Buck Curran :: Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas

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On his second solo album, Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas, guitarist Buck Curran assembles a set of peaceful Takoma-style guitar instrumentals, custom built for thoughtfulness and calm. Best known for his work with the psych-folk duo Arborea, Curran currently resides with his family in Bergamo, Italy, and this sublime lp finds him reflecting on familial spirits. Dedicating the album to his children Shylah, Liam, and Francesco, Curran devotes the first half of the album to carefully composed ballads . . .

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Catching Up With The Love Language

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"I'm stoked, man. Back at work after so long."

This is Stuart McLamb of the Love Language, standing on an L.A. sidewalk having just emerged from a barber shop. It's a relatively new surrounding for the North Carolina native who took Huck Finn's advice about a year ago and lit out for the territories. The impetus for our phone call is the first new Love Language record in five years. Baby Grand will see the light of day August 3rd on Merge Records, and it marks a sizeable change in McLamb's surroundings.

AD spoke with McLamb about what he's been up to since 2013's Ruby Red, writing and composing inside a defacto hammock factory, the way album ingestion can affect your own art, and how the new album's title has its own cheeky fit in the universe of the Love Language. Check out the video for the first single, "Southern Doldrums," down below.

Aquarium Drunkard: This is the longest time that has elapsed between Love Language records. What's been going on and what lead to that long of a break?

Stuart McLamb: Well, it's always kind of been me writing and doing it. I think maybe I just got a little -- maybe not burnt out, but you shouldn't just churn things out to just do it. It needs to come from a spot. So it took a while for me to rediscover my passion and have songs pile up that I thought were good. I spent hours and hours making demos, and there was a lot of stuff I just didn't feel was honest or real and ended up just scrapping them.

That was the deal with the Love Language, but I did stay busy with several other things. Right after the tour for Ruby Red, I mixed a record by a Chapel Hill band called Last Year's Men. It was a great record and they put it out, but they'd started a punk band right after that and it never went that far. So I spent a long time working on that and then I had a band called Soon. That was a band I did that was a bit more of a heavy thing. Put that album out. I did a record with a project called Pretty Ponies. Maybe it didn't seem like it in the public eye, but I definitely felt pretty busy. It probably does appear that way to people who just know me from the Love Language.

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Daniel Lanois :: Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois

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On their new collaborative album, Daniel Lanois and electronic composer Aaron Funk, better known as Venetian Snares, make for an unexpected "Canadian team." As a producer and solo artist, Lanois's work is dedicated to open, moody space; Funk, on the other hand, populates his soundworlds with near constant twitching and aggressive motion. But Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois makes sense of this contrast, blending Lanois' slow motion, gospel-informed pedal steel with Funk's dramatic breakcore.

Often, the record recalls the soundscapes of Lanois' work with Brian Eno on 1983's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, if that record's spacey ambiance had been punctuated by violent bursts of noise and rhythm. Employing a Miles Davis cut-up style, manipulating "yards" of live recordings, Lanois edited the album together. It's a testament to his restless creative drive and a daring listen. We caught up with Lanois in LA to ask how the strange team-up came about.

Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois by Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois

Aquarium Drunkard:  A few years ago, after recording an interview in your studio, you played us some of the music you were working with Venetian Snares on. I've been anxious to hear it since and it's turned out to be a wild record.

Daniel Lanois: Oh yeah, well we finally gave birth. [Laughs] It feels pretty good. I've been devoted to this for a while now, and I'll say to my friends, "By the time something comes out," by the time you get a release date from the label and all this, in a way, the creative peak has already happened. So I've actually moved on to some other work now, but hey, listen man, we're going on tour, Snares and I. I call [Aaron Funk] "Snares."

It's exciting. I feel like it's my first band. The  shows feel like, "Whoa, things are so psychedelic." I'm pretty thrilled about it because we can really pull this thing off live. He's really a master. We make a pretty good Canadian team.

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Posted on Daniel Lanois The AD Interview Venetian Snares

Mudie’s All-Stars :: Loran’s Dance

Idris Muhammad Mudie's All-Stars Reggae/DubPosted on

When a cover works. In this case, Mudie’s All-Stars Jamaican rendering of Idris Muhammad’s “Loran’s Dance.” I’m scribbling this on a train back to Tokyo after three nights haunting an array of Kyoto hi-fi kissas – mostly jazz, but not all. It was one of the latter, Rub A Dub, that turned me on to the below recording.

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Bola Sete :: Falling Stars

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Nestled at the end of a recent installment of Deerhunter’s weekly, and highly recommended, “Sunday Night Radio Hour” Spotify mix, was Bola Sete’s “Falling Stars.” Previously unknown to us, the expectations were for a pleasant strum of acoustic guitar. We love Sete’s guitar playing here, whether it be the jazzy bossa nova sway that he mastered with a classical touch, or the immaculate, serene sounds of openness . . .

