Adeline Hotel :: Watch the Sunflowers

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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Radio Free Heaven: A Mix Inspired By Philip K. Dick and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

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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Tom Zé :: Estudando o Samba

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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Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: October 2025

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 :: Royal Festival Hall, 1969-1970

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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Phil Yost :: Bent City

... 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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The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)

Aural crudités. 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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Transmissions :: The Cosmic Tones Research Trio

This week on the show, the Portland-based group of Roman Norfleet, Harlan Silverman, and Kennedy Verrett, aka The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. “Cosmic” is a term that has, thanks to critics and writers, become a little overused. Practically every indie rock band or country-based singer/songwriter with an effects pedal employs “cosmic” touches these days. But as this spiritual jazz trio explains, each of us contains our own cosmos . . .

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Songs Belong to Everyone Who Can Sing Along :: Craig Finn on Always Been

The cover of Craig Finn's latest solo album, Always Been, directly nods to Randy Newman's 1977 lp Little Criminals. Shot in the same location, on the West 7th Street overpass over the I-110, it presents The Hold Steady frontman posed exactly as Newman is on his classic album. And like Newman's songbook, Always Been is filled with character studies, a cast of people who aren't quite sure what to make of their lives and the directions they've taken. It also arrives with a book of short stories, Lousy With Ghosts. Finn joins us to . . .

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John Maus :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Since the mid-2000s John Maus gained a reputation as an arcane conversationalist, whose public dialogues offered as much intricacy as they did enthusiasm, with a philosophical repertoire only matched by his own nervous body language. For this interview we plunged into the specifics of those discourses to try to trace the strange continuities between the continental thought and mystical traditions Maus is enamored with and the postwar pop sound his work inevitably comes to represent . . .

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Maxine Funke :: Timeless Town

Maxine Funke gifts us yet another quietly stunning release in Timeless Town. Across nine songs (including two instrumentals) of homespun folk and lo-fi pop, the New Zealand-based singer-songwriter crafts music that is intimate, starry, and wistful. Leaving her guitar in its case this time, she surrounds her hushed, dusky vocals with various keyboards and analog synth effects, as well as a melodica and pocket operator, and the sparsest touch of cello . . .

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Carson McHone :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

In her vividly descriptive lyricism, which comes alive across all her albums, but especially on her latest release, Pentimento, Carson McHone is a natural artist. Written on paintings and postcards, McHone deftly utilizes color, texture and movement in these exceptionally compelling and immersive arrangements . . .

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Ramsey Lewis :: Them Changes

For anyone who frequents their local record store, the term "cheap heat" is likely a familiar one. Often its own section, the cheap heat bin usually contains copies of iconic records in dubious condition, lesser-known titles by major artists, and maybe most importantly, overlooked records that either never fully caught on, or for one reason or another, never found their audience. The problem with some of these titles is that while the cheap part is generally accurate, the ‘heat’ is sometimes over-promised. Not the case with Ramsey Lewis’ 1970 funky soul jazz gem Them Changes, a record we . . .

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Jens Kuross :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

Before recording Crooked Songs, Jens Kuross was making cabinets, teaching children how to play the piano, and having a lot of difficult conversations with himself. After a series of disappointments following the release of his 2020 LP The Man Nobody Can Touch resulted in his return to Idaho to lead a quieter life . . .

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Joropop: Psych Pop & Folk in Venezuela, 1968-1976

The Madrid-based Munster Records and its sister label Vampisoul have become house favorites over the last few years. The latter released one of our favorite reissues of the year in Cartao Postal, the 1971 MPB masterclass from Brazilian singer Evinha, and Munster Records is keeping that momentum strong with Joropop: Psych Pop & Folk in Venezuela, 1968-1976, a compilation that hasn’t strayed far from the speakers since its summer release . . .

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