-6pm PT . . .
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Fairport Convention got together in 1967, and somehow managed to cram several lifetimes into the next couple years. Lineup changes, horrible tragedies, stylistic shifts — and of course, a heap of inarguably classic albums. Listening into live recordings made at London’s Royal Festival Hall from the spring of 1969 through the winter of 1970 gives us a hazy-but-remarkable glimpse of the ever-evolving group as they fearlessly fused dusty folk with pure electricity . . .
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... Bent City is a spectral album unfolding a multi-tracked mirror house of sonic fantasias, with each wondrously bizarre corridor becoming an entire dimension unto itself. It’s a mesmerizing work of “sound-on-sound” composition, Yost’s intricate method of weaving home-recorded tape loops together, which allowed him a canvas for improvisation á la Sandy Bull, using “various combinations of soprano saxophone, flute, electric guitar, bass, maracas and tambourine . . .
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