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Michael Rault :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

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Michael Rault's new album, New Day Tonight, lends itself to repeated listens. It's not just that the Canadian musician continues to build on his distinctively retro-but-not-old sound, but the complexity and layering accomplished on the LP reveals something new with each listen. We caught up with Rault from his home in Montreal and got the lowdown on working hand-in-hand with Daptone and Wick Records, the long-but-fruitful gap between releases, and the fortuitous walk he took with producer Wayne Gordon to a Brooklyn music shop that ended up giving the record one of its signature sounds.

It's a New Day Tonight by Michael Rault

Aquarium Drunkard: Not to start too on-the-nose, but at times the record seems preoccupied with the dichotomy of night and day, and sleep in particular. Both in the title, some of the song titles, and the lyrics — and it’s even coming out on Sleepless Records in Canada… so to be frank, how do you sleep at night?

Michael Rault: Nothing particularly unusual happens to me when I sleep, I used to sleepwalk sometimes, I guess that’s unusual, but I don’t do that much anymore. I’ve always had this subconscious approach to writing music and writing songs — not to sound pretentious or like I’ve got any special method that I use, cause I don’t really. I tend to try to play things and come up with ideas and see what sticks without thinking about it too much. And then listening to what I sing, when I’m not really thinking about it, I start to see patterns and themes. Then I start to think more consciously and make sense of it without, maybe, making too much sense of it. I don’t want to kill it by organizing it too much.

I wrote “Sleep With Me” without really thinking about it at all. And it came together in a more cohesive way than most songs do. I think I sang the first verse and chorus and maybe second verse in pretty quick order. I didn’t think I was gonna make an album themed around sleeping, but the idea kept popping up in songs I was writing. As I started getting closer to finishing the album, I was coming up with a list of songs to concentrate on - I realized that sleep was a theme. I wrote a couple of more, consciously, about sleeping and dreaming to fill out the album. “Dream Song” was consciously written about it.

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Aquarium Drunkard Presents: Gospel Jubilee Vol. 2 — A Mixtape

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Forcing someone to read a lengthy explication of the music found in the second installment of the Gospel Jubilee would only delay the experience of hearing — feeling — these heavenly, heavenly sounds. Over an hour of unbelievable falsettos, palpable bass lines, smoking–even Hazel-esque–guitars, fervid singing voices, chunky synthesizers, perfect drums, and much more . . .

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Ambient Explorations: Cool Maritime / Sam Gendel

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Cool Maritime is the work of Sean Hellfritsch. A modular synth composer, he is the spouse of fellow modern electronic pioneer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and shares her sense of ambient adventure in crafting exploratory soundscapes that reach beyond the tangible and into unseen worlds. His latest outing, Sharing Waves, due out June 1 via Leaving Records, is brought to life with shimmering ripples of aqua tones and a misty rainforest timbre. But the record expands beyond . . .

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Jennifer Castle :: Angels of Death

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“The fictional concept of death rears its head in so many of my songs, always on the periphery, or as a side note, or a reminder, a punchline or the bottom line, always sniffing around like a death dog. For once I wanted to try to put it in my center vision. In order to talk about death, I armed myself with the only antidote I know: writing. Is this a record about death or a record about writing? Hard to tell in the end. I began to think of poetry as time travel. I tried to write messages to the future.” — Jennifer Castle

Jennifer Castle's path has always been a patient one. Whether covering Bob Dylan  or channeling the energy of Laurel Canyon on her album  Pink City, an elliptical air defines her work. But she's never been more potent than on her new album, Angels of Death, a work that may well stand the test of time as a masterpiece.

Following a series of familial losses, Castle stares down mortality. It’s no small feat addressing the end, but what other choice does one have? The notion of grief — the shapeless act of processing and learning to live with loss — is tremendously and overwhelmingly intangible. Because as final as a loss may feel, the question always remains: Is anyone, or anything, ever completely gone? And though mourning brings moments of overwhelming despair, at other times, it opens our eyes to the present in a way they were previously closed to. And then there are the times when all these opposing ideas seem to act in concert. The middleworld, we hear Castle call it. That's where  Angels of Death lives.

Jennifer Castle :: Crying Shame

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Garcia Peoples :: Show Your Troubles Out

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On their debut LP Cosmic Cash, New Jersey's Garcia Peoples  funnel  the energy of their live shows into a cohesive full-length statement. Originally a quartet featuring Tom Malach and Danny Arakaki on guitars, Cesar Arakaki on drums, and Derek Spaldo on bass, they recently added Pat Gubler (PG Six, Wet Tuna) on keys to fully flesh out the group as a deep groove machine, capable of turning on a dime. Built on dueling twin leads, barrelhouse keys, and bubbly rhythms, their songs recall the melodic glory of  NRBQ and Little Feat,  approximating AM golden radio at it finest. These songs beg to be blasted with the windows rolled down while you  cruise backroads trying to avoid the fuzz and have a good time. On your own terms, man.

We asked the band to tell us a bit about their first single “Show Your Troubles Out” out now in advance of the band's full album release this summer on Beyond Beyond is Beyond Records.

“The original thought about this song was for it to be super heavy while maintaining a solid groove, î  la Steppenwolf – née ‘American Rock n’ Roll’. Since we don’t have the amazing rasp and gusto in our voice like John Kay …[this is] more or so what came out, that dictated the mood of the melody and vocals. Kind of like, how the Band says in an interview that they 'sang what they could.' So you can say this song is Canadian-American at its core.

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These Are Better Days :: Bruce Springsteen, The Album Collection Vol. 2: 1987-1996

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“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature,” Brian Eno wrote in  A Year With Swollen Appendices. “CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”

I’m thinking about that quote sitting at my kitchen table, staring at Bruce Springsteen’s bolo tie on the cover of 1987’s Tunnel of Love. I know Eno wasn’t talking about neckwear, but formats are also a kind of fashion. They go in and out of style, and this month sees the release of Springsteen’s The Album Collection Vol. 2: 1987-1996. Remastered for high grade vinyl, a format once considered dead, and housed in a replica tweed Fender guitar case box, the set commemorates a string of albums that found Springsteen in the wilderness years dividing his most commercially successful eras, including  Tunnel of Love  and the  Chimes of Freedom EP from 1987, 1992’s  Lucky Town,  Human Touch,   and the live In Concert/MTV “Plugged” special, 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, and 1996’s Blood Brothers EP.

The lavish presentation of this under-recognized era might strike an odd note at first. These are not Springsteen’s undisputed masterpieces, nor efforts released by an established classic rock standard bearer. But that makes them even more interesting. They are the work of a songwriter facing himself and the world around him, creating art about how growing up means seeing yourself and others in non-idealized terms.

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The Lagniappe Sessions :: Cut Worms

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Lagniappe (la ·gniappe) noun ‘lan-ˌyap,’ — 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. 2. Something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus.

In early 2017, in the twilight hours outside a Michael Hurley show, John Andrews of Quilt, Woods, and Yawns first told us about Max Clarke, who records under the name Cut Worms. It wasn't long before we experienced his spectral sound for ourselves. Clarke sounds like he stepped out of a late night Time-Life rock 'n' roll memories commercial to take the stage at the Bang Bang Bar in Twin Peaks.  Hollow Ground, the debut lp from Cut Worms, is out  on Jagjaguwar, and Clarke is on tour with King Tuff. In his own words, he describes adapting songs by the Nerves and Tucker Zimmerman for this installment of the Lagniappe Sessions.

"Cut Worms has never really been only one group or thing. That’s part of what I like about it ... In this instance, it’s me (Max) and my girlfriend, Caroline Gohlke. We collaborated on these tunes that we both really like and tried to do some honest interpretations of them. Both are fantastic songs and we had fun putting them together in our way."

Cut Worms :: Many Roads to Follow (The Nerves)

The Nerves are a favorite group of mine and Caroline's. I’ve loved this song from the first time I heard it. The original song only exists as a demo, so there was room for interpretation. The vocal harmonies are really interesting and I’m not sure we really got it exactly “correct” but we did our own thing with it and I like how it turned out.

Cut Worms :: Old Fashion Shotgun Wedding (Tucker Zimmerman)

Caroline and I each recently found this song independently of one another and so it was kind of a serendipitous thing when she suggested it as a song choice for this project because I had been thinking about it too. The original version of this song by Tucker Zimmerman is singular and basically perfect the way it is. So without any intention of “improving” on the original, we did our own interpretation of it which I think does fair justice to the spirit of the thing. I’m really pleased with how it came out.

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Ben Lamar Gay :: Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun

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Despite what its title may seem to imply, Ben Lamar Gay’s Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun is not some kind of pastoral manifesto. In fact, you’re not likely to hear an album in 2018 so steamed by big-city humidity. Like King Krule, Gay is some kind of post-industrial master of structural manipulation, the kind of guy who can fit a song into the most unlikely of unoccupied spaces the same way an . . .

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Yung Wu :: Shore Leave

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When you've made one perfect record, why make another? Shore Leave, originally released in 1987, is Yung Wu's sole long-player (though a covers album has circulated privately). It's a total jangle rock gem, filled with sparkling songwriting, infectious rhythms and gorgeous melodies. But even though the band's discography is brief . . .

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SIRIUS/XMU :: Aquarium Drunkard Show (7pm PST, Channel 35)

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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can now be heard every Wednesday at 7pm PST with an encore broadcasts on-demand via the SIRIUS/XM app.

SIRIUS 521: Jean-Michel Bernard — Genérique Stéphane ++ Basa Basa - African Soul Power ++ Missus Beastly — Geisha ++ Sinkane - Jeeper Creeper ++ William Onyeabor - Better Change Your Mind ++ Seu Jorge and Almaz - Everybody Loves The Sunshine ++ Paint - Heaven In Farsi ++ Khruangbin - Maria Tambien ++ Night Beats - H-Bomb ++ Spacemen 3 - Come Down Easy (Demo) ++ The Velvet Underground - I’m Sticking With You . . .

